I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen sit on Thursday, February 1, 2024.

A close friend of mine who began practicing a secularized form of mindfulness meditation a couple of years told me last week that he’s become more curious about what he’s been doing.  He has settled into the practice he took up, but that practice is unrelated to any tradition, any historical or social context, that situates it and offers a broader perspective and supportive scaffolding.  He has questions about what he’s doing and experiencing that his meditation coach, who mainly works with companies and businesspeople, doesn’t seem to be able to answer.  He’s been reading some Dharma books—mostly written by the Americans who popularized Theravadin approaches to meditation, like Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg.  I gather he appreciates what he’s finding there, yet he is eager for more, and not just what’s available through reading.  He has signed up for a couple of meditation retreats and is looking forward to them excitedly, if also with a bit of trepidation.

I had recommended a Zen book to this friend about a year ago and sent him a link to my blog, where I post the texts of many of these talks. He thanked me for these resources last week—and said, with a wry smile, that he didn’t understand any of it. I thanked him for the feedback.

This friend is a very smart, deep-thinking person.  I know a Zen teacher who seems to take pride in the fact that his talks have become more and more obscure and elliptical over time.  I suppose there’s a case to be made for being obscure and elliptical, at least as one tool in a Zen teacher’s toolkit.  This Zen teacher wouldn’t be the first to try to describe the indescribable this way.  But that’s not what I’m trying to do most of the time.

Tonight, I’d like to offer one take on what’s going on in meditation.  I hope this talk will seem more approachable, and perhaps useful, to my friend, and that there’s something in it for us, too. 

Let me start by offering a metaphor for our experience of self as we take up meditation. It’s an image of two containers.  I recently ordered a box of Mason jars to make Japanese-style pickled vegetables, so let’s imagine a jar inside a box.  I’m the jar and the universe we inhabit is the box.

There’s activity inside the jar of self that is me; there’s other activity inside the box that is the universe; and these spheres of activity, inside and outside me, often seem to be related.  If something “good” presents itself in the box, in my corner of the universe, like tasty food or a loved one, a “good” feeling arises in the jar of self.  Likewise, if thought of or desire for something I perceive as good arises in the jar, I might take this as a queue to act in relation to something else in the box.  Perhaps I start thinking about my wife, so I text her to say I’m thinking of her or to suggest go out to dinner over the weekend.  We also can imagine examples of activity “inside” and “outside” the jar of self that have a negative valence.

But this initial image is too simple, static, predictable, and mechanistic.  We need to complicate it a bit.  These containers don’t always feel stable.  The jar of self is moving inside a box that is moving, and things are moving inside each of them.  Our own thoughts and feelings about things shift.  Loved ones aren’t always available and don’t always respond as we wish.  And so we may feel disoriented much of the time; we’re constantly called upon to reorient.

Both we and the world around us are changing constantly, and some part of us wants what’s inside and outside oneself to stay in a fixed state that feels safe, secure, and satisfying.  This part of us responds to the tumult and its desire for stability by acting in ways intended to manage what’s going on inside and outside the jar of self.  Sometimes we can manage things to a point of reasonable satisfaction for a while, but eventually something arises in the current of experience that challenges our capacity to cope.  Something arises inside the jar or inside the box that exceeds the present boundaries of our comfort zone.  Life shows us that our power to control it, to make it conform to our ideals and other wishes, is limited.  Experience is dynamic, partially unpredictable, and not contained or containable.

Meditation is one way we can respond to this situation; to the seeming tumult and our usual ways of responding to the tumult.  Like other potential responses, meditation is an activity.  Even though it looks passive, it’s another form of action.  It’s a period when we choose to sit and simply attend to whatever is going on inside the seeming jar of self and inside this seeming box in which we jars find ourselves.

By the time many of us come to meditation in late adolescence or adulthood, we may have noticed that some of our default responses to the tumult can be rather reactive, even compulsive.  We often respond to activity inside and outside in predictable ways that may be more a product of evolutionary and/or early life conditioning.  Much of the time we act very unlike we’re acting as we meditate.  We act, well, even more actively, in ways we think will stabilize or better our experience, keep us safe and happy. 

