'Reality is always waiting to be discovered because it is always here. Where else could it be?' Photo: Aleks Marinkovic on Unsplash
‘Awareness is about what we are doing when we are not meditating.’
Mind the gap: Tony D’Souza reflects on another tale from the Zen tradition
After many years of apprenticeship (ten years in all, not including the first three when he swept the floor, made tea and did whatever he was told) the young man had achieved the rank of Zen teacher. Now, on a rainy, windswept day, he felt happy and confident in his accomplishment as he climbed the steep hill to visit his master. The heavy rain made the path slippery, and climbing it in his wooden clogs was very difficult as his feet slipped in the wet mud. Suddenly, his umbrella, which he held aloft in his right hand, blew inside out and flapped about wildly in the wind. Trying to restore it to its original purpose was like wrestling with a large demented bat.
ill. He never thought about the weather. He would have travelled in any weather to see his master because he had taught him everything he knew or, more precisely, everything he needed to know (after ten years, he now understood that most of what he thought he knew had to be forgotten before he knew anything worth knowing).
His master, now an old man, had become famous throughout this wild and mountainous district. When the young man walked through the door, the old man greeted him with a nod. Sitting on his usual seat, the old man looked as though he had been moulded by the natural forces of the region itself. He appeared part of it, like a tree or a mountain or one of the rocks in the garden. His skin had the same light tan hue as the polished cherry wood of his walking stick. The great bald dome of his head, surrounded by wisps of white hair, looked like a boulder rounded smooth by the surf.
He asked the young man a question, ‘Did you leave your clogs and umbrella on the porch?’
‘Yes,’ replied the young man.
‘Tell me,’ the master continued, ‘did you place your umbrella to the left of your clogs, or to the right?’
The young man did not know the answer. Suddenly realising he had not yet attained full awareness, he respectfully bowed to his master and shuffled backwards towards the door. In the porch, he put on his clogs and picked up his sodden umbrella. He then made his way his way back down the slippery path to his lodgings. The next day he renounced his role as a Zen teacher and enrolled as an apprentice under the old man for another ten years.
This story may seem a little extreme on first reading, but you must remember that the young man, as an apprentice, would have practiced meditation every day. Awareness, however, is about what we are doing when we are not meditating. If we are lost in thought when we are not meditating then our formal practice periods are like little islands of awareness in a sea of forgetfulness. Awareness, or mindfulness, is the means to maintain the attention of meditation throughout the day.
I once saw a slogan on a T-shirt: ‘Lost in Thought – Send a Search Party’, and thought how true it was of all of us. There is hardly a moment when we are not doing something or thinking something. Our problem is that we have become thinking-doing machines and our society applauds us for it; in fact, it applauds little else. And this is how our days are spent. One day follows another. The days become weeks, then months, then years – all lost in thought. We are either in constant activity or lost in the incessant babble of thought (or both). We rarely concentrate on anything. For example, it is very rare for us to concentrate (really concentrate) on the simple act of eating. In the modern world, it is not unusual for people to spend their entire adult lives eating while watching TV or checking their social media. Just imagine, eating all those meals and barely tasting anything – just fuelling the body while the mind is distracted. And this is just one example. We are thinking of something else when we are brushing our teeth, having a shower, even when we are driving a car. John Lennon wrote ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’, and he was certainly right about our world and how we live.
Awareness, or mindfulness, is the antidote to constant distraction because it grounds us in reality. Moment-to-moment mindfulness is consciously paying attention to what we are doing and to our surroundings. Mindfulness asks us to pay attention, whether it is to peeling the potatoes, having a shower or washing the dishes. Instead of the constant and ubiquitous ‘not here now,’ it gently brings our mind to ‘be here now’. It takes us out of abstraction and into the real. It asks us to come out of the thoughts in our head and feel the texture of the peeled potato, feel the soapy water on our skin and feel the dishes while we wash them. The mind has no conception of the present moment. It exists only in time, in the past or the future, and because neither exist except as thought, living in the mind is living in la la land.
Many people spend their entire lives with their minds completely absorbed in thought, in distractions such as TV, radio and newspapers. This is a great tragedy. But reality is always waiting to be discovered because it is always here. Where else could it be? Mindfulness reminds us of that. It reinforces the effects of meditation by allowing us to be aware of thoughts as they occur during the day. This has many benefits, but three are most apparent.
Firstly, we learn not to take our thoughts (and the emotions caused by them) as seriously as we do. We can learn to observe them and let them go like clouds passing in the sky, which is the first step to declaring independence from the senseless chatter of mind.
Secondly (a direct result of the first), we do not have to act out every passing thought or emotion. In time, we become less reactive, less like a puppet on a string, driven mechanically by our own inner world of the mind-created self and its shadow, the emotions.
Finally, we begin to realise our judgements can’t be trusted. From infancy, we learn to evaluate everything we perceive, including other people. Our judgements fall into three categories: good, bad or indifferent. All our judgements are made using our mind and our personal experience. Therefore, everything we see is seen through the prism of our past and through personal preference, which means our judgements are opinions – not facts. The world we see is made of the judgements we project onto it, which is why we never see anything as it is until we cleanse our eyes of judgement. As William Blake said: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’
Comments
How delightful to read about another spiritual path in a Christian based publication. If you haven’t come across it The Book of Joy about HH the Dalai Lama meeting his friend Bishop Desmond Tutu is just such a meeting of spirits. On a less serious note I was recently gifted a hammock. It is a marvellous antidote to thinking and doing as you can’t do any reading or screen watching or chores stranded half way up a tree. However, I have been made aware of the breeze, the birds, the insects, the sky in a very different way!
By nyinmodelek@btinternet.com on 2nd August 2020 - 8:07
‘Mindfulness’ is neither about the mind nor about being full - what an unfortunate word to translate the original Sanskrit ‘sati’. We need to get out of our minds - as Tony says, trapped in time - and into the eternal present of awareness by emptying ourselves of our ego.
As I see it, this is all there in the Christian tradition as well, buried under the total misuse of the terms ‘eternal’ and ‘eternal life’ as being lasting forever - i.e. still trapped in time. How many of us, when entering into meditation have not let go of the western attachment to ‘mind’ and to ‘time’?
The example from the nature of apprenticeship is wonderful - but how many of us today have the slightest idea of just what ‘apprenticeship is? We think of ‘learning’ as something that you do in a classroom, from books. An apprenticeship is the development of skill through supervised practice, in which classroom type learning is but a base to enable that practice to start.
It is not true that “the first three when he swept the floor, made tea and did whatever he was told” are not part of the apprenticeship - they are in fact an absolutely essential part of any apprenticeship. For what you are really doing in those first three years (normally expressed as one year in a classic five year apprenticeship) is watching the practice of the master and other experienced workers - becoming aware of the nature of practice in the workshop. One day, the master, carefully watching the novice, will observe their paying attention, and invite them to practice some simple skill for the first time, standing closely over them in case they might make a mistake and hurt themselves, and saying ‘not like that, like this’, showing them how it is done by example, not by explanation.
The purpose of that first year or three years is to get the novice out of their head and into the space of practice, essential before any practice can meaningfully commence.
By GordonF on 4th August 2020 - 8:08
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