The Striving for Spiritual

  During the meditation practice tonight, a practitioner had shared about how counting the breath in meditation lead him to feel tension in his forehead. Somehow, I began to wonder: as much as I have had a similar experience of tension, where does it really come from? What intentions or emotions are happening in mind that trigger a person to be tense during meditation?
    I haven't personally been able to isolate one cause of this. Sometimes, tension is the result of many conditions that happen to take fruition in that moment. But one thing I do notice is that there are certain underlying thoughts which provide a particular mood or flavor to a person's meditation. One such thought is the striving to 'be' something, such as a spiritual or 'focused' being. This happens a lot when a person tries to use a meditation method to shut out anything that isn't meditation, but it can also happen when a person is trying too hard to focus on one particular object. On a larger scale, it seems to arise when a person is striving to embody a certain set of ideals, rather than questioning what gives rise to all ideals and all experiences in the first place.
   As I am writing these sentences, I am looking not at the words themselves or at their meanings, but at the background upon which they are written. This is very much an analogy for how one can look at meditative practice. By looking just a bit askance, I start to type these words without a sense of being attached to them. Moreover, it's the screen that is the most significant thing for me in this moment, since without the screen there would be no words, no coherent text, and no readers either. Similarly, with meditation, one is not directly focused exclusively on one particular stimulus. Instead, the person is seeing the object of their practice only in light of the background from which it arises and disappears. It is this background that both illuminates and is illuminated in turn. And in this way, the object never becomes an object of attachment, but more like a temporary tool to point to the canvas.
    When looked at in this way, practice need not be a kind of dogmatic focus on one thing and suppression of others. More to the point, it has to do with having this object in mind (be it the breath, or huatou, or silent illumination) and using it to look a little bit to the canvas from which is arises and can be known. It's the canvas that gives meaning to the picture, by fully contextualizing the object as impermanent and reflective of something else. Even words function in this way: when I put letters together, the letters themselves are not 'objects' by themselves but are designed to illuminate what come before and after. It's not about objects in and of themselves, but it is more about the background upon which interconnection can be seen and exemplified. This is in fact the beauty of writing, let alone any kind of process: it teaches the deep connection between all things. One only needs look at a paragraph to see this interdependence evolve: letters to words, words to sentences, sentences linking to paragraphs.