But our actions don’t reliably produce desired results; when they don’t, we tend to generate more activity—whether visible to others or just more and more rumination within the jar of self—that never fully or permanently delivers the results we think will satisfy us.  The logic of our thought and actions so often is about trying to contain and control experience, as if we really were jars inside a box.  We want to bottle up and preserve what’s pleasing and to quarantine and cut off what’s not pleasing. 

We can think of all this in terms of Buddhism’s three poisons.  Greed is compulsive grasping for thoughts and feelings inside us and configurations of beings and things in the broader universe that we experience as pleasant.  Hatred is compulsive avoidance or pushing away of thoughts, feelings, beings, and things we experience as unpleasant.  Delusion is about our false thought streams, our false narratives—and all narratives, even our presently most comprehensive narratives, are at least partially false.  They’re incomplete, or they will be soon, as the world continues to turn.  We tend to invest our narratives—even our best ones, even the one I’m offering now—with more explanatory power than they deserve.  We’re really trying to fix ourselves, our identities, as we do.

In meditation, stuff arises: mild pain in a foot, the pleasant smell of a cake baking, my narratives about this or that, boredom.  We’d normally act differently to these stimuli, but, in meditation, we choose just to sit and attend.  We choose that activity instead.  We choose just to abide.  We learn we can abide; that we can cope.  We adopt a stable orientation in this realm of shifting experience. 

As confidence in our capacity to do that consistently grows, interesting things begin to happen.  Our comfort zone during time off the cushion also begins to expand.  Our need to contain and control declines.  We might feel relatively more calm some of the time.  We may become less reactive; more truly agentic.

In meditation, we’re separating from our habitual ways of relating to activity inside us—what we contain, so to speak—and outside us, within the larger container that contains us.  Paradoxically, in this realm as others, we must separate to connect—genuinely connect with our own experience and with others.  As poets and astronomers know, it’s so much easier to connect with the moon and stars than with ourselves and our loved ones, because of their seeming vast distance from us.  Telescopes and poems about stars are efforts to draw them closer.

In mediation, we discover that, for 10 or 15 or 25 minutes at a time, we can endure that discomfort we thought we couldn’t endure; we can resist that temptation we thought we couldn’t resist; we can cope with boredom.  In fact, we start to notice, just sitting here, just being here without trying to distract ourselves, that doing that isn’t boring.

As our experience begins to change, our perspective also may begin to change.  My perspective on myself, on all that’s arising inside and outside me, on life writ large may begin to change.  In one of his books about meditation that I read long ago, Thich Nhat Hahn says something like, “Once we are capable of stopping, then we begin to see.” 

The sense of being a container inside a container, of being and needing to constrain, may begin to dissolve.  We may begin to identify (if that’s the right word) with flow of activity itself.  We may begin to discover ourselves with all beings and things as one thing.  We need a new metaphor at this point.  Maybe we become more like the relatively stable, but still evolving, still slowly shifting, banks and bed of an old river.  But we’re also the water moving through it.  You may know that many rivers are deceptive looking.  They’re not like a bathtub or a pipe.  What we call a river is just the water visible on the surface.  There’s far more moving water in the ground, surrounding, mixing with, and constantly reforming the riverbed.  We become permeable like this through our practice; our boundaries become clearer and more stable feeling in some sense, and yet simultaneously fuzzier and permeable.  The boundary between inner and outer blurs.  The larger container seems boundless.  Our personal experience feels more spacious.  Less confining.

There’s much more we could say about what’s going on in meditation, and how our other practices, like chanting, bowing, reading and reflection, and working with koans and the precepts, complement it.  I also should note that practices outside the Zen tradition, including various forms of therapy and somatic practices, also can contribute to the transformation of our experience and perspective I’ve been describing.  In fact, there’s risk in meditation that we’ll get too good at distancing ourselves from what’s arising; that we’ll use meditation to bypass features of our experience, past and present, that we would be wise to examine more closely through some practice that’s better suited for that.

Anyway, there’s much more we could say about what’s going on in meditation, but let’s leave it here for now. I’m not sure I’ve achieved my goal of making what’s going on more understandable. If not, I hope your reactions and insights will help clarify things for all of us.