A Meditation on Meditation (revisited)

I wanted to revisit one of my favorite pieces from this blog, A Meditation On Meditation, which explains something of what Buddhism and meditation have meant to me for the past 21 years or so... (This piece was originally published on Monday, September 6, 2010.)

It's  vital, I think - especially as the father of two young children - to  have some moments in the day of silence and stillness, time in which you  can be totally "alone" and quiet and reflect on who fundamentally you  are, and ask the question: what is this world - this extraordinary and  beautiful though sometimes savage - cosmos that we live in?

For  me, that time is early morning, sometimes very early morning. I  especially love the dawn, although often I wake to write much earlier,  sometimes as early as 3am or 4am (I also mostly go to bed early and I  only ever wake naturally; I would not be so happy getting up at 3am if  it were forced on me by an alarm).

In summer especially  the dawn is a truly magical time, especially when it is warm enough (it  usually is in Los Angeles, although this summer has been unusually  cold) to sit outside by the large Buddha in our garden and meditate.

I  have been a Buddhist for about 20 years, ever since the death of my  first child, my son, Joe Buffalo, at the age of five from cancer. My GP  at the time in Brighton, England - who was a woman, a Buddhist, a  homeopath as well as a regular doctor, and also an acupuncturist - first  taught me Mindfulness of Breathing (anapanasati  in the ancient Pali language) and then introduced me to a local  Buddhist center, where I learned other techniques of meditation and  experienced, remarkably quickly, an astounding sense of peace and bliss -  or joy, if you prefer a simpler word.

Since then, and  since my move soon after from Brighton to Miami Beach and then, eight  years later, on to Los Angeles, I have continued to meditate at some  point most days of my life.

My meditation is very  relaxed, I do not believe that it should be something I approach as an  obligation or a burden. I practice it more for peace, for relaxation,  for good health and for calm and a sense of oneness with everyone and  everything - plus a reminder, each day, of how tiny I am in the scheme  of things and how incredibly beautiful is the world that surrounds us.

This  piece is not intended to try to convert anybody to Buddhism but merely  an acknowledgment of the incredibly vital role it plays it my life.

Each  morning, as I drift in and out of the "focus" of my meditation - a  single point of thought or non-thought, an escape from the constant  "chatter" of the brain even with itself - I find myself thinking not  only of how much I love my family now, my wife and children, but how  close my first son, my sister, and both my parents - all whom have died -  still feel to me.

If I am lucky enough to sit outside,  I also experience the quiet song of the crickets, the smell of the  earth from the sprinklers, the wonderful silence of our neighborhood -  and also I am joined in my stillness by our two rabbits and four  chickens, who have the run of the garden and who approach me often while  I am still, and sometimes sit in my lap.

I have various favorite verses from the Dhammapada (the Buddha's Teachings) and the Bhagavad Gita that I know by heart and reflect on, and little personal mantras that I have created for myself over the years.

I also find myself, pretty much every single day, reciting in my mind one of two passages in particular from T S Eliot's Four Quartets,  a book of spiritual and metaphysical beauty that I would easily rate  alongside the Dhammapada and Gita. Both of these betray not simply  exceptional writing but also extraordinary wisdom, and - as with the  passage that follows - I find something different to consider every day  that I recall them:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor
fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance
is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement
from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still
point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.*

(Even  the punctuation of these lines is exceptional and seems to alter their  meaning each time I read them, which I do occasionally to refresh my  memory.)

Eliot's verses, and my own musings, tend to  make me reflect on our planet's place in the Solar System and the wider  cosmos, and - strange though it may seem in terms of how ancient  meditation is - I sometimes look at the Planets  app on my iPhone, since it shows the position of all the planets in the  sky in real time - and also offers a quite mesmerizing rotating view of  our world (and any of the other planets and the Moon), in darkness and  in light, so that you can see where dawn is breaking and where night is  beginning. I find that looking at that each day reminds me of how  beautiful our world is, and that it is one, and we are all one - an  equal part of it, whether in Africa, Europe, Asia, the US, or any of the  tiny islands that dot our magnificent oceans.

As  well as outside, I have meditated, too, in darkness - sometimes in the  darkness of the bedroom where our young children were sleeping with  their mother.

As I listened to the different pace of  their breathing, enjoying identifying each, I realized how much I love  being called Baba (the Chinese form of Daddy; my wife is  Chinese-American), and how that means more to me than my own "given"  name.

I realized that who I am to my children (who are  six years old and 20 months) - which is hopefully a warm and loving  father rather than an assimilation of my life's activities and missteps,  my "achievements" and friendships - means more to me than anything, and  that in fact we define ourselves far too much through our "names."

Names  are useful, they even have a power of their own (anyone who has spent  time naming a child will know how difficult it is to find a name that  you pray your child will enjoy living with), but they are not "us."

"We" are "us" - by which I mean that we are indefinable. We are, to use T S Eliot's perfect phrase, "Neither flesh nor fleshless" - which is just one of the reasons I find that passage from the Quartets so remarkable to think about each day.

I  will end this meditation on meditation with another brief passage from  Eliot; perhaps my most favorite of all. I recite this to myself every  day and I find it at once strangely comforting and thrilling - and  always with a different meaning. I love the ocean, it is in my blood (my  father grew up in a tiny Scottish fishing village), so the line  beginning, "Out at sea," has particular significance and beauty for me.

"Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning."*

I  cannot think of a better way to begin each day than with the profoundly  stirring and mysterious - and inspiring - ten words that conclude that  verse. How better to think of each day than as, "my beginning"? And we are all everywhere and nowhere.

In fact, in closing, to quote another extraordinary line, this time from John Lennon's beautiful song, Instant Karma:

"Why are you there
When you're everywhere?"

Namaste - peace - love,
Alexander

*T S Eliot's remarkable Four Quartets is available from Amazon and hopefully every bookseller on the planet.