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Archive for meditation

Doing “Nothing”

Nothing

Out and about on this morning’s beauty walk, I happened to ask a neighbor about his holidays, which he said he’d spent pretty much "doing nothing". That sounded like absolute bliss to me.

I’ve been reading David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, and in it he says it takes up to 4 hours of uninterrupted time, most of it quite literally doing nothing, to produce just one hour’s worth of creative output.  His book is a poetic and scientific inquiry into that "nothing" – specifically training ourselves through meditation to "dive deep" for the big ideas that fuel a creative life. He describes the bliss on the other side of meditation as a "thick beauty".

Reading Lynch’s book has been a kind of revelation for me, even though I’m a meditator and have had a spiritual practice for many years. I’m very aware of how meditation helps me manage the stress of my life and stay focused in my work, yet somehow I’d never thought of it as a way to strengthen my intuition and directly nurture my creative expression. But of course it does! How wonderful…

Adopting this perspective basically takes care of two of my new year’s resolutions this year – meditate more regularly and exercise my creative faculties more vigorously – although I don’t resonate with the idea of resolutions as much as holding intentions, chief among mine for this year being to "stay awake" and "step fully into myself".

Going back to Lynch, he says that when you dive within, or transcend (through meditation), there is a "huge unbounded ocean" of bliss where creativity can flow freely. An "ocean of creativity"  that creates everything, that IS us. He says this is easy "because it’s the nature of the mind" and it just naturally wants to go there.

What’s not always so easy, but totally essential, is waking ourselves up from the illusions of this world, this life, and keeping our attention on what’s really happening, both internally and in the world around us. For me, an important part of waking up and staying awake is in sharing what I see, and that’s one of the main reasons I blog – or take photographs or write poetry, or any other form of creative expression.

William Staffford underscores this imperative beautifully in his A Ritual to Read to Each Other:

"If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star."

"And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep."

So the speaking, the courage it takes to step into one’s own authentic voice, is for me a key counterpart to diving deep into the nothingness, and an essential part of illuminating the beauty I seek to see in every thing, everywhere.

John O’Donohue says that "…true poetic beauty emerges when the poet is absolutely faithful to the uniqueness of her own voice . The danger of our exposure seems to call beauty (and) she responds to the cry of the original voice."

And so we individuals start a new year, another cycle deeper into ourselves and wider out into the world. It’s good to be alive and among you! 

Into Great Silence

Moment

I recently saw a film that absolutely transcended previous cinematic experience. It was called Into Great Silence, and as the name implies it was mostly silent, and close to three hours long.

It was unlike anything I have ever seen, right from the very first few frames…

Grainy old-fashioned film leisurely following snow flurries and dust motes in the cold winter light; morning in a Carthusian monastery high in the French alps; the almost imperceptible movement of the
stars across the night sky; the almost unbearable tenderness of men’s voices, singing their
prayers direct to God’s ear.

Time winds like a long, repetitive round of sound and light in this film … morning passing into day
into dusk and then night, dissolving into dawn and morning, again and again.
The seasons pass in a parade of light and shadow so slow you can barely see it move, the relentless red thread of time woven through all things.

I entered into it like I would a long meditation … my mind
chattering away at first ["What am I doing this for?" "God, this is
uncomfortable" "I’ll never sit here for 3 whole hours"] even as my body
slows and prepares to still… I slowly sink into the mesmerizing images
and sounds of the great silence on the screen, as its magic wraps itself around me and all of us in the room. We are so quiet we can hear every movement, every piece of popcorn crushing and sound from the movies next door, but our collective attention is so focused these sounds don’t distract us.

The experience is luxurious, painterly, yet never less than austere. We take the time to dwell lovingly on small details one could only be aware of when the pace is that slow… the images are almost excruciatingly beautiful and absolutely ordinary, a metal wash bowl propped against the wall, rocking slowly as water drains away. 

In the grainy film colors lose their distinction, outlines blur and particles merge dissolving into each other. As in a dream, I kept reaching in awe for my camera to record what was being revealed around me, only to be shocked to find I am in a seat watching a movie.

As part of the round of cinematic repetition, quotes in three languages kept appearing on the screen, over and over. One quote captures my attention each time, "Oh Lord, you have seduced me. And I was seduced." Every syllable strikes a chord & vibrates in my psyche.

This film seduced me with its rich thirst for silence; I wanted to surrender, like the monks, to simplicity and the raw beauty of the perfect eternal present. I was seduced by the rhythmic throb of nature’s pattern, wanting to give myself into it utterly, as if responding to the call of an insistent lover. It seduced me like the love of God had seduced those monks.

It seemed dream-like, a million miles away, but these were young men, living now, in modern times. Every now and then there would be some detail to bring that modernity home – a computer in someone’s room, or some bright packaging, a sticker on fruit. But they were living a life that was as old as time; their song books illuminated manuscripts from the 17th century, read by the light of candles; their feet treading stones that had been trod for centuries.

I was right there with them, my senses completely alive, cells toughening to withstand the cold as I knelt on the hard stone, planted the early shoots while snow still lie on the ground. I felt myself shyly expand into the warmth and joy of the short but utterly sweet summer, then let it go when the time and season changed. A year passed, and yet the flow continued; another winter, season into season, life into life, youth into age and dark into light.

When it finally ended, I wasn’t ready to go. My companion and I just sat there in the dark empty cinema, listening to the shifting scene around us, preparing to leave the silence … adapting to the current of our lives, the here and now of the Berkeley street just outside the doors … it wasn’t an easy transition, but I could sense the beauty in the silence that still remained, the eternal silence that always remains at the center of everything, and that was enough somehow.

Afterwards, talking about my experience with others, and again now writing about it, I am struck by what an amazing phenomenon it really was… far beyond anything I’ve ever experienced in a film before. It’s almost like it changed the molecular structure of my body; certainly it took my consciousness someplace I’ve never been except after many hours of meditation.

In spiritual work, they say that once you’ve ‘woken up’ you can never go back to sleep again, at least not in that completely unaware way; similarly, I believe the experience of sitting with this film for three hours can change you; if you surrender to it you’ll never be the same again.