1 May, 2023.

My meditation has calmed, at least as of yesterday and again today.  Though I have said before that I do not meditate on anything, there is no question that since his death I have meditated on Cuillin and on the Tao, trying in any way possible to understand the relation of the two, to understand my readings when they assure me that Cuillin and I are expressions of the te of the Tao, simultaneous and unified expressions transcending time and thus together beyond the fact of his death.  It is hard to believe, though I so want to, and it is harder to approach in the midst of meditation.  At the same time, I am hoping not to try; I am hopeful that I will once again “expect nothing”.  The anguish of my previous entry has eased, in one sense, though my anguish over Cuillin’s death has not.  When I feel I have come to some deeper understanding or vision, it has to do with the unity of all things, and the endurance of all things across time, because of their involvement and inescapable rootedness in the Tao.  In my best instants of meditation I seem to perceive the Tao, and at such moments I no longer experience Cuillin’s loss in the same way.  What I know—that he is irreparably gone—is no longer what I feel or understand; what I know suddenly seems so much smaller.  I do begin again to sense the Tao as a place of the utmost peace; though I feel this only in glimpses, in quickly passing moments.

            I have been helped by Alan Watts’s book The Tao of Philosophy, which, in my present moment of reading, insists that I am something the Tao is doing, something the world and nature are doing.  That in fact we are all something the Tao is doing, equally and without distinction, and that time and change and loss do not alter what the Tao does.  The burden of selfhood—if that means the discovery of purpose, authenticity, the accomplishment of good or bad works—assumes that we are doing, that we are here to do.  Watts reminds us that human nature is just another expression of nature itself; we are natural, precisely as we are, and any sense of estrangement or alienation is delusion.  In today’s meditation, I moved when I could to some sense that these ideas, and a comforting understanding of Cuillin’s physical absence and his enduring being, were all closely intertwined, with the Tao illuminating them all.

            The Tao is the key, to me.  Enlightenment, as kensho or satori, is not of much interest now.