It's Not About Me
Some meditations feel more challenging than others. The body cannot just let go and relax into it. But it is not about me.
This morning was one of those times that though I sought over and over to let go into Presence, I kept feeling stuck in the discomfort of muscular tension, in the jaw, shoulders, arms, and back.
It was difficult simply to let go.
I was reminded again and again that it is not about me.
The Delusion That I am the Centre of the Universe
A while back, I wrote about the well known commencement speeach by David Foster Wallace, This Is Water. It was over 20 years ago now.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” …
Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language…
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
It is both utterly natural and absolutely bizarre that billions of people are walking around on this planet, each of us looking from the perspective of being the centre of the universe. As David said, there’s the world, in front or behind me, to my right or left, above or below me.
It seems that it is all about me.
My feeling, the tension in my body, my apparent inability to meditate ‘properly’ today.
Me, me, me.
Real Freedom
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing…
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
So much about David’s commencement speech is about the snares of the false self. The self-centredness. The seeking to worship this or that or the other. Default settings, programs that run automatically in the mind and the body. The false self developed to protect me from the rigours of an apparently hostile world but has become over decades more and more of a prison.
What a contrast is life before death! Letting go of the delusion that I am the centre of the universe, and becoming empathetic, more and more skilful at entering imaginatively into the felt experience of people around me, each one struggling with their personal version of being at the centre while feeling so very alone.
This is water.
Waking Up
It’s tempting to believe that I could suddenly one day “wake up” and remain in the constant awareness of Reality As It Is. No longer subject to the dream of being at the centre, I would begin each day and go through every amount of it fully conscious.
Of course, in trying to aspire toward being awake constantly or in trying to cling to an experience of feeling awake, I am letting myself in for a world of suffering.
Perhaps instead being quietly grateful for any moment I am a bit more aware of Reality. Wherein the Presence is known to be everywhere, and I am held, so I can let go.
Not asleep one moment and fully awake the next, but a brief and limited perception of more of Reality at certain times.
Could it be more frequent or more continuous in the future? Of course.
Will it?
Let’s see what happens.
This really made me stop and think. The way you stay with the body rather than trying to override it feels important. That tension doesn’t read as failure here, but as part of the very water you’re pointing to. Even the noticing of “me, me, me” is already a soft loosening of it.
I was especially struck by the gentleness of your ending. Not striving for constant wakefulness, not turning awareness into another standard to meet, but allowing brief moments of being held to be enough for now. That feels like real discipline to me. The kind that doesn’t harden the self, but gradually makes room for others.