"Degrees" of Letting Go

 Wednesday night's group meditation always seems to remind me that there are many degrees of letting go. For instance, during today's meditation, I noticed that my tense posture is related to a desire to 'stay with' something during meditation. But the paradox of meditation is that this 'staying with' does not require some kind of rigid, inflexible posture--quite the opposite, there is a kind of subtle flexibility that is needed. An analogy might be that if a fox is chasing a mouse, it is not enough for the fox to be able to fix its eye rigidly on the mouse's body. Nor is it necessarily a good idea for the fox to be so intensely focused on the mouse that its muscles start to get tight and stiffen. Rather, the fox has to learn to somehow move with the causes and conditions; to be labile enough while not losing its ultimate goal.
    Of course, the even more challenging aspect of meditation is that the goal is not even to get the mouse. Rather, it is to know that there is ultimately no fox and no mouse. The only way to get there is to have this kind of 'let go' mind which is always 'this mind' at the same time. It I not even particularly letting go at all, because to think of it that way would be to say that there is something external to me that needs to be let go of.
    How do I get to that state of 'letting go'? I have found that asking 'how' is a kind of mental trap, and it's only when I give up the how altogether that I can experience this letting go. "How" comes from an emphasis on technical rationality: the notion that things can be attained by following a set of instructions that can be reproduced anytime or anywhere. The reason it is not so easy to apply in meditation is that the 'how' creates an object, which in turn creates the rational subject. And one starts to see very quickly that this division of subject and object creates an eternal state of striving to merge with something, be it an emotion or a desired state of mind. Even 'letting go' can get embroiled in this striving: we strive to 'let go' in order to 'achieve' some desired state of bliss or relaxation. But this again creates a very interesting dynamic of striving for something that one isn't already. So again, letting go cannot be taken to be a goal that involves striving of any kind.
     It is only when even letting go ceases to matter that an authentic letting go is possible. In other words, the letting go simply embraces both attachment and non-attachment. It doesn't try to seek non-attachment or flee attachment. It is almost like a state of pure knowing without striving: seeing these habitual tendencies to seek and reject, without adding another layer of seeking and rejection in response to the latter seeing. At the same time, this 'pure observation' is never in opposition to striving, since it embraces every state of being equally. At this stage, anything is possible, and the mind is open to every possibility, taking care never to reject or create another mind that is separate from infinite possibility. So this letting go is actually a state of complete inclusion. What one really lets go of is the process of splitting into a self-object relationship and then attaching to certain objects and rejecting others.