I invite visitors to read “Meditation fails me” and the next two entries as a triad.

At last meditation fails me completely.  Or I fail completely at meditation.  My practice has devolved into an occasional chance to sit quietly and fret for twenty minutes.  The snaking thoughts are rampant and they triumph.  I feel a fraud as I sit, and I look back at the entries of this journal and feel that fraudulence suffuse them retroactively.  I meant to mislead no one and didn’t think I was misleading myself.  But the pressures of life at the moment are such as to tolerate no displacement by the present moment or the original face or the Uncarved Block.  Truly in zazen I am no more than my worries, and there are far better means of dealing with them than this quiet sitting and counted breathing.  “Be up and doing,” as Catharine Parr Traill said to Morag Gunn in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners.  She wasn’t wrong.

The “present moment” cannot be an experience of emptiness and inner quiet.  The present moment I can value and cherish and seek is full of leaves and wind and angles of sunlight and distant sounds and a wide angle of vision and the heart beating and the lungs rushing and a sense of encompassment.  The body joys in it; the mind is full but also calm.  The negative “decrease upon decrease”* model of the present moment no longer attracts me.  Why should the rooms of insight be quiet and dark and withdrawn?  Only the open, dull-witted, spontaneous gazing of the poet in fallow creation interests me.  It may be meditative, that state, but it is not meditation.

I have to ask again, might a teacher make this meditation practice sound once more?  Might meditating in a group alter these present dismaying wasteful sittings?  Perhaps.  But I disdain the place of student now.  Time will tell if I return to the self-taught meditation practice that has fuelled me through crisis after crisis these last two years.  For now, I simply fail at it.

* Tao Te Ching, trans. Medhurst, ch. 48.

27 June, 2024.