A Substack follow-up to Meditation: What and Why in response to Tom Carroll’s query. And then we’ll ‘swim the Ganges.’ But I might not get to the Ganges tomorrow since I’ll be heading to the shooting range.
The neo-Kantian German philosopher Eugen Herrigel wrote a book entitled Zen in the Art of Archery. Tomorrow I will practice Zen and the Art of Handgunnery. Can you trigger an explosion a couple of inches from your face without flinching or moving the gun, with equanimity and detachment from the outcome, hitting a bulls-eye eleven yards off?
This was a great post, Bill. Thank you. I appreciate how concrete, detailed, and prescriptive the Time, Posture, Stretching, Breath, and Relaxation sections were. Ever since my kindergarten teacher tried unsuccessfully to get me to sit ‘Indian style,’ I’ve had a hard time being comfortable in any position on a floor. But I will experiment along the lines you suggest. I have found some cushion-and-mat sets online. They aren’t cheap, but it’s probably best not to scrimp. And who knows? A good cushion-and-mat might turn out to be just what I need to handle the floor.
Starting with Theme, however, I began to have some questions. You put forward two things that seemed to me to be in tension with one another. I wondered how (or if) you’d keep both balls in the air.
In the beginning, you said, “One might start discursively, by running through a mantram, but the idea is to achieve a nondiscursive one-pointedness of attention.” Then in paras 1 – 2, you used the Jesus Prayer and St. Augustine as examples. If I understood you correctly, in each case one starts with the entire phrase, slowly winnowing it down to a single word repeated over and over, until you “sink into mental quiet.” Once there, you “let go of the mantram and simply abide passively in the state of quiet, without reflecting on it [or] analyzing it…” I think I understand what you mean, and I think I see how it could work. (As an aside, I presume this is the point at which you “know you are there,” as you said in your first post.)
So far, so good.
But then you seemed to change course, starting with para 4. There you said, “[a] classical theme of meditation is the Self…” and went on to present a series of discursive questions, one after another. This is a different than gradually dropping words from the Jesus Prayer, with the final “Lord, Lord…” sliding you into ‘mental quiet.’ Not only does contemplation of the vexing questions in para 4 onward seem like a different approach than the ever-narrowing intentional focus of paras 1 – 3, it actually seems (to some degree) antithetical.
Do you see what I mean? Paras 1 – 3 look to me like one approach, and para 4 onward looks like another. I trust they don’t nullify each other, but also I don’t immediately see the compatibility either.
Here is another way to put it. You concluded the para-4-onward section with a koan, suggesting it might be a “pointer to a dimension beyond the discursive mind.” I see how it could be such a pointer, but (unlike the approach in paras 1 – 3) I don’t see how it would help *move you beyond* the discursive mind and into mental quiet. In fact, it seems as though it might even work against it.
Could the answer be in your penultimate paragraph? There you say, “…instead of bashing one’s head against this brick wall of a koan, one can just repeat ‘I,’ ‘I,’ ‘I’ [to bring] the discursive intellect to subsidence.” Does this mean paras 1 – 3, and para 4 onward, are about two different things? Are you suggesting a choice? Take one approach today, the other tomorrow — that sort of thing? Is para 4 onward in some way preparatory to paras 1 – 3? Is that how they go together?
I posted the above question shortly before your latest went up, i.e., “Meditation as Reduction…” The link to “This Morning’s Meditation” that it contained shed helpful light on the the para 1 – 3 material above, though I am still a little fuzzy how the para-4-onward material fits in.
Tom,
You don’t have to spend any money assuming you have some pillows. By experimenting with throw rugs, pillows, and towels, you can rig up something that is comfortable.
On the other main point, there are two different approaches, one passive, the other active; the goal, however, is the same. My latest Substack upload should clarify things.