On the subject of uncertainty ... which personally I have almost no tolerance of ... I put this in my blog back in June:
"The virtue of uncertainty is not a comfortable idea, but then a citizen-based democracy is built upon participation, which is the very expression of permanent discomfort. The corporatist system depends upon the citizen's desire for inner comfort. Equilibrium is dependent upon our recognition of reality, which is the acceptance of permanent psychic discomfort. And the acceptance of psychic discomfort is the acceptance of consciousness."
... So .. yeah ... uncertainty is for me, the essence of psychic discomfort. But I guess feeling uncomfortable is the flip side to the good moments ... and one day maybe I will accept and understand this and truly know, as Mary said the other day on her blog, that my feelings will not kill me.
Oh, Zen is entirely about uncertainty: why do you think we Zennies keep such a rigorous practice discipline? All the pomp & circumstance of formal Zen practice with its prescribed rituals for every last detail, even how you rest your chopsticks during mealtime, is simply a counter-balance to the uncertainty of everything else in life.
In other words, the reason to cultivate a regular practice ritual is to give you something to rest upon given the fact that everything else (your own so-called self included) is perpetually up in the air & in flux.
I think that many of the psychic problems people have with meditation (I mean inner restlessness, not "My back hurts" or "My leg itches") stems from the intolerance of uncertainty Stray comments on. At some point in your practice, an awareness of your own LACK of control--your own utter helpless inter-dependence--will arise out of the silence. "Uncertainty" is just another name for impermanence and lack of control, isn't it? It seems to me that sitting meditation is ALL ABOUT growing comfortable with one's own inner uncertainty: what we Zennies call Don't Know Mind.
In light of all this, I think it's ironic that I'm spending the day meticulously planning the last of three syllabi for the start of fall semester classes tomorrow. Today, everything is cleanly predictable as I compose a document outlining assignments and due-dates for the next 15 weeks...and then all bets are off the second I walk into the classroom and encounter actual students and the uncertainty that is human relationship.
If things were certain, they'd be damn boring, no?
Leslee, I'm glad to hear you're taking an Adult Ed class. The Cambridge Zen Center offers classes through both CCAE and BCAE, so I've taught several of those during my years as a ZC residence. It's a great way to give your meditation practice a crash-course kick-start. (And that applies to the instructor as well as the students!) :-)
Lorianne, that was excellent. If we had a sidebar with some really good bits that were written in the comments, I'd put what you just wrote on meditation and uncertainty in there.
I've had two major periods of uncertainty in my life. The most recent my blogger friends know of, the other one was when my father lay dying. He was in Intensive Care, multiple tubes in, multiple tubes out, unable to talk with the tracheotomy. For six months the doctors refused to say that he had another day to live. Any moment, we can't say beyond today, it was incredible psychic and emotional torture. Each day I would go to the hospital not knowing, I would hold his hand and lip read not knowing, I would leave not knowing if I were to see him alive again. I couldn't sleep, left my TA at university, didn't work on my thesis, lived in a state I don't want to remember. It was like that Eastern European or Russian author who's name escapes me at the moment who was blindfolded and taken to be shot each day and each day wasn't shot. Excruciating. Existential angst. Out of your control.
My Dad eventually had all the tubes taken out, the machines unplugged, and he faced death directly.
Those few days,... true uncertainty is not an enviable or desirable state.
Neither was the year I just went through. But for the last decade or so I have become a meditator. With daily meditation, I began to understand how strong we all are underneath. There is a deep rhythm to life that we can trust.
I wouldn't call it the bedrock but perhaps the song of the bedrock.
Meditating is not just listening to, but participating in, at our deepest level, shorn of everything, the song of life and death.
"Meditating is not just listening to, but participating in, at our deepest level, shorn of everything, the song of life and death."
Brenda, I think you just hit the nail smack-dab on the head. That "participating in" you speak of can include panic or whatever response arises from uncertainty: dread, fear, deep & abiding crankiness. Lots of folks come to meditation, I think, thinking that they have to "be at peace" with whatever arises, and while that's a noble goal, it isn't necessarily a realistic one.
