God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body
like the hands of my Beloved.
Mary Oliver
I’m waiting for a beginning. And in doing so, I’m reminded yet again what a challenging practice this is. As I sit here quietly, tuning into the natural movement of my breath, I begin to notice tension in my shoulders and jaw and a pressuring, thrusting-forward sensation in my chest. These sensations are some of the bodily expressions of impatience. I want to get this thing going. Accomplish something. Have a clear, or at least a clearer sense of how this piece might take shape.
I notice emptiness in my belly. I move towards it, gently, softly, resting my awareness in this area. There’s an urge to do something—qi gong, yoga; put this writing project aside till tomorrow when maybe something clearer will have come. Tomorrow for sure. I feel the urge in my chest intensifying. A little painful, this familiar, forward-thrusting propulsion. Do something. Something definite. Tangible. Move.
I breathe, attention on the exhalation, on the pause at the bottom of the exhalation. The inhalation arising of itself out of the pause, effortlessly, naturally. The tinge of fear that had been in my belly is now in my chest. I acknowledge it, welcome it, visit it softly with my awareness. And it begins to soften, though this wasn’t my intention. I’m simply trying to follow the lead of what’s arising. These uncomfortable feelings aren’t impediments to accomplishing something. They are the way, the path. And the path is everything. And nothing. Everything, in the sense that the path is whatever is arising. And nothing insofar as it is neither set nor random. The path is ungraspable and can only be lived.
* * * *
It’s 1:30 AM and I’m awake again. For the past several nights I’ve been waking between 1:15 and 2:00. My whole body groans as I anticipate another few hours of frustration followed by a day of weariness.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether I go to bed at 9:30 or midnight. I awaken in the early morning and can’t get back to sleep till 5:30, 6:00AM.
Occasionally, in the past, when I’ve slept poorly for a night, my mind’s been active, preoccupied with something that I can’t leave alone. Or that won’t leave me alone. But this is different. Beside the fact of it continuing for a number of consecutive nights, my mind is relatively calm. Nothing is preoccupying me, in a conscious way at least. Though I sense that this lack of sleep could become a preoccupation, if I were to follow a certain course.
So though I’m tired and I’m frustrated, I do have a sense that this is something purposeful. A wider intelligence moving here. And my task is to attune to it, align with it, open to this disruption of my generally reliable routine.
* * * *
A wider intelligence. The sense that everything that occurs is rich with significance, alive and meaningful. Intimately, precisely personal and aloofly, inexorably impersonal. Listen to the words of Ibn Arabi:
Nothing walks in the cosmos without walking as a messenger with a message. This is an eminent knowledge. Even worms in their movements are rushing with a message for those who understand it.
[Ibn al-Arabi. The Self-Disclosure of God. p.4. William C. Chittick, trans. SUNY Press. 1998].
This is an essentially spiritual sensibility: that whatever occurs, whatever arises is meaningful in a way that may be ultimately incomprehensible to the mind, but can nevertheless be clearly felt. The key is that we recognize and attend the messages that are continually appearing in our lives. And orient by way of them. This is not primarily an intellectual enterprise, but a dynamic process of open and spacious attention that can be cultivated and increasingly refined.
Let’s listen to another formulation of this sensibility, one that makes an important implication explicit. A few days before his passing, Jung gave the following response to a questioner who asked him his view of God:
God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse. [ C.G. Jung].
What Jung offers for our consideration is the possibility that we can directly feel the movement and activity of an intelligence wider than our familiar mental, egoic consciousness, particularly as it threatens to pull the rug out from under us. We can feel the movement of the Divine upsetting our cherished views, eroding places of rigidity, undoing a false sense of security and thwarting our plans, hopes and dreams.
Who then devised this torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar name.
[ T.S.Eliot. Four Quartets: Little Gidding. from” Collected Poems:1909-1962. Harcourt Brace Javonovich. San Diergo. 1970]
Everyone encounters this in some form or other. We inevitably meet disappointment, experience loss and suffer pain. From a spiritual perspective, pain itself is a mystery. If everything that occurs is somehow meaningful, a messenger with a message, discomfort, disappointment and pain become particularly poignant and fruitful areas of study.
Suffering is a call for inquiry, says Nisargadatta Maharaj. All pain needs investigation.
[ Quoted in David Carse. Perfect Brilliant Stillness. p. 189. Paragate Publishing. 2006]
* * * *
There are other ways of formulating the intuition that all that arises is meaningful. The concept of karma expresses it from a different angle. Everything that occurs, every event and encounter, every thought and emotion, is understood to be the fruit of past and the cause of future occurrences. Nothing we do or fail to do is without significance and consequence. Habitual, automatic, unconscious tendencies arise, to be repeated indefinitely or to be transformed. As these tendencies are transformed, or “burned”, new possibilities and openings emerge, contributing to the tapestry of occurrence. We might say that whatever arises is the precisely calibrated stuff of our potential awakening. We needn’t look further than this present moment to discover the basic materials and tasks of our own real work.
What I think is particularly noteworthy here is the ecological or interdependent dynamism of karma. Sometimes misunderstood in simplistic causal terms, karma is rather the active principle at play in the world’s unfolding. Whatever is arising is always the expression of everything. Everything that is, is the activity of this intelligence, the fruit of previous occurrence.
The mind, of course, can never grasp the complexity of this essentially relational reality. But we can attune to and align with this wider intelligence. When we do so, we are better able to meet the ups and downs of life with interest and openness. For we experience everything crossing our path, all that is occurring, as intimately related to our own awakening.
From a psychological/developmental perspective, recurrent patterns and tendencies as well as acute occurrences of discomfort and pain can also be understood as purposeful. In the course of normal development, we all encounter situations, both outer and inner, that are distressing and incomprehensible. We react to these situations by way of defense mechanisms, i.e., with processes that attempt to moderate, manage or eliminate the disturbance.
There are a range of such mechanisms, but what they all share in common is this: the attempt to keep from feeling something. To some significant extent, our lives are organized around keeping certain experiences at bay. A good bit of energy, of our life force, is bound up in this way and our development is more or less inhibited and shaped by these defenses against feeling.
While these defenses enable us to manage what might otherwise seem overwhelming, they also inevitably constrict our lