As I began to meditate today I had two or three decisions of some substance on my mind. I knew that meditation was not for making decisions, and so as I began to breathe more easily I tried to avert the thoughts and assessments that had filled the hour or two before sitting. Of course, I also tried not to try to avert them, and I was more or less successful: the zazen was not troubling, or frustrating. When I had a few moments of empty mind here and there—more scattered and brief than I might have wished for—I felt on the one hand that I had ended the decision-making process for that time. On the other hand, I felt that decisions, though they seemed irrelevant for a moment or two, were “being made” in that time as well. Perhaps this is because the empty mind always and already knows; the world of decision-making is the world of distinctions, binaries, barriers, where the mind can’t flow (see “Mind is Water” in an earlier entry). By no means did I arise with a clear sense of what to do in any of my areas of puzzlement, but I did leave meditation with an increased irony about the whole process of decision-making which we make so central to our lives of striving. The answers lie elsewhere.
The other day I was talking with a younger poet about the creative process and my belief that the true flow of poetry occurs in a mental, perhaps even spiritual, condition much like the emptiness that is desired by many of those who meditate. The truly creative instant arises when the dams and fences and barriers of the knowing mind have dissolved, and the free flow of watery mind is restored. We agreed the idea would be called Romantic in any contemporary literary or cultural criticism, and certainly my own experience as a poet seeking publication speaks of a literary world dominated by a poetry of conscious ideation and powerful social affiliation rather than the spontaneity of mindful flow in an empty space.
So meditation and poetry, for me, are approaches to the same condition and in some degree enact one another. And the business of decision-making, of discrimination and preference, is harmful to both.
16 December, 2023.
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