Month: January 2018

My experience with meditation is relatively brief.     I’ve been sitting down and meditating for only about two and a half years.    This is all relatively new to me, even though my introduction to meditation goes back many, many years.   The clear transformation, however, has only happened during my recent experience of actually sitting down and meditating.

It is only recently that I have learned to anchor my meditation in focused body-awareness.     My gateway into meditation is through my intimate awareness of my body.   Like others who meditate, I often rely on my breath to make me aware of my physical person.   I observe my body, I feel my chest or whole body, I settle into that awareness.    My mind is given nothing else to do but pay attention to  my body and what it feels.

I have learned what this feels like only because I have done it many, many times. My attention finds its way home, just as I can find my way through my house with no lights on.    I have cultivated the habit of being attentive and totally immersed in the awareness of my body.

That’s really all there is to it.    As my mind wants to wander off, I notice that it is wandering.    There are some times that I will choose to follow the lead of my mind and perhaps reflect on some observation my mind might make.     Mostly, I watch my thoughts pass by, much as I might watch a passing cloud.     I am meditating.

Some people like to use guided meditation as a guide in their meditation exercise.   It gives them something to be attentive to.   For me, guided meditation runs away with my awareness.   I like to remain aware of  the intense presence of my body.

For me, meditation is an exercise.   It is practice in being attentive.    I am training and strengthening my mind very much as I train and strengthen my back and leg muscles by the exercises I do at the gym.   I carry the experience of that meditation training with me through the day, and consciously call upon it to be intentionally mindful of what I am doing

I rely on my gym exercise to help me to go up and down my stairs.   I rely on my meditation practice to help me be aware I am going up and down the stairs.

It was more than entertainment.  A movie I just saw made me think, and it even deepened my awareness.   It reminded me how systems of religious belief consistently become intertwined with secular social structure and the exercise of power.   I see this at all levels, from a family to a mega-state.   The belief and control structures become so entangled with each other  that it becomes difficult to distinguish one from the other.

I instantly saw echoes of my younger self in the movie “Silence”, a story of two young Jesuit missionaries in  17th century Japan.  The Japanese are torn between a traditional social structure and the recent infusion of christianity.    The intense personal belief of the missionary priests is challenged by the pragmatism of saving peasants from suffering at the expense of the faith of the priests.

The one priest is confronted by silence, a lack of divine inspiration on how to solve his conflict.   His unyielding attachment to his personal identify as a believer, to the end,  keeps him from being of substantive use to the people he is there to help.

He is ultimately unable to be of benefit to the Japanese  because he remains such an outsider  both in belief and nationality.  The struggle is never resolved.

I was reminded of how I saw that my own personal belief began to be an obstacle to my being a genuine benefit to people I intended to serve.   Had I been loyal to the beliefs of my community of Catholic monks, I might have been able to give believing people what they wanted but not what I saw they needed.

I deliberately and pragmatically learned how to bend the rules of my believing community so that I could be of genuine service.   In time I learned that I had to let go of loyalty to the institution that made the rules and dictated my faith.    I separated myself from the structure of belief, and in time embraced my own personal belief.

Since then, I have realized that I am better living a life without belief altogether.    I have decided to attach myself only to what I can experience and understand.   In the movie, I was surprised that the missionary priest never made that move, but instead chose to remain stubbornly attached to his silent divinity.    All the supporting elements were present, but he could not let go of his own restricted identity as a believer.

The identities of Church and State were mingled, just in real life.  I think his identity as a believer was intertwined with his identity as Portuguese.    And so it was for the Japanese.  He remained a Portuguese believer in a country of Japanese believers.

His system of belief supported a certain social structure, and that belief could not yield to a foreign social structure.    Neither could his belief be tolerated by a country whose social structure relied on beliefs indigenous to Japan.

Commitment to my way of belief was once tied intimately to my commitment to a certain social structure and social order.    My commitment to belief was actually synonymous  with my commitment to a religious institution.  In the movie, I well understood the Japanese concern for maintaining a belief  that supported social order, even while I did not like their methods of imposing control.