You don't have to make peace with uncertainty...you just have to sit with it. For years after I started meditating, meditation always involved at least one stint of unmitigated panic: it took a huge amount of strength or stubbornness to make myself sit still when everything inside was screaming "run away."
We can run away from our cushions, but we can't run away from uncertainty: it follows us as surely as our own footsteps. Meditation isn't about eliminating uncertainty or our emotional reactions to it; meditation is about finding the strength to sit in the face of it.
That was me, the system's been buggy, so I didn't realize my comment had already posted when it wouldn't with repeated attempts earlier. I ended up posting my bit on my Dad, linking back to you all too.
Lorianne, despite what I've been through with uncertainty, losing everything but the 2 suitcases I arrived with & my computer (which I had UPS-d separately), or my Dad's months of dying, and it's possible he might still be alive today if he'd wished to live a cybernetic existence with machines breathing for him, he was such a fighter, the doctors always said he could live for years like this, but there was no long term care facility at the time, my two experiences of true uncertainty were hell. It's partially that there's always choice in uncertainty. Things could go this way or that. And whatever way they went, it didn't have to be that way. Nothing can be absolute, even years after when we retrospectively ponder on what happened.
Meditation does help me to live with knowing that despite life's regularity and gentle continuance and ordinariness it can also pull not just the rug under your feet but the entire floor and the earth itself can crumble.
And that there is a way, a tao, to dancing the dance that's given to you at any moment to dance.
Meditation does make you less prone to the wild ride of highs and depressions, the outer circumference of the Samsaric wheel, and does, even when you want to run from your meditation cushion, enable you to feel the ecstasy at the centre, of this, now.
Visible matter is only 5% of the universe; life is such a gift.
Nearly losing everything! Sheesh. It's all either crammed in here in boxes, or in a local storage unit about a 10 minute walk from here, and fully affordable. While I can't access most of it, I get to ponder the meaning of nearly losing a lifetime of accumulation. I'm very glad to be out of the 'cloud of unknowing' though!
8 Comments:
On the subject of uncertainty ... which personally I have almost no tolerance of ... I put this in my blog back in June:
"The virtue of uncertainty is not a comfortable idea, but then a citizen-based democracy is built upon participation, which is the very expression of permanent discomfort. The corporatist system depends upon the citizen's desire for inner comfort. Equilibrium is dependent upon our recognition of reality, which is the acceptance of permanent psychic discomfort. And the acceptance of psychic discomfort is the acceptance of consciousness."
John Ralston Saul, 1995
Read the full text here.
... So .. yeah ... uncertainty is for me, the essence of psychic discomfort. But I guess feeling uncomfortable is the flip side to the good moments ... and one day maybe I will accept and understand this and truly know, as Mary said the other day on her blog, that my feelings will not kill me.
Phew. Tough stuff though.
Oh, Zen is entirely about uncertainty: why do you think we Zennies keep such a rigorous practice discipline? All the pomp & circumstance of formal Zen practice with its prescribed rituals for every last detail, even how you rest your chopsticks during mealtime, is simply a counter-balance to the uncertainty of everything else in life.
In other words, the reason to cultivate a regular practice ritual is to give you something to rest upon given the fact that everything else (your own so-called self included) is perpetually up in the air & in flux.
I think that many of the psychic problems people have with meditation (I mean inner restlessness, not "My back hurts" or "My leg itches") stems from the intolerance of uncertainty Stray comments on. At some point in your practice, an awareness of your own LACK of control--your own utter helpless inter-dependence--will arise out of the silence. "Uncertainty" is just another name for impermanence and lack of control, isn't it? It seems to me that sitting meditation is ALL ABOUT growing comfortable with one's own inner uncertainty: what we Zennies call Don't Know Mind.
In light of all this, I think it's ironic that I'm spending the day meticulously planning the last of three syllabi for the start of fall semester classes tomorrow. Today, everything is cleanly predictable as I compose a document outlining assignments and due-dates for the next 15 weeks...and then all bets are off the second I walk into the classroom and encounter actual students and the uncertainty that is human relationship.
If things were certain, they'd be damn boring, no?
