You may have heard before that meditation is about dropping your storyline. At a surface level, this seems reasonable enough. Let go of your past worries and hangups and just be, right?
But the deeper you go, the more you find there is to drop. For example, can you detect in yourself the deep certainty that the past concretely exists? That something really did happen? It seems preposterous to suggest otherwise, but note that it is not at all a given. Bertrand Russell:
But you just can't take that dead seriously, can you? It's one thing to understand this intellectually, and another to glimpse this strange and wondrous possibility. And so this is part of the story that you're as yet unwilling to loosen your death grip on: that the past really happened; I really have been alive before this very moment.
It can be glimpsed directly, immediately. You don't actually have to go through years of penance and austerity to see it. All that's required is your willingness. On the other hand, if you're like most of us, you won't be convinced to look until you have indeed spent many hours "earning" it.
Which is fine, of course, because all that time on the cushion can be enjoyable anyway.
But the deeper you go, the more you find there is to drop. For example, can you detect in yourself the deep certainty that the past concretely exists? That something really did happen? It seems preposterous to suggest otherwise, but note that it is not at all a given. Bertrand Russell:
There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that 'remembered' a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.If you really grok what he is saying, it should profoundly startle you. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into existence in this very moment. This may genuinely be the first moment you've ever existed.
But you just can't take that dead seriously, can you? It's one thing to understand this intellectually, and another to glimpse this strange and wondrous possibility. And so this is part of the story that you're as yet unwilling to loosen your death grip on: that the past really happened; I really have been alive before this very moment.
It can be glimpsed directly, immediately. You don't actually have to go through years of penance and austerity to see it. All that's required is your willingness. On the other hand, if you're like most of us, you won't be convinced to look until you have indeed spent many hours "earning" it.
Which is fine, of course, because all that time on the cushion can be enjoyable anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment