Post #86: Rolling Up the Mat

2 Feb. 2024

“What is really needed is a reversal in how we ask for the meaning of life: what must learn ourselves and teach despairing mankind is that it is really never a question of what we expect of life, but rather what life expects from us, and nothing else!”

—Viktor E. Frankl, Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen (Man’s Search for Meaning)*

     Pilgrims on the Path who wish to get taken seriously by their peers will not often say so openly, and perhaps what I am about to share doesn’t apply to them. Possibly it is my problem and mine alone. But I suspect that it is quite a bit more common than people let on. The problem is this: sometimes you will get tired and fed up with your pilgrimage, with the need to keep up your sittings, to be concerned with mindfulness, to heed the precepts, or to see things through a Dhammic lens at all. Sometimes it will all just get on your nerves, the Dhamma talk, the Dhamma look, the Dhamma crowd, everything. You’ll just want to be done with it all. Quit for good. Make your exit. Out and over.

     Next thing you know, perhaps you will find yourself rolling up your mat and leaving it out with the recycling, giving away your Dhamma books, and vowing to yourself never to read or talk Dhamma ever again. Off the Path, once and for all. Farewell to all that. It’s possible. Who knows. But if you’ve done a bit of steadfast walking on the Path, such a dark mood will probably suggest other thoughts to you as well. You might ask yourself how long your distempered state is likely to last, for example. Very well, so let’s say you really, truly are feeling done with the nonsense right now. That may be a fact. But how long will it last? A meditator will have his doubts about whether your funk is really as robust as it may feel at the moment.

     Next you might catch yourself wondering where your sudden change in attitude is coming from. Superficially, it seems to be driven by the facts of the case—the apparent tediousness or pointlessness of it all, or whatever the terms of the indictment may be that you’ve drawn up in your mind. But if you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid (and it doesn’t take a particularly heavy dose), you will ask yourself also whether it might not all be “impurities” rising to the surface of your mind (or if you have the bug still worse, “sankharas” arising). Oh my, it seems the practice won’t let you go so easily after all. You may be done with the Path (you think), but is the Path done with you?

     Another pesky thought makes its appearance: just how much better off do you really expect to become by dropping the burden of your practice? Even granting what a pain it can be (or at least appear) sometimes, how different does that make your practice from the rest of your life? Most likely, when you are in a mood to be done with the mat already, and with all that is connected to it, the Dhamma is not the only thing getting on your nerves, wouldn’t you agree? Is the practice really the culprit here or merely the messenger?

     So for today you are surely done—let us agree. But will it really make you feel so much better not to do your sitting in the morning? By all means go ahead and try it, but how long do you really expect the relief to last? And what if some other storm hits you in the course of the ensuing days of “liberation” from your meditator’s chores: will you be in any better position to cope because you’ve given up on the laborious attempt to bring your mind into a little more balance? Even if you are done with the Dhamma (for the sake of argument), how done can you ever be with the unsatisfactory dimension to life in general that a Dhamma practice is supposed to help you address? You can’t expect that side of things to disappear just because you are frustrated with the supposed inefficiency or inefficacy of your remedial efforts. “Bah humbug,” you may scoff: “I’ve worked at it long enough with meager results. It’s a waste of time, a fool’s errand, at least for me.” All right, let’s say that you are right (again, for argument’s sake only); but do you have anything better to go by? If so, good for you; do whatever works. But seriously, what is your fallback option here? Pizza? Chocolate? Netflix? Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll?

     Given the distaste you are feeling for the mat at the moment, there are probably other things eating at you, as I already said. But never mind; let’s imagine you skipping the sittings and making it through the agitations of the day somehow. It would not be so surprising if you were to discover, by the evening, just the slightest stirring of a little voice whispering in your ear that perhaps doing a bit of sitting would be helpful—not because of any obligation to the practice (which you’ve just repudiated) but because you can, so to speak. Just a teensy-weensy pausing in the stream of events, nothing to register on the scales. You’re done with that, after all. But a few moments of closing your eyes and watching events unfold with dispassion and detachment can’t possibly do much harm to a resolution so steadfast…

     So you sit down and, delicious irony of it all, your mind quickly settles as it normally does not and you have one of those revelatory fairy-tale sittings that work, incontrovertibly, as advertised in the picture books. Hah, the mat got you back, and something bit you in the butt again! There really is no self in a single moment of experience, you hear yourself thinking, not deliberately but as a matter of meditative course, so to speak. The more you focus on the moment, the more the self dissolves, and your misery along with it. The sense of self resides, it seems, largely in the connections we draw between such moments, mostly in the past, but also in the projected future. Self is our story about those interweaving threads and their meanings; that’s also why “identity” depends so much on memory. “Letting go” is dropping the connections, the focus on how our current experiences relate to others—including all judgments I may make of a moment, such as whether I am enjoying it or not. Comparison equals misery.

     Hence complete concentration on the impermanent sensations of the moment, to the exclusion of all else, if indeed possible, may be the practical, quite ordinary meaning of no-self and the gateway to the cessation of suffering, just as the orthodox telling has it. Meanwhile, as long as you want self and thinking to go away, on the other hand, it cannot happen; because if it were to occur, even for a moment, you would be thinking about it and thereby end the moment of no-thought. All wanting and liking and preferring is such thinking and making connections; so unless you learn to let go of that, if only on the mat, self can never disappear nor suffering cease. A failure of acceptance, in other words. All this streams through your mind somehow, without any direction on your part—who knows with what validity.

     You get up from your mat feeling lighter; you sleep on it. In the morning there is no question of doing the prescription dose of a full hour, but you don’t feel you need to force anything today. So you do half an hour. The worst of the storm seems to have passed, you sigh with palpable relief. And thus you find yourself back on the Path, if you were ever able to leave it even for a wayward step…

     (This one goes to V, with love.)

*Translated from the German Kösel Verlag/Penguin edition, 2009, p. 117 (compare p. 77 in the Beacon Press edition, 2006).

PS (7 Feb.): I would be embarrassed and sorely tempted to delete my above comments if anyone took them to mean that I thought I had any special insight into no-self. I am not Eckhart Tolle redux; I am a low-key Beggar’s Buddhist and I know “stream-entry” or “Nibbanic dipping” only from my books. What I intended was merely to share how, on a day when I was in the throes of a grim roll-up-the-mat funk, I got reminded that the sense of self really does recede in meditation, that it can even dissolve altogether for a bit, and that when it does so, the suffering lifts in tandem. The trumpet did not sound; no epiphanies or beatific visions were revealed to me; no fireworks or choirs of angels announced my arrival at any stage of putative awakening, enlightenment, or sainthood. All I received (and it was nothing to scoff at) was a plain but deeply satisfying reassurance that the practice really does help with lifting our burdens. Even when one is barely able to find one’s way, unsure whether one is still on the Path or not, it is still there under one’s feet, holding things up and giving direction to one’s steps. The connection can be made vividly visible again, as it was for me that day, at the most unlikely and unexpected moments. Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know, says the Tao. That sounds a bit excessive to me; I am quite ready to believe that that some who speak really do know; but not me. (Tolle, for one: he may be an oddball, but a fraud he is not.) For my part, am just recalling what went through my head that day, because the way it all went seems so characteristically ironic to me, and so peculiarly true to the Path, which is always good for a surprising turn, and never quite what you take it to be.