What condition of mind do we seek in meditation? Is it more like emptiness or fullness? Most of my readings encourage me to seek and to attain a condition they liken to emptiness: an emptying out of the ego, of the attached self. When I think of the space I seek as a space without words, I am again imagining a place that has been emptied of something. And it is easy to think that a state of peace will necessarily be free of all our daily troubles. Troubles of which we are so full. No wonder emptiness is one of the words that swirl around enlightenment.
On the other hand, we seek to be mindful. Perhaps that is the more Westernized of the two terms, but just this morning I encountered it in Man-An’s “An Elementary Talk on Zen” from the early seventeenth century: he tells you “to make continuous concentration of true mindfulness your general” in the resistance against the fear of death.* It sounds as if something good in us, in that better spiritual state meditation might bring, will be full of our minds. Or is it our minds that are full, of some deep relation to the world and time that brings peace too? We can read on, and meditate on, to try to understand what mindfulness might be, but it does not sound at all like emptiness, and I’ve yet to find that sacred writing that helps me understand the two as one state—which they surely are?
If I am meditating less lately, and writing about it still less here, it is in large part because the idea of a desired emptiness that I have long pursued, in study and in sitting, no longer persuades me, at a time of life and a point in my work as a poet when I wish above all to experience the fullest possible instance of each moment I have left to live. If there is one stimulus to writing poetry that I recognize more than any other, it is the suddenly radiant light that arises and envelopes the world I move in and holds me spellbound, often for several seconds. What the modernists called epiphany, admitting thereby its roots in religious understandings. I’m lucky at my age still to have them now and then. At such times the world feels unbearably full, and the challenge to any writer is somehow to capture that plenitude. I can’t see that it has anything to do with emptiness—except insofar as one might need an empty room and an empty hour or two to get it down on paper, and perhaps a certain inner stillness in which one can listen well.
The problem is, I have found no definition of mindfulness, that is, of a kind to be gained by meditation or spiritual training, that impels creativity, that inspires. Mindfulness once again is a state that offsets the clamouring world. Is it not? And I want the world to clamour at me now, and I want to clamour in return.
What I seek in meditation may be deeply antagonistic to the business of being that leads to the writing of poems. However wrong-headed that thought may be—and however binary may be the trapped mind that asks if enlightenment is emptiness or fullness—I know which way my purpose lies: to the next poem. So if this meditation journal continues to thin out, anyone reading this will have one good account, at least, of the reason.
* In Classics of Buddhism and Zen: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary, vol. 1, p. 468.
4 November, 2024.