That should not be at all surprising because belief systems, religions, are consistently part of the affairs of state.   Christianity prevailed because it became the state religion and strengthened the power of the state.    Muslims are often identified not by religious beliefs as their name would suggest, but with their political entanglements.

I often hear it asked whether someone a Jew because of their belief, their heritage or their nationality.    From the beginning, Christianity has been the State religion of the United States, in spite of a bold and brave attempt by many to support and be inclusive of people who have other beliefs.   While hardly practiced, the intent to be inclusive is often spoken.

The movie reminded me what a relief it is for me to be separate from the social framework of a Church.  I am able to acknowledge that I no longer want to believe in a certain way or believe at all.   I am free of that strangling structure.   The movie left me disappointed that  neither the main character nor the director, Martin Scorsese, seemed to exhibit that same break.

It was funny how I woke up this morning, and my first thought was “This is New Year’s Day, the first day of a new year.”   As far as the calendar goes, that makes sense.    In the bigger view, it misses the mark.

Our culture thinks this is a new year.    It was a conscious decision made many years ago so that people could get along with one another.  It makes for coordination, especially for commerce between cultures, but it is not a true reflection of what is going on.   For many cultures, it is just another day on the calendar, nothing new or special.    We base our calendar on the fiction that the earth has returned to the same spot relative to the sun as it was 365 days ago.   It is a nice idea, but it isn’t correct.

We measure our year by counting 365 days, but it actually takes the earth closer to 365 1/4 days to go around the sun.     So we have to insert an extra day every four years and call it a leap year.    If last year, 2017, had been one of those leap years with an extra day, today would be December 31 and tomorrow would be the beginning of a new year.  But it isn’t.

Some cultures choose to ignore the 365 day routine and determine the length of a year by cycles of the moon.     Their “year” needs major adjustments because the number of lunar cycles don’t correspond to the length of times it takes the earth to circle the sun.   Our culture adjusts the discrepancy by a day, they adjust by a month.

Even the way we measure days is not a true indication of what is happening. Whoever figured out how many seconds should be in a day didn’t get it exactly right, and adjustments have to be made from time to time.    Even that is not totally predictable.    It keeps changing.  Even with our modern technology, we just don’t know how to take into account all the factors that determine how much time passes in a day.

It is even something of a fiction to think of the earth returning to the same spot around the sun once a year.    That spot is constantly changing, we never occupy the same spot in space.   The path of the earth around the sun is in a constant wobble, some of which we can measure and predict.    We can take into account that there are at least three big, gross variables in that wobble.     There are many other  more subtle variables caused by the gravity effect of other planets, other solar systems and other galaxies.  There is the added effect caused by the earth slowing down as it makes its path around the sun and as it rotates.

It is quite a bold stroke of imagination and consensus  to determine that this is the beginning of some kind of new year.     Things around us, including the earth, are constantly changing.     There simply may be no accurate way to determine the passage of time astronomically.    Our best shot is like playing Pooh Sticks, throwing sticks into a moving stream and watching them float by.   So we do our best and live with a known fiction of exact measurement.

Even the revered Einstein didn’t get it right.    He opted for a static universe where there were no gross changes.   He chose to ignore what his mathematics told him, and instead went with the prevailing idea that the universe was static.    He fudged his math to make it come out consistent with his misconception.    Of course, he later regretted this error when the astronomer Hubble provided observations of a reality that was not at all static.

Our little planet is constantly changing what it is and where it is.    It is impossible to determine that it ever returns to the same spot.    All the reference points are constantly changing.    Even the world-wide GPS system needs constant adjusting, so we can determine where we are with some degree of accuracy.    We have decided on measuring sticks for time that are neither accurate or static.   Our days are not the same length, the time around sun is not measured in an even number of days.    We throw sticks into the spacetime flowing all around us and use those sticks to decide where we might be.

I actually like to observe that this is not really the beginning of a new year, except for people who need to know when to go to school, show up for work or keep a doctor appointment.    I like to think of it more as a new bend in a constantly turning, very unpredictable white water river.    It is another pulse in a long and uncharted surge of adrenaline.