In today’s meditation it felt as if I went deeper.  What this feeling amounted to is this: the usual plague of random thoughts stopped feeling like a plague.  As they rose and fell I was happily indifferent.  The moments of deep quiet and stillness felt more active. 

I had hoped to settle my mind a little in the face of the ongoing American catastrophe, and instead seemed to have some sudden glimpse of the Tao in its gentle meaning and operations, all embracing.  The sense of catastrophe dissipated, the intuition of the long timescale of the Tao grew stronger.  How brief we are, we and our little troubled world.

Words can’t help me understand how the Tao and the current global crisis might be reconciled.  Briefly, in these moments that felt deeper than usual, there seemed no tension there.  This didn’t mean that the catastrophe wasn’t real: I live in this body, in this country, on this planet, and these are at risk.  It was simply that I had some place of evaluation other than my body from which my feelings about the historical moment arose.  Or rather, a place within which the historical moment receded.

Only briefly.  If there was any greater depth to my meditation today, it came and went as usual.  A glimpse, then confusion.  But this is the first sitting in some time that felt different, new.  I will seek it again—even if seeking is not what we are meant to do.

5 February, 2025.