Many years ago, I spent a year teaching outdoor
education to grade school children. The
students would be bussed out from the city for their once-a-year instruction
about wild nature. In addition to
providing the scientifically-oriented subjects that were the core of our outdoor
education curricula, I attempted to get students to sit quietly for a few
minutes and attend to the sensory qualities of nature. To get them to quiet down, I would tell them:
“if we sit quietly, something special might happen.” I usually did not have much success getting
students to be still, but one morning I had a group sitting quietly when two
fawns walked right into the middle of the circle we had formed. Wow, I thought, this is special! Strangely, it didn’t create nearly the buzz
among the students I expected. Later I
asked the teacher why the students were not more impressed. She said, “They think you do this for every group.”
Oh well!
In the lingo of outdoor education, the technique
of sitting quietly in this way is called Seton Sitting. It was named for the naturalist Thomas
Seton. It is nothing more than trying to
sit very quietly in a natural area until the wildlife forgets you are
there. Some people call it “still
stalking.”
Once, while Seton Sitting, a Northern Goshawk
landed on a ledge about ten feet from me and graciously ignored me for about
ten minutes.
Though its goals are not quite as lofty as
enlightenment or attaining oneness with God, Seton Sitting is not too different
from the formal practice of meditation.
In both Seton Sitting and meditation you have to become somewhat ignorant. Yes you have to ignore the ants that crawl on
you, and be unresponsive to a variety of other stimuli. This, I think, is what all forms of
meditative practice have in common: to practice them, you have to create a
“space” between the stimuli and the response.
In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl writes about experiences
as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps.
Frankl recognized that he had lost control over his activities and his
environment. He came to realize,
however, that though he could not control the stimulus he was subjected to, he
could decide within himself how he would let it affect him and how he would
respond to it. Meditation is like
this. In meditation, however, it is the
very space between the stimulus and response, rather than the response that is
the focus.
I often think of meditation as a “space” between
stimulus and response. The ordinary mind
has a patterned response to various internal and external stimuli. To meditate, a person learns to be
unresponsive, or at least less responsive, to these stimuli (though maintaining
the ability to respond if necessary).
Once you have become proficient in creating this mental space, you can
do two things with it. You can remain in
the silence and emptiness of this space, or can choose some object of
attention, such as an idea, symbol, or impression, and become deeply immersed
in it. Both have their distinctive
values. I call the first of these,
meditation, and the second, contemplation, but this distinction is not present
in ordinary usage. In the practice of
meditation, we learn to become unresponsive to both external and internal
stimuli. The external stimuli cannot be shut out; the internal stimuli –
thoughts, emotions, desires -- can be slowed, but not stopped. The practice of meditation deepens as we
learn to let both external and internal stimuli pass through us without letting
them elicit a response.
This is not easy.
Most of us have a very strong inclination to respond to a thought or
image by thinking it through. In the
early stages of learning the practice of meditation, again and again one finds
oneself abstracted from the present moment, entangled in a thought. With time, though, maintaining this space
between the stimulus and the response becomes easier, and this space can
develop into an inner refuge of self control and peace.
I mostly learned meditation on my own, but for a
brief time I practiced meditation in the Zen tradition with Katigiri Roshi, a
Zen Master (he was also Robert Pirsig’s teacher). Zen is a form of Buddhism, and the goal of
Buddhism is Nirvana. Nirvana means
something like extinction, and what is extinguished is the need to respond to
stimuli. One of the incredible images
from the Vietnam era was a film clip of Buddhist monks protesting the war by
dousing themselves with gasoline and calmly setting themselves on fire. While burning, the monks meditated quietly
and showed no outward signs of suffering.
This seems to be a powerful vindication of the idea articulated by
Frankl and many others before him that humans have the freedom to choose their
response.
But this is meditation at its extreme: the ultimate anodyne to the pains and
suffering of life. The world is
certainly rife with degradation and pain, and I honor the Buddha for his
commitment to finding and communicating a means for us to escape it. But the world is also filled with beauty and
grace and occasions of joy. If one
becomes unresponsive to pain and suffering, does it not entail also becoming
unresponsive to beauty and delight?
Zen Buddhism, which developed in China, was
strongly influenced by philosophical Taoism.
Taoism offered a different approach to meditation. In Buddhism, meditation is good and more
meditation is better. In Taoism,
meditation is good, but only to a point.
In verse 15 of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tze observes that muddy waters
settles and become clear. In verse 16 he
observes that leaves fall from the tree to return to the roots. I read these as an invitation to bring all
the muddiness, all the sorrow, distractions and joys of the world into our
meditation. And there we let them
settle, so that we come forth from meditation with a deeper sense of our
being’s rootedness in this world and with a clearer mind. This is the approach to meditation I have
come to embrace.
The poet T.S. Eliot described the modern condition
as being “distracted form distraction by distraction.” Our world pulses with disjointed stimuli,
pulling the mind this way and that like leaves in the wind. The distracted mind’s readiest refuge is in
entertainments abundantly supplied by the popular media. But, these entertainments are just that
distraction from distraction. To gain
clarity and rootedness requires a different approach. A formal meditation practice may be the right
approach for some, or just sitting quietly with nature might work better for
others. One has to try a few things to
find what works best. And it is worth
it. As I told my students many years
ago, if we sit quietly, something special might happen.
