The Undoing of Meditation

When we go shopping, walk the dog or run an errand in our neighbourhood—in a place or along a route or path we’ve followed dozens of times before—what is it, exactly, that we’re seeing? Are we seeing and experiencing things freshly as they are or are we experiencing, in part or even largely, a store of accumulated thoughts and images and memories about the things we pass along the way?

What are we truly experiencing of the world, and what are we projecting?

We might ask the same question of meditation.

Many of us come to meditation with the idea of gaining something—peace of mind, happiness or even enlightenment, along with all the thoughts and images we associate with those words.

We might have any number of reasons for doing this. We might ache for relief from the pain and sadness we carry with us, and likely have carried our whole lives. We might have a conception of ourselves as somehow incomplete, insufficient or even deficient, and desire to mould ourselves into an ideal. We might come to meditation, too, with long-held beliefs concerning the merits of action and achievement; all of our lives having been told that if we work hard enough at something we will get better at it and even, perhaps one day, master it.

So, we might come to meditation believing we have found a solution. But do we actually understand the problem?

Unfortunately, many meditation practices and traditions and teachers can reinforce the illusion of something to be done or accomplished, and someone to do it. After all, doesn’t the very word “practice” connote progression and development? We need to find out for ourselves. Every conception, every injunction, every assertion, including this blog, should be questioned.

Maybe, just maybe, we are complete as we are. Maybe the problem isn’t us, but how we conceive of ourselves. Take a stone, for example. Can your conception of a stone—or the meaning of that word—come anywhere close to describing what it actually is? Toni Packer, author of several books on Meditative Inquiry, says that any conception we might have of ourselves is necessarily incomplete.

Can you watch without judgment or condemnation the yearning to change yourself—often barely perceptible—if that comes up for you? Can you locate the “me” that wants to do the changing as separate from the “me” that’s undergoing change? Do you see the problem inherent in this conception of a divided self?

And what happens when we simply inquire into our moment-to-moment experience:  holding anxiety, pain, fear, whatever it is, in awareness; watch and question without embracing and rejecting all the habituated thinking and feeling that we attach to our sense of self?

Self-concern, conceptions of self and our egos are no match for this light of awareness. As Eckhart Tolle says, the ego hates the present moment. Perhaps right here, in presence, everything you aspire to be—everything that is noble and compassionate—and infinitely more is waiting to be revealed, without any techniques, or any need to change what is. And so meditation becomes not doing, but an undoing, unlearning, and unwinding of all our stories about ourselves. Going backwards, rather than forwards; like getting younger instead of older. Only as little children, said Jesus, can we enter the kingdom of heaven. He meant, not some idea of a heavenly place, but the possibility of finding heaven here on earth.