Day 231: Why meditate?

It's the obvious question. If meditation is so difficult and frustrating and boring and slow, why do it? Why spend ten minutes every day of your life sitting still with no phone and no TV and no music, no entertainment, no stimuli, simply counting your breath over and over again?

The answer: because we have lost control of our brains. Our thoughts are running amok. We have evolved to be so good at thinking that we do not know how to let go of thinking, we do not know how to be grounded and present, rather than lost in thought, and this is lessening the value of our lives.

You've heard the aphorism that to the man with a hammer everything begins to look like a nail? Well we are like that with thought, with the narrow thinking of the intellect, the voice in our heads, which is but a minuscule portion of the far more diffuse and disparate and complex system that is the mind. We bring our intellect to bear on the world to such an extent that soon we forget that not everything in the world needs to be dealt with intellectually.

Rather than a hammer, picture a man with a sword. This is the intellect. Its great strength is that it cuts. It separates the world into component pieces - cuts Northern from Southern Hemisphere, cuts Europe from Asia, and Britain from Europe, us from them, cuts the self from the environment, one from two, nouns from verbs, now from then, observer from observed.

We've needed this swordsman to survive, to fight our way out of the primordial swamps and on to success. He has won us many battles, many wars. We have promoted him from guard to lieutenant to captain to general, and his confidence, and arrogance, has grown. He has started ruling for us, in our stead, and we have let him, because he did such a good job of getting us here.

But he isn't a wise and benevolent king. His heart is that of a simple swordsman, and thus, whenever a problem arises, whatever the problem may be, his first thought is to reach for his blade...

The intellect is vital to us. We need it when handling our company's accounts. When rewriting complex laws. When studying economics. When attempting our maths homework.

But what about when taking in a sunset? Admiring a work of art? When walking alone through a forest in the pale morning light with the spring's first bluebells coming to bud? When lying naked in bed with a lover?

Of course we always require the intellect to some degree. The swordsman must always be at our sides. But how much use is it, how worthwhile, to be stood on a mountaintop staring out at the expanse of land stretched below, and to be able to only focus on your little swordsman as he jabbers about this and that and the other, what happened last Tuesday, why Linda didn't reply to your email, when the next season of so-and-so is coming out, why it is that you'll never be happy?

Meditation is the antidote to this. It is a technique for putting the swordsman back in his place.

By focusing on your breath, or the sounds coming to you, or a repeated mantra ("om mani padme hum") you are giving your swordsman a block of wood. He has to be alert, has to be chopping continuously, to be prepared for danger, but with meditation you are giving him a block of wood and saying, Here, chop this!

And he chops at the wood, chop, chop, chop, and he chops away from the wood, and at the ground, and the air, and pretty soon he's chopping everything in your awareness again. And you bring him back to the wood, No, chop this!

And he chops at the wood, and away from the wood, and at...

No, chop this!

And you keep bringing him back. And slowly you give him a distraction while you build the strength of all the rest of your awareness. While you concentrate on ruling, and appreciating, this existence that your swordsman has won for you.

Because everything that the intellect does is about keeping you alive. But there's a whole depth of mindfulness within you that isn't just trying to stay alive, but is the reason for living.

We're talking sunsets, bluebells, lovers, croissants. Saint-Saëns. Tarkovsky's Solyaris. Sundays by the fire with the dog.

These things don't need cutting apart, analysing, measuring, weighing. They need experiencing. You don't think about them. You exist with them.

Meditation is a way to deepen your ability to exist with the world.

You should try it.

......

Music: The Swan, from The Carnival of the Animals, by Camille Saint-Saëns.