After yesterday’s panic I meditated today as strictly as I could on the Tao.  I have lost somewhere my sense of the Tao in my life, and its relation to my life.  I “believe” in the Tao, though it is not really an object of belief or doubt.  That is to say, I find the Tao the most compelling vision I have encountered of the way reality and the universe are as I understand (and wish) them to be.  So I simply sat in the hope of recapturing that rich and beautiful sense of the Tao that suffused most of my meditation practice for the last two years.  Old images that once called it up to me—that strangely compacted sun the size of a pea, the wide field of wild flowers extending into infinity—had become strategies and practices and could no longer fill me with understanding.  Nevertheless, the sitting was calming and relatively peaceful; though I am burdened with worries at the moment, and seem to handle my worries worse than ever, the mind was mostly at bay, and the light I was hoping to sit within was not often dissipated.  Towards the end of the sitting I suddenly recalled, or perhaps I can say experienced anew, that I am the Tao, one of its expressions, no different from any other, not estranged from the Tao because I can’t be.  Neither brighter above, nor darker below.*  This was not revelation or even a thin glimmer of enlightenment.  It was conscious understanding—remembering an idea that had once helped me.  Should I ever find myself briefly eased of the daily mind, should I recover the silence and peace that that mind works so hard to obscure; should I recover for a moment only the spontaneity with which I was once able to act, then that is my being in the Tao.  Peace, calm, emptiness.  Untroubled unfolding; proliferation, withdrawal, harmony.  I can’t claim any of these for myself, scarcely for a second, but I stand up today with a better memory of what has brought me to sit down each day in months past.

* Tao Te Ching, trans. Medhurst, ch. 14.

29 June, 2024