Thinking is essential to wisdom, but you cannot think your way to wisdom. This may seem a conundrum, but is actually the explication of a truth we know in our deepest selves but cannot always bring to the surface of our understanding.
When we are born, we do not have wisdom. Though some infants seem more wise than others, the judgment and awareness essential to wisdom can only arise through experience. Infants are information-gathering machines and it would be grand to have the capacity for taking in the world around us we did at that age. But eventually we accumulate enough awareness of the world to form opinions and strategies for navigating that world as we move into it as thinking beings. We encounter loss, pain, disappointment and limitations and must find our way through these. Thought and the formation of lasting impressions are essential to this process; otherwise we would simply repeat the same mistakes over and over without learning how to avoid them.
Eventually, though (for most of us, at least), this thought formation begins to feel unsatisfying. We sense that there is something more to the world, that its patterns and synchronicity cohere into more than the sum of its parts. We seek for this deeper meaning in a variety of ways, many of them futile and some of them destructive. Many get stuck in this stage. Some of us find a spiritual discipline which answers many of the nagging questions of wisdom's path. But inevitably we come up against the frontier beyond which thinking cannot take us further. This can be very frustrating. From our earliest thoughts until this moment, thinking has carried us through, kept us safe, given us the information we needed to negotiate the world. But it cannot take us further.
One metaphor which speaks to me is that of light. As we mature, we turn on more and more lights in our mind. We begin in darkness, lacking wisdom. Slowly we turn on lights as we learn. But the brightest of lights will never cut through the wall of our final darkness unless it is focused into a laser-like beam of unforced, unmitigated, unfiltered concentration.
This is an uncomfortable point in our development. We have always been able to think our way through any problem and find a solution. The powerful tool that is the mind has been our constant companion and surest safeguard against the depredations of the world. But now we have reached a point where the mind is no longer useful, where yet more thought will not lead us any closer to the naked truth we seek.
For this we turn to the power of concentration. Anyone who has practiced meditation for any time at all has had the experience of insight spontaneously arising when the mind is stilled. No matter what the specifics of our practice may be, if we focus our minds on a neutral object rather than on an object of inquiry, insight has the opportunity to arise. Without concentration, such an arising cannot take place—there is no room in our heads or our hearts for this to occur. The vacuum created in the absence of thought allows insight to arise.
This is illogical. (It just occurred to me when I wrote those words that Spock of Star Trek fame was very logical and because of this was sometimes not very wise). Logic is the purview of the mind. At some point in our lives we believe that logic holds the answers to all questions (most of us have encountered ten-year-olds who know everything because they have made this discovery). Coming up against the illogical barrier of the end of the usefulness of thought is very disconcerting. Nonetheless, in order to move beyond the land of limited wisdom, we must drop thought altogether.
Concentration is almost absurdly easy to develop in the short term, which is one of the reasons it may not seem very important to the thinking mind. All we need do is find an object upon which we can entirely focus our attention. The formula is simple: the more thoroughly we focus that attention, the more insight and its fruit, wisdom, can arise. We choose a neutral object about which we do not hold a strong opinion, such as the breath. (We can only imagine what would come of choosing something like our mothers or our jobs as the object of our attention; we hold many, many opinions about these and would spin off into thought and be entirely lost to concentration before we even began). There is nothing special about choosing the breath; it is constantly available and entirely neutral and therefore extremely useful for this. Other than our opinion that it is a good idea to keep doing it, we tend to accept breathing as it is.
The difficulty, if it can be called such, is that concentration on our object of attention cannot be sustained without vigorous, constant effort to train the mind to do so. As our practice progresses, we can sustain concentration more often and for longer periods. As we do this, we find that insight arises of its own accord. We are then on the road to wisdom. Every time a thought intrudes into our meditation, we gently turn our attention back toward the object of concentration. We do this over and over and over. This is compared quite often and (I think) appropriately to the training of a puppy. We ask the mind to sit. To stay. To heel. Over and over we gently, gently condition the mind to focus attention until (in theory, at least) this becomes second nature and our preferred state of being. Thinking can then become a tool we use when it is helpful but put on the shelf when it ceases to be so. Even when not in formal meditation we can return to untrammeled concentration except in those moments and situations in which thought is useful. This is the goal of this part of our practice, to come to the realization that there is a greater consciousness beyond the thinking mind. We have access to this at any time and under any conditions. But when the mind takes up so much of the foreground of our awareness, it can seem as if these thoughts are all there is. Concentration is the key that opens the door to the larger awareness, to freedom from compulsive thinking and to wisdom.
Eventually, though (for most of us, at least), this thought formation begins to feel unsatisfying. We sense that there is something more to the world, that its patterns and synchronicity cohere into more than the sum of its parts. We seek for this deeper meaning in a variety of ways, many of them futile and some of them destructive. Many get stuck in this stage. Some of us find a spiritual discipline which answers many of the nagging questions of wisdom's path. But inevitably we come up against the frontier beyond which thinking cannot take us further. This can be very frustrating. From our earliest thoughts until this moment, thinking has carried us through, kept us safe, given us the information we needed to negotiate the world. But it cannot take us further.
This is an uncomfortable point in our development. We have always been able to think our way through any problem and find a solution. The powerful tool that is the mind has been our constant companion and surest safeguard against the depredations of the world. But now we have reached a point where the mind is no longer useful, where yet more thought will not lead us any closer to the naked truth we seek.
For this we turn to the power of concentration. Anyone who has practiced meditation for any time at all has had the experience of insight spontaneously arising when the mind is stilled. No matter what the specifics of our practice may be, if we focus our minds on a neutral object rather than on an object of inquiry, insight has the opportunity to arise. Without concentration, such an arising cannot take place—there is no room in our heads or our hearts for this to occur. The vacuum created in the absence of thought allows insight to arise.
Concentration is almost absurdly easy to develop in the short term, which is one of the reasons it may not seem very important to the thinking mind. All we need do is find an object upon which we can entirely focus our attention. The formula is simple: the more thoroughly we focus that attention, the more insight and its fruit, wisdom, can arise. We choose a neutral object about which we do not hold a strong opinion, such as the breath. (We can only imagine what would come of choosing something like our mothers or our jobs as the object of our attention; we hold many, many opinions about these and would spin off into thought and be entirely lost to concentration before we even began). There is nothing special about choosing the breath; it is constantly available and entirely neutral and therefore extremely useful for this. Other than our opinion that it is a good idea to keep doing it, we tend to accept breathing as it is.
The difficulty, if it can be called such, is that concentration on our object of attention cannot be sustained without vigorous, constant effort to train the mind to do so. As our practice progresses, we can sustain concentration more often and for longer periods. As we do this, we find that insight arises of its own accord. We are then on the road to wisdom. Every time a thought intrudes into our meditation, we gently turn our attention back toward the object of concentration. We do this over and over and over. This is compared quite often and (I think) appropriately to the training of a puppy. We ask the mind to sit. To stay. To heel. Over and over we gently, gently condition the mind to focus attention until (in theory, at least) this becomes second nature and our preferred state of being. Thinking can then become a tool we use when it is helpful but put on the shelf when it ceases to be so. Even when not in formal meditation we can return to untrammeled concentration except in those moments and situations in which thought is useful. This is the goal of this part of our practice, to come to the realization that there is a greater consciousness beyond the thinking mind. We have access to this at any time and under any conditions. But when the mind takes up so much of the foreground of our awareness, it can seem as if these thoughts are all there is. Concentration is the key that opens the door to the larger awareness, to freedom from compulsive thinking and to wisdom.
I love that first sentence!
ReplyDelete(I like the rest of the post, too.)