Leslee, I'm glad to hear you're taking an Adult Ed class. The Cambridge Zen Center offers classes through both CCAE and BCAE, so I've taught several of those during my years as a ZC residence. It's a great way to give your meditation practice a crash-course kick-start. (And that applies to the instructor as well as the students!) :-)
Lorianne, that was excellent. If we had a sidebar with some really good bits that were written in the comments, I'd put what you just wrote on meditation and uncertainty in there.
I've had two major periods of uncertainty in my life. The most recent my blogger friends know of, the other one was when my father lay dying. He was in Intensive Care, multiple tubes in, multiple tubes out, unable to talk with the tracheotomy. For six months the doctors refused to say that he had another day to live. Any moment, we can't say beyond today, it was incredible psychic and emotional torture. Each day I would go to the hospital not knowing, I would hold his hand and lip read not knowing, I would leave not knowing if I were to see him alive again. I couldn't sleep, left my TA at university, didn't work on my thesis, lived in a state I don't want to remember. It was like that Eastern European or Russian author who's name escapes me at the moment who was blindfolded and taken to be shot each day and each day wasn't shot. Excruciating. Existential angst. Out of your control.
My Dad eventually had all the tubes taken out, the machines unplugged, and he faced death directly.
Those few days,... true uncertainty is not an enviable or desirable state.
Neither was the year I just went through. But for the last decade or so I have become a meditator. With daily meditation, I began to understand how strong we all are underneath. There is a deep rhythm to life that we can trust.
I wouldn't call it the bedrock but perhaps the song of the bedrock.
Meditating is not just listening to, but participating in, at our deepest level, shorn of everything, the song of life and death.
And finding the rhythm okay, ecstatic even.
"Meditating is not just listening to, but participating in, at our deepest level, shorn of everything, the song of life and death."
Brenda, I think you just hit the nail smack-dab on the head. That "participating in" you speak of can include panic or whatever response arises from uncertainty: dread, fear, deep & abiding crankiness. Lots of folks come to meditation, I think, thinking that they have to "be at peace" with whatever arises, and while that's a noble goal, it isn't necessarily a realistic one.
You don't have to make peace with uncertainty...you just have to sit with it. For years after I started meditating, meditation always involved at least one stint of unmitigated panic: it took a huge amount of strength or stubbornness to make myself sit still when everything inside was screaming "run away."
We can run away from our cushions, but we can't run away from uncertainty: it follows us as surely as our own footsteps. Meditation isn't about eliminating uncertainty or our emotional reactions to it; meditation is about finding the strength to sit in the face of it.
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That was me, the system's been buggy, so I didn't realize my comment had already posted when it wouldn't with repeated attempts earlier. I ended up posting my bit on my Dad, linking back to you all too.
Lorianne, despite what I've been through with uncertainty, losing everything but the 2 suitcases I arrived with & my computer (which I had UPS-d separately), or my Dad's months of dying, and it's possible he might still be alive today if he'd wished to live a cybernetic existence with machines breathing for him, he was such a fighter, the doctors always said he could live for years like this, but there was no long term care facility at the time, my two experiences of true uncertainty were hell. It's partially that there's always choice in uncertainty. Things could go this way or that. And whatever way they went, it didn't have to be that way. Nothing can be absolute, even years after when we retrospectively ponder on what happened.
Meditation does help me to live with knowing that despite life's regularity and gentle continuance and ordinariness it can also pull not just the rug under your feet but the entire floor and the earth itself can crumble.
And that there is a way, a tao, to dancing the dance that's given to you at any moment to dance.
Meditation does make you less prone to the wild ride of highs and depressions, the outer circumference of the Samsaric wheel, and does, even when you want to run from your meditation cushion, enable you to feel the ecstasy at the centre, of this, now.
Visible matter is only 5% of the universe; life is such a gift.
Nearly losing everything! Sheesh. It's all either crammed in here in boxes, or in a local storage unit about a 10 minute walk from here, and fully affordable. While I can't access most of it, I get to ponder the meaning of nearly losing a lifetime of accumulation. I'm very glad to be out of the 'cloud of unknowing' though!
"Meditating is not just listening to, but participating in, at our deepest level, shorn of everything, the song of life and death."
I think we should put this in the sidebar!!
And hi Leslee!
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