to sit or not to sit

This issue: to sit or not to sit?  

Merely stating this issue brings up a legion of other issues, many of which go unchallenged and unrecognized in the awareness of a potential meditator. To tackle one issue inevitably begs other, lateral questions.  

As an instructor, I am somewhat aware of the dynamics involved in teaching. If an instructor says, for example, that one must practice meditation 20 minutes a day at least four days a week for several months in order to make progress, all sorts of reactions may begin to occur. Here is a major one (I’m sure you may have many more to add):  

A part of us will rebel against this. (That’s just one reason I sometimes say “don’t meditate” — that way the pressure is off, and you might even rebel against the “don’t meditate” message and experiment with meditation on your own terms).  A part of us may become colonized, ideologically and perhaps even more insidiously, by the meditation instructions and “the path.”  

This is a phenomenon that I became much more aware of when I began teaching meditation than when I was a student. As a student, I would just do the instruction diligently, thinking that the instruction was helping me see things the way they truly are. When I was observing my breath, for instance, I believed that the instruction to notice the rise and fall of my abdomen was getting me to see the fundamental truth of rising or falling, or as my teachers put it, the “arising and passing away of phenomena.”  

It took me a long time to realize that this was just a concept, albeit one that was implanted in the instruction.  

It took me even longer to see more clearly how everything is seen through a lens.  

There are many concepts that are similarly implanted in instructions: being aware of each breath = being in the present moment is a major one. Another one is that staying with body sensations or thoughts as they arise, hang around for a while, then pass away = the purification of the mind, the production of wisdom and the elimination of the grasping ego.  

These and other concepts are as much a part of the instruction as the rules inherent in the instruction–the foremost being something like “don’t break the rules!”  

One reason perhaps why people are reluctant to break the rules implanted in meditation instructions is that he fell that if they do, the promise of realizing the concept embedded in them will remain unfulfilled.  

It becomes almost second nature to think that by dropping the practice of staying with the breath, or that “failing” at the instruction by “wandering off”, that one will never find a way to be in the present moment or know how “the true nature” of things.  

The number of such potentially harmful concepts embedded in traditional meditation instruction in my view is quite large.  

So what to do? 

I encourage independent meditation. I also encourage a return to the relaxed simplicity we knew as children. By independent meditation I mean–do what you feel is helpful, but really examine the process by yourself. Consider the option of meditation when you feel like it, not because you feel you have to. Try giving up all ideas about “discipline” and see how that affects your life.  

Don’t meditate. 

For a long time. 

Then try a period of “free” meditation–ideologically and process wise. Choiceless awareness.  

Some meditators stick by their technique because the feeling of the rightness of the instruction may come from perceived rightness of the concepts embedded in it. The thinking goes like this: If I believe in this particular concept, say that being in the present moment = ultimate reality, then I will learn an instruction that will lead me to being in the present moment all the time. The idea, or promise of the idea, basically sells the meditation instruction.  

Try letting all this kind of thinking go. But to do that you need to be aware that you might have some unexamined “thinking” going on along these lines.  

There are also concepts that operate as instructions on their own: just let go, do not cling to anything, accept all that comes, be equanimous, love yourself, empty your mind, and a whole bunch of others.  

One huge question I have been playing with all these years of teaching meditation simply this: Is it possible for people to meditate without embedded concepts? Is this beneficial?  

I’ll leave this question, in the true spirit of independent meditation, up to you to decide!  

The above thoughts are questions relate to technique and rationale. There are another set of questions that arise at the beginning when the issue arises to sit or not to sit. 

This branch of questions deal with “Why meditate.” Or, more precisely, if the present moment’s experience cannot be improved or changed, what then are we trying to do by meditation? In Zen it is the old question “If we are already Buddha, what are we trying to accomplish by meditating?”  

“From the beginning, all beings are Buddha;
Like water and ice, without water no ice,
Outside us, no Buddhas.
How near the Truth, yet how far we seek?”

Hakuin Zenji (1686 1769) 

I’ve written about this a number of times (see ”Chasing phantom treasure,” “The monkey pod tree in the park” and other essays). This question has been addressed by many traditions and perhaps is the most important of all questions. 

This question is also at the root of what in our group has become known as “Marv’s question ” (Tom says sitting is not necessary, that we don’t need to strive, but Tom himself strove for years, so isn’t the instruction to not strive based on the result of the years of striving Tom did; therefore, given Tom’s unabashed history of spiritual striving, doesn’t this invalidate the instruction for us students, as clearly Tom’s striving allowed him to “reach” some special state?)  

I grow tired of the many stock, almost hackneyed answers to this important question. I find these type of answers jumping out of modern day teachers of nonduality, in the abstruse zen lore of old and in the tantric teachings.  

Please consider a totally fresh take on this by Genpo Roshi, an elder statesman of North American Zen, who has produced two excellent DVDS entitled “The Big Mind Process.” I had put these on suggested viewing list over a year ago on the website. I will make copies available on to the Wednesday group now that we have a new DVD burner. Genpo Roshi does an excellent job of settling this. He answers the seemingly unanswerable “Marv’s question.” I highly recommend these DVDs. 

After all, it will only be answered in your own direct experience of the spacious immediacy of that which is before good and bad. Or as Hui-neng (638-713), asked “Without making good or bad in that moment, what is your original face before your parents were born ?”