In the past I have thought of the straying thoughts that intrude on meditation as like muscle spasms, only in the brain and mind. That image was briefly useful, but now seems to me to encourage the kind of binary of real mind and everyday mind that itself undermines the possible richness of one’s meditation. Who wants a cramp or spasm? We naturally try to hold it off, to relax the muscle in question. And as many of these entries have noted, the harder you try to hold off the straying thoughts, the more persistent and strenuous they become. As Bankei says, “it is like washing blood with blood.”1
Today I meditated with a different metaphor in mind: that the straying thoughts are in effect reflexes, autonomous or well-trained neurobiological routes to thought and action that we do not think we choose. I don’t know the neurobiology of reflexes and can’t develop the image much. But reflection tells me that a great deal of the content of my “thoughts” (suddenly I want the irony of quotation marks as I use that word) is like a reflex: a certain stimulus, in this case of fear or desire or anger, triggers a certain response in mentally audible words, dialogues, fantasies of interaction that will lead, so I imagine, to a certain outcome. The thoughts whirl about thereafter in words. I hear myself thinking them; and whereas I sought quietude and emptiness, I am helplessly full and noisy with mental content.
If such thoughts are reflexes, they are more neutral experiences than spasms; I need not fend them off, indeed, I probably can’t anyway, just as I can’t stop my shin from popping upward when my knee is knocked by the doctor. I must accept that fact of my bodily self. What’s more, I typically find it amusing. Is it possible to find amusing the reflexes of the everyday mind and simply observe them calmly as they unfold, until like the lower leg they fall back into stillness? I meditated with this in mind today, and seemed to come to a stable clarity that I haven’t often experienced lately.
It’s also helpful to ask, at least for me, just how much of our mental lives is indeed reflex, just habitual patterns of response and inner verbalization. “Failure is to form habits,” said Walter Pater,2 and habits of mind and insight are perhaps the most stultifying. T.S. Eliot seems to have experienced his own mind as a place full of “things that other people have desired” but managed to ask, “Are these ideas right or wrong?”3 It can’t be easy to break from reflex—who can live without habits?—but identifying one’s reflexes as such may be helpful. More meditation along these lines to come.
1 “Sayings of National Teacher Bankei” in Thomas Cleary’s The Original Face, in Classics of Buddhism and Zen: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary, vol. 4, p. 472.
2 In the conclusion to his The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1873.
3 In his early poem “Portrait of a Lady.”
30 January, 2024.