If You’re Not Aware, What Are You?
What does it take to be aware? Does it take all of you? Does it take a lifetime of focus? If you’re aware of what happens one moment and unaware the next, what happens to you?
What we do with our lives, how we take it all in, and why we do things matters. It matters deeply. Just noticing our breathing–the feel of the air through our windpipes, the expansion and contraction of our diaphragms–is enough to make us feel utterly, undeniably, eternally alive. And when we are not focusing on these things that happen, how alive are we? Are we alive if our lungs work, our hearts beat, our cells exchange nutrients but our minds don’t follow what happens? In a sense we certainly are, but that’s a different kind of life. It’s not a life wholly in the flow of things.
If you’re not aware, you are the same as being aware…but there’s just less of you to know the difference the moment makes.
Meaning is Relational
If I were to ask you
which of the following would you prefer, 1 or 10
how would you answer the question? Could you really answer the question? Perhaps you could if you had some kind of preference for one of the numbers over the other. But for all intents and purposes, you really couldn’t give a meaningful answer. Why not? Because the real question doesn’t ask about the nouns 1 or 10 but the adjectives 1 and 10.
So now if I were to ask you
which do you prefer, 1 papercut or 10 papercuts?
you now can answer the question because you have context. Things in themselves have, by definition, no context, nothing to with them. But once a thing has a context, it has a relationship, and it’s the relationship that bridges your consciousness with the things, which is how meaning arises. Meaning, then, is a relationship between things, specifically things related within consciousness, which is itself a network of relationships.
So how does this abstract philosophical observation relate to meditation, to Zen? Well, mindfulness is about relationships: that things relate, how they relate, what their underlying relationship to other things unfolds. If in the process of meditating you increase your awareness of relationships, meaning grows out of that process. Life vivifies through that meaning. It helps us realize that the cliche query “What is the meaning of life?” has no meaning because it demands meaning in itself, which is devoid of any relation to anything else. Rather, the answerable question is “What are the meanings of what happens in life”.
Our interactivity with the world, through observation or action, is the relation out of which we seek and find meanings. Any practice which increases our awareness of things, increases our relationships, which increases the meanings potent in the stream of happenings we call life.
Zen is relational. Meaning is relational. Zen is Meaning.
Meditation Minder
Being asleep is a part of life. What we call meditation could be described as the process of being awake, or at least being aware of being either awake or asleep. For those of us who have practiced meditation one way or another, we all know that we drift away sometimes from our practice. Life happens and the things that happen often have a way of gravitating us away from our discipline. That’s ok. But a life unobserved, at least from time to time, is a life not fully awoken to. We need sleep and wakefulness.
So how can we enliven our discipline when faced with time-draining modernity? One simple solution I’ve come up with follows. When you happen to catch yourself not making time to open up your awareness of the things you do, order yourself a prescription, a doctor’s order as it were. Sometimes when we have an externally imposed ritual like “Take 2 pills 3 times a day with water” we tend to be more faithful about what we need to do. So order yourself a Z-pack (Zen Pack) from time to time.
When we’re finding it hard to bring forth awareness of the life around us, a little prescription can become a big deal. Sometimes we only need 5 minutes of sitting, worked in 2 or 3 times a day. Saying to yourself “I’ll enjoy a sitting meditation for 5 or 10 minutes before breakfast, lunch, and bedtime for the next 5 days” can be enough to get you back on track. You may find on day 6 that your sessions are more mindfully routine, a bit longer, a bit more focused, and you don’t feel as stressed about all the craziness in you life.
It can also be useful to mark your calendar with mindfulness reminders. Daily minders can be useful–a pop-up or email alert that interrupts you from your web surfing or work can give you the break your mind needs. Also, to break things up and keep your long-term discipline healthy, adding meditation holidays to your schedule can bring about some needed release from your slumber. Quarterly dates can be very effective. A day to more deeply reflect on things: ask yourself how’s your business going or how your perception of others could be more creative and compassionate. A day, or half of one, to re-read an old favorite or attend a community meeting on something you enjoy.
Remember: the best time to meditate is when you don’t have the time. Namaste!
Everything Is Marketing
Talk of marketing may not sound at all Zen; in fact it sounds like the definition of Anti-Zen, Eastern counterpart to the Anti-Christ. But everything is Zen and marketing is Zen. No matter how great an idea, it won’t help anybody if it isn’t marketed successfully. Marketing isn’t about deceptive sales practices to profit from the transfer of goods and services. It can be, but that’s just bad marketing. A market is where people meet, it’s a connection. And the connection is the fundamental unit of the universe, of life.
We are moving, every year, every month, every day, every moment, toward an increasingly business-run world. This process is creating increasing pressures on people’s lives and so there’s a feeling of needing something more than just survival. The idea is that we’re entering a sort of event-horizon which will pull us into strings of linguine, into a vacuum of ever-accelerating gravity, and in order to thrive one has to already be ahead of the curve. It’s easy, then, to conclude that business, and the marketing that’s involved with every step, is an evil, a wrong way.
But Zen is all about business. Specifically, it’s about the business of mindfulness. Mindful sitting. Mindful eating. Mindful breathing. Mindful stepping. Every step is a connection. What we call mindfulness is really a connection with another stream of interconnections. The mind is a market and anytime it does what it does best it’s marketing. It’s a natural-born marketer. Not to market is not to live.
So as we ramp up the curve in the early part of the twenty-first century, we have an incredible opportunity to sync what our minds do effortlessly (market) with the direction that the world seems to be taking (marketing). The changes will be painful, will be demanding, will be challenging, will be dangerous. In other words they will be life. It’s the best opportunity for the practice of Zen in a long time.
If you want to ride a dragon, you’ll just have to climb up its long tail. And it’s a long tail we are facing. Climbing up will take discipline, collaboration, competition, mindfulness, inter-connection, networking. All the things available in our increasingly technology-prone life. The best tool we have is the same tool that is behind all of natural selection: marketing.
Without marketing there would be no me, no you, no us, no they. The peacock feather is brilliant copy for the species, and the species is the vital market for the next generation. Without that market, life has nowhere to flow. Everything is marketing. Practice Zen the natural way. Practice marketing. You’ll wake up to a better world.
Breathe Reprise
Breathing in the air, focusing on the breathing, meditation frees.
There Is No Way Out Of The Mind
Try to get out of your mind. You can’t. It’s like trying to eat your own mouth.
If you sit long enough with a focus on your breathing, you will notice that your mind wanders around with inconstant velocity, sometimes slow, sometimes fast. You can either keep coming back to your focusing breath or follow the thoughts that move through your mind. Either way, your mind shifts into another mind, only being one kind of mind at any moment. No matter what thoughts or feelings you have you always are in the mind, there is no stopping it. Everything we do comes out of the mind and always comes back into it.
Your life is a sort of hologram of your mind. Wherever the radiance of your mind flows the hologram stretches. What you call you is the encircling hologram that your mind imputes through the universe. The universe grows you and you grow the universe and there is no way out of the mind that you grow.
Monkey Mind
The brain is a meta tag,
a finger pointing
to the blogging of the mind.
Nothing Zen
Zen cannot be grasped, it cannot be taught, it cannot be achieved. Zen is impossible.
Zen is the wordless language of being here now. It does not strive to become. It is. Zen is the bird flying over the face of the moon-glazed lake. The Zen of Tao is also the Tao of Zen. The branch grows out of the trunk that grows out of the ground that grows out of fallen leaves. What turns is turned around.
Achieve the impossible. Practice Zen.
Breathe, Look, Listen
Sitting lotuses,
rain patters soft leaf mush.
It’s time to open.
