Leeward Shore

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

I read an interesting article about language earlier this evening. It was called Beyond Language: Finding freedom through thoughts and words, by Zoketsu Norman Fischer. The closing paragraphs particularly resonated with me:

Going beyond language through language is something we can practice and develop through meditation, study, and awareness in daily life. In meditation we can learn to pay attention not only to sensation but also to emotion and thinking. Learning to let thinking come and go, we can eventually understand a thought as a thought and a word as a word, and with this understanding we can find a measure of freedom from thoughts and words. We can begin to appreciate Buddhist thought not as a new set of concepts that we are to adhere to, but as a kind of mental yoga, a counterweight to the concepts we already unconsciously hold and that hold us, locking us into a small, temporary, atomized self.

When in daily living we learn to return again and again to where we are in body, emotion, and mind, we are learning to hold our language and views lightly, to see that they are ever-evolving currents of being, that they are not only ours but belong to everyone else as well. When we cultivate the practice of paying close attention to the way we talk to ourselves, we won’t fool ourselves too much. Another old Zen master used to call out to himself, “Don’t be fooled by anything.” And he would answer, “I won’t be!”

but here's where I am in my current, chosen approach to meditation. As I practice concentration through following the breath, I am perhaps turning to the body, but not the emotions or the mind. I know this is the next step, but concentration seems to be the place to work right now. It is interesting to note that my breath-following has become almost wordless. I noticed this tonight as I sat. the following is more like a visualization of the movement, a sort of recognition of the stations that the breath passes, but without really naming the stations.



I'm going to look at this more closely when I sit tomorrow.