Is There Anybody Around

We can easily be carried away by the desire to perfect tools or means for practice.

It’s almost as if we’re focusing so much on the hammer that we’ve forgotten the piece of wood we’re working on. We focus on all the tools in the workshop, and we forget the piece of furniture we’re making. Not exactly the best analogy, perhaps a bit masculine for a nun, but sometimes I think of my mind as a workshop – it feels like that.

We have many tools in the practice and we become quite fascinated by them, but we forget about the material we are working with. We forget what it is that we are addressing and lose the subtlety of life as it is in this moment. We are so concentrated on external things, even the breath or focusing so much on getting our concentration right or wondering whether our mindfulness is strong or not – questioning, doubting – that we actually lose touch with the very material these tools are meant to help us see clearly.

Right now we may feel very empty, very peaceful, with nothing much happening. But in my experience, if I stay sitting long enough, out of this emptiness the world may emerge. Thoughts, feelings, stories can emerge out of nowhere and come and go. A lot of the time not much emerges, but even when there’s nothing much happening, there’s still an experience of something. So it’s not difficult to lose contact with what’s happening now, even when nothing much is happening.

Again, in meditation we are sometimes so focused on the tools that we squeeze ourselves into some kind of a mould which we assume we have to become or fit into. This mould may be pleasant for a little while. We may look like the model which pleases us, but it’s still not quite connected with reality, with the way things are right now. How many of us can find anybody right now, at this moment, who actually looks like what each of us is supposed to look like? Is there anybody around? Just get used to that experience – is there anybody around? Is there a meditator around? Is there somebody around? It’s interesting, eh?

This is a contrast with so much of what we create about ourselves. When we sit in meditation, we really get to see whether there is someone around. Is there something that I really can call me? Mine? Or what do I create? What is it that makes me believe there is a ‘me’ around? What is it that makes me feel something important is happening to me right now?

This reflection by Ajahn Sundara is from the book, Walking the World, (pdf) pp. 141-142.