In the first psalm of Book of Mercy Leonard Cohen reflects on his various failed prayers and meditations and recounts the different efforts he had made to move forward—in the case of this poem, to move God back onto his throne.  “I stopped stopping and I stopped starting,” he says, “and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance.  This was a strategy, and didn’t work at all.”  I know thoroughly now what he meant by this passage.

When I am not at peace, or when the proliferating thoughts interrupt and seem to weaken my meditation, every single thing in my head is one kind of strategy or another.  I strategize above all the words, the letters or emails or conversational gambits, that will get me something I want, or allow me to evade something I fear.  My strategy is always verbal—is everyone’s?  I often think that if I could just shut down the mechanism that produces words in my mind—briefly, of course!—there would be no need for meditation; that meditation is an effort to get beyond the verbal entirely.  At least I would then know what aspects of the desirous ego persist in a non-verbal consciousness.

Lao-Tzu teaches that the wisest way to escape strategy and its infinite frustrations is through non-attachment and non-action, so that rather than suppressing strategies of desire and fear we render them meaningless.  But these evanescent goals are so hard to attain: I’m sure that I and perhaps others have also tried to approach the problem from the other end, by silencing strategy, by turning off the verbal reflex in the brain. 

Not only can it not be done: Cohen’s insight is that any attempt from that end of the problem would be just another strategy.  Indeed, even the attempt to stop stopping words would be just another strategy.  Nothing “works.”  We’re left in a space between strategies, the verbal dance that plagues us in our heads, and the ways and means we adopt in order to still that dance once and for all.

If there is a way forward, then, it can only be from the far end of consciousness where Taoism can teach us.  Non-action; non-attachment; the dispersal of the ego.  As I said, so hard to understand, much more so to achieve.  And how to prevent these seekings from themselves hardening into strategy?

15 August, 2024.