29 October, 2023.
Another long hiatus. My friends and family will know why. The annus horribilis continues, and 2023 is not over. In the bitter period that began with a text from my nephew on October 6th, I have meditated often. Surprisingly, the clearing of my thoughts and the attainment of something like a comforting emptiness have become almost habitual. Meditation has been calming if not restorative, a twenty minutes of emotional and conceptual neutrality.
And perhaps that is all it can ever be for me. A brief, practised release from the pain of illness and death. I’m not sure if I am seeking anything further or, as I said in an earlier post, if I even believe in an enlightenment that could have some lasting effect on my way of being in the world. If this were a Christian practice, wise elders would tell me, I suspect, that I was in the condition of despair.
Despite all the thought I have given to non-attachment and non-action in earlier posts, I feel quite clear in my own mind now that life is meaningless to me without vigorous, passionate attachments, especially to others. I reject detachment. I know that non-attachment is not detachment.
But for all my study and meditation, I have not yet learned a way of non-attachment that doesn’t feel like detachment. And all this study and practice because loss and suffering are so painful to us? I would not even if I could overcome that pain at the price of a life lived without love for others. Individuals, illusory as their separateness may be. Others who may leave us, who may die.
Nevertheless, I continue. I’m writing this. I meditated today, and will meditate again. I continue to gain, now and then, and to seek, two chief understandings. I have never found any conception of the cosmos and its origins and meaning as truthful to my own experience and observation as the Tao. And although Lao Tzu says that the Tao is non-attached to its own creation,* I have so much else to learn from its endless proliferation of energy and form.
Second, I try to understand non-attachment not as a reduction or a refusal of attachments but as a cleansing and illumination of them. So that, side by side, might exist a passionate deep love for another and an understanding of her as among the expressions of the Tao, and thus temporary, transient—the love exposing me to further loss, more suffering. But at that same moment to glimpse ourselves as fundamentally one with a Way into which we only appear to vanish when the end comes.
All these conceptions; all wishful; all longing. All these aims going against the grain of my Buddhist and Taoist studies. So be it. For these, if for nothing more, meditation continues.
* “It gives them life and nurtures. / It gives them life without possession. / It benefits them but asks no thanks. / It holds but imposes no authority. / Such is the mysterious virtue.” Tao Te Ching 10, trans. A.S. Kline.