In this issue:
A teaching I heard when I began training is, “Practice activity in stillness, and stillness in activity.” Like some other teachings from that time, this phrase seemed enigmatic and perplexing. I “could not get my head around it.” But pure meditation did not demand that I “understand” this in order to sit and open my heart. And studying the Precepts and learning to apply them to the nuances of daily life did not ask that I “figure this out.” It was not the important thing, but the teaching stuck with me and became something like a traditional koan that asks for a heart understanding rather than a head understanding. I “put it on the back burner,” as Rev. Master Jiyu advised trainees, and just got on with training in meditation and the Precepts.
Then one meditation period found me wrestling with a particularly tenacious and resistant karmic memory. The more I tried to let go of it, the more insistently it “got in my face.” After going ‘round and ‘round with this pesky piece of karma, I suddenly had one of those welcome—if rare— “Aha!” moments of insight: this IS activity in stillness. This very process of willingly not grabbing after or pushing away whatever comes up in meditation, as we are taught in our very first meditation instruction, is “activity in stillness.” It is not something esoteric or far from us, but the very process of pure meditation itself. It was something I had been practicing all along without realizing it.
To borrow from Rev. Master Koshin’s article from last month, the result of the active letting go is to “allow our attention to draw to a still point underneath the flow of thoughts, perceptions, and feelings…”. As meditation continues, the active process quiets and the stillness expands until we are “gently drawn to a deeper spiritual Place where there is plenty of spiritual space. Indeed, when meditation goes very deep, there is a sense of infinite vastness.” Not every meditation period requires the same degree of activity to reach this Place, depending on what comes up, but some initial activity of letting go and opening up is needed.
The other side of the equation is bringing the stillness of pure meditation into the activities of daily life. By experiencing this Place of stillness and space in pure meditation, we prove its Reality for ourselves; having proven It, we know we can call upon It during the activities of daily life when circumstances conspire to agitate us and pull us off-center and break Precepts and cause ourselves and others suffering. Again, Rev. Master Koshin describes this very well: “In the midst of daily activity, we ‘leave spaces’ whenever we pause to re-center ourselves. In this pausing we are finding spaces within the temporal flow of our experience by relaxing into the present moment and (spiritually, if not physically) bowing in acceptance.” This pausing is introducing stillness in activity.
The ego wants to drive the car of life. It steers with emotions, and with what it deems “rationality” and “common sense”—too often not either one but rather projections of self-justification and opinionation. Emotions and reason have their place, but if we allow them to drive our life…the cliff of suffering is ever near.
The Place of spiritual peace in our center, our hara, is always there, always available to us in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. It calls to us, “I am here, my door is open.” It is up to us to pause, turn, and walk through it into the dimension of stillness, peace, and joy.