Looking

An Angel Whispered

An angel whispered: you find the truth by looking — not by looking for

The moment you decide what you are looking for you have stopped looking. You are now looking-for.

The difference between looking and looking-for is gargantuan.

When she was little, my oldest daughter used to roam the nearby forest looking for fairies. She could never catch sight of them, not even a glimpse. She complained to her granny about this who, wisely, told her that fairies knew if you were looking for them and would refuse to show. They will only show themselves (now and then, and very much at their choosing) if you were simply looking, she said.

But how do you look for fairies if you’re not looking for fairies? my daughter wanted to know. Well, said Granny, you keep your eyes open.

So the next time she went into the forest my daughter did her best to not look for fairies but to just look, to just keep her eyes open, and lo and behold, she swears, she saw one, clear as day, beautiful as anything.

I believed her then and I believe her still.

It is a common and very often repeated view that the nature of Nirvana lies well beyond the kin of men. You can only know that level of bliss (or non-bliss, or whatever you might find) by experiencing it, not by postulating or reasoning about it. Not by imagining it.

And the ladder of Language reaches nowhere near that high.

Shunryu Suzuki echoes this sentiment when he talks about Zazen:

“Zazen practice is the practice in which we resume our pure way of life, beyond any gaining idea, beyond fame and profit. By practice we just keep our original nature as it is. There is no need to intellectualize about what our pure original nature is because it is beyond our intellectual understanding. And there is no need to appreciate it because it is beyond our appreciation. So just to sit without any idea of gain, and with the purest intention, to remain as quiet as our original nature — this is our practice.”

And that advice, in turn, is echoed by every trustworthy meditation teacher I have come across — yes, there are non-trustworthy specimens about, in it for the quick and ill-gotten buck, but they soon expose their true colors, fear not.

Meditation is a “looking”, pure and simple. Not for something, just looking. If you do look for something while sitting on your cushion you are not meditating, you are thinking, hoping, reflecting, musing and, just like the fairies, the bliss that is your true nature refuses to show.

And how hard is it not to not look for something, to not have a goal in mind, a specific bliss, something intellectually tangible as it were. And darn if your true bliss doesn’t pick up on this and, fairylike, stays out of sight.

Preconception has no place in meditation, just like prejudice has no place in relationships among people. A prejudice is a made-up mind, a screening filter that discards all that doesn’t meet one’s firmly-clung-to, and often self-aggrandizing view.

A preconception about what you might experience in deep Samadhi will never let you experience anything like it until you drop the expectation, your meditative preconception (prejudice, as it were).

It may take years to let go of preconceptions. Add a few more years to shed other kinds of interference. Meditation is not a quick fix. Some say it will take lifetimes to finally arrive, and that those who do arrive have been on the path for previous lifetimes.

I am not sure how long the path is — I believe it is a very individual and personal measure, but I admit that it has taken me well over a decade of daily meditation (morning and evening) to fully shed my (yes, deeply rooted) preconceptions.

These days the fairies seem to enjoy themselves, dancing.

© Wolfstuff

P.S. If you like what you’ve read here and would like to contribute to the creative motion, as it were, you can do so via PayPal: here.