24 August, 2023.

What trumps the conscious mind is equanimity.  What do we mean in common parlance when we refer to another as Zen?  “His attitude is completely Zen.”  “I’ve never seen such a Zen reaction to a bad mark!”  We mean that such a person has responded to something considerable with a surprising lack of feeling, of concern, lack of affect.  This may be a cartoon version of my experience today, but it is not without value. For some reason I can’t explain, all the impediments to a calming, deep meditation came and went as usual, but I was simply indifferent to them.  The cascading voices that make up my thoughts, the sense that one breath was freer than another (therefore one tighter than another), the awareness of the ambient music of Tibetan bowls or nature sounds accompanying them—or the sudden recognition that I had been utterly unaware of them for several minutes—all these arose as usual.  But they had none of their disconcerting ability to trigger conscious thought, that damnable glass wall between self and peace.  Instead my experience remained calm and centred, “one-pointed” as Medhurst has it in Lao Tzu; my breath and being seemed to rest around the hara (but even when it slipped back into my head, that mattered not at all); I took pleasure in this or that note in the music, and ignored others, in perfect peace.  I felt a powerful equanimity, and the fact that I could not explain it, had not sought it or brought it about, the fact that I had no words for it, could not disturb it. I’m sure equanimity and enlightenment have some complex relation to one another that I don’t begin to understand—but for now I am untroubled by it. The calm felt real, though it also allowed all the other presences in my sitting mind to be real as well.