On Enlightenment - Part I

Meditation. Panic. Raindrops. Nabokov. A four-part series, 12/3/2024 - 12/6/2024.

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For five years I meditated for thirty minutes every day, and I mean every day. Absolutely every day. By “absolutely every day” I mean, sure, maybe I would miss a couple of days a week.

In those days, I was never able to stop messing with how I meditated. I couldn’t settle on a plan of attack. You might think, “Well, that’s simple, Adam. I can help you. Just do the most basic thing. Count breaths.” (You use my name because you’ve heard this calms the anxious.)

So, I would count breaths from one to ten and start again at one. But then I would make it complicated. Do I count on the in breath? Or the out breath? Do I count the whole thing as two beats? Or both in and out in double-time?

When do I start the count? And when I lose my place and restart at zero, do I count the breath I’m currently in as one? Or is that a zero breath which stabilizes before we launch back in? Do I count the in as one and then try to think of nothing, just clear mind, no thought, on the out breath?

If I’m on six and I know I’m on six, but my mind has clearly wandered, do I pick up again at one or stay on the current integer and press on? I wonder if I should stop and write this last question down somewhere so that I don’t forget to ask someone that might know these things. Or should I trust that if the question is important, it will re-emerge meditation session after meditation session with karmic insistency?

Oh, and that’s the thing I forgot but just remembered: during the counting: should I also be aware of my breathing itself? Should I, for example, feel my breath through my nose or focus lower, more in the abdominal cavity, aware of it there because it is further from the “seat of my thinking.”

Could it be that thinking “I’m not drifting off right now” is yet one more drift-off? Or are they qualitatively different? Is every thought a drift-off with some only having the illusion of being present.

Hmm.

Is there any way to know this? I mean really know this. Because they feel different, I conclude, if conclude is even remotely the right word. And what about that special little moment down at the bottom there when you feel you don’t need to breathe and then everything kicks back into life. Do you need to wait for this whole respiratory ignition business to finish before starting the next number? Or is it part of the last number? I wonder when my quarterly taxes are due. I bet this is one of those months that the due date isn’t what you think. Crap.

One.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so busy wrangling my thoughts to a single point of concentration. Maybe I should just let my concentration go where it will. Let the mind run free and gradually settle on its own like a frightened animal that calms down when given some space, gently hemming it in without freaking it out.

Or maybe I should get a mantra. I’ve resisted the whole groovy mantra business, but maybe that’s what I need. Maybe I’m actually a mantra guy. Now that would be a surprise.

I bet the Internet has some Mantra.com site that can help me. Cause you know that it does somewhere. But I don’t think I could ever settle into somebody else’s word picked for me through a random mantra generator. An R.M.G.

A random mantra generator seems like a Dilbert thing. Probably some mantra.com faux search page out there right now is driving traffic. Fucking “driving traffic.” Assholes. Name harvester squirrels. I knew domain name harvesting was going to be big, but I ignored it because it was boring. I could have been soooo rich.

One.

“I will just listen to whatever is presented in my sensory space. I will allow it to simply be and then fade away as something else rises to the fore.”

I wonder if I should name the thing I’m listening to or gently acknowledge it before moving away. “You are my invasive thought. Thank you, you have been kind to me. Now we must part.”

I think the Vietnamese Buddhists do this, but the Japanese Buddhists say it is possibly the worst thing you could do. They wear different colored robes. Maybe they fell out over this very issue.

One.

I need to peek my eye open for a second to see how much of my half-hour is left, but the clock is just out of sight. I have to lean sideways onto my forearm to get a better angle towards it. My legs are semi lotused-up so I have to tip myself back into position with my right arm in progressive bursts of arm effort. I don’t want to disturb my legs because once I do it will be incredibly painful as the nerves come back to life. I’m like the guy peacefully freezing to death and beginning to dream of naked snow princesses, but then somebody goes and warms him up, and he’s in thaw-out agony, and the princesses have disappeared, and it was just starting to get interesting. God, I hope there’s sex in the afterlife.

One.

I think I should think of Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I am thinking of nothing if you don’t count the thought of nothing. Be on guard for any thought of nothing coming in and kill it when it arrives. I am a double-duty Samurai warrior with my big mental blade out.

“Next thought, I’m going to kill you. Stand back, children.”

Death to the next thought I repeat, swirling around in a paranoid, is-the-enemy-right-behind me thing that low budget martial artists do when preparing to be attacked in the dark warehouse of some overcast, non-union Canadian city. Then a big arcing slash of silver, thought-slicing blade destroys all thinking and buries itself two inches into the wooden floor.

One.

My back hurts. My right foot is completely numb. I have that phantom thing amputees have where I have an itch but when I scratch it, there’s no leg there. I wonder if I’m killing the nerves letting it go this dead. Melanie thinks so.

Remember the time I stood up and leaned on my deadened leg and fell over like a one-legged pirate in front of everybody at the Wednesday night meditation evening? That was embarrassing, and everybody tried to pretend they didn’t see it, which seemed like not acknowledging reality. That still irks me.

Even the visiting Zen Master in Training, or whatever one step below Zen Master is, pretended it didn’t happen. Wouldn’t truly enlightened people say something straightforward and simple like “are you okay?” or mysterious like “a pound of flax” instead of pretending they didn’t see me crash into the ficus tree?

One.

Brrrring goes the timer.

*

Five years of this.

It would be untrue to say it was always like this. There were mornings where you could hook up electrodes and probably get a minor theta something fluttering an inch behind my temples.

But then the very next day, the strategy I used to create the results of the previous day was useless. There’s no road here anymore, and yesterday there was a road here.

It is like I have to rediscover the road every time. The last road never goes anywhere. There’s no sense of progress. There’s no sense of getting anywhere. There’s a Zen saying that you never step in the same river twice, but I’ll never know that either, will I? Because every time I go to even try to step back in the river, they’ve moved the entire river.

There was a lovely, peaceful, flowing river here, and it’s gone.

*

A handful of times I felt my mental activity settle into something like a stretch of mental quiet. Of silence. But the moments were few and brief. Almost the second I notice I was having them, something anxious raced into the void to fill it up.

There must be a skydive surrender required to let go and free fall into emptiness. The la-dee-da-dee-da people who think everything is so wonderful and easy can do this, but I can’t. They sing beautifully and keep telling you there’s nothing to it: “everybody can sing!” as they spin around arms extended.

This is – I’m not kidding – a class of suffering. Dukha.

There’s something in me that doesn’t want to balance, that doesn’t want to float without noticing and recording and watching that I’m balancing or floating. It is like I’m crossing an invisible bridge over a chasm that the coming-of-age heroes cross in fantasy movies.

But when I stand at the ledge, I can’t bring myself to step into the shimmering void that ripples into permanence. Exactly where I have to take that single step of faith, an internal “I” looks out over the edge, hems and haws, and then says no, no, no can’t do it.

Just can’t do it.

One.

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I’m currently serializing a story about a washed-up baseball player and his Little League protégé. I’ve attracted a distressingly low readership right now, which is problematic, because, for one thing, this story is going to go on longer than a twenty-three inning game, and for the other it’s good, and I’m not going to argue about it, although even an argument about it would be welcome.

Huge spoiler:

It’s not a story about baseball at all. It’s a story about losing and love which is the best kind of story, and if you like other things I write, give it a try. No, a little more than a try.

As a rule, I recommend bailing on writing that doesn’t connect immediately. It’s my “Life is Short” reading rule, but life is short, and we can all use more stories about love and loss because – everybody, look up for a moment – they are the main event. Give it two paragraphs.

Chapter 1: "The Knuckleball Artist"