Into the Hurricane

  When there is a hurricane stirring up, the instinctive thing to do is to try to seek shelter from the storm. In fact, I apply this principle to other kinds of suffering, including mental suffering. If I experience vexation, the first thing I try to do is to curb the sources of the vexation or try to find a way around it. Another process that happens even before this is that I treat the emotion as something far away from experience, as though trying to dissociate from it. Of course, this ends up not really addressing the feeling at all, but instead only intensifying my felt sense that it is not good, or needs to be eradicated in some way.
    When I was at the Science Centre yesterday, I saw an exhibit which talks about researchers who go into the hurricane in order to better understand it, predict its severity, and figure out ways to minimize its effects on others. Here, the hurricane is still seen as a potential source of suffering. But the approach is different from trying to avoid the problems latent in the hurricane. In this case, the scientists go directly into the storm itself to fully understand it. Rather than trying to avoid the hurricane or see it from a distance, there is a sense of wanting to genuinely know what it is, to thoroughly understand it before making any decisions related to it.
     This experience of 'entering the hurricane' might be analogous in meditation to that of questioning where the phenomena comes from in mind. Here, I am not trying to solidify my understanding of the hurricane and how I relate to it, but rather am changing my overall experience of myself and the hurricane (and everything around it) into a question. By asking 'who' is having this experience, I am going beyond the sense of self and other, or separate 'me' vs 'hurricane'. It's not easy, because my deep-rooted instinct is to look for an object that I can call the source of suffering. Without that object, anxiety will tend to arise, which takes the form of a kind of malaise: a sense that the world I inhabit makes no sense or is just 'meaningless'. But if I am staying close to this malaise, I will recognize that even the desire for 'meaning' is just another form of the desire for awareness to have a tangible object. Perhaps it's also a desire to locate the source of suffering in something tangible, thus separating what is 'good' (which I want to preserve) from what is 'bad' (which I want to reject or get rid of). This attempt to create 'good' and 'bad' objects only perpetuates anxiety and a sense of overall dissatisfaction. Perhaps meditation explores how a person can stay with discomfort of not having an object: of being 'naked' without objects to cling to.
    But in meditation, there still needs to be an object, which is why the question itself becomes the object. But, one can't just treat the object like a safe mantra: one must start to see where that object is coming from, in order to break through the craving for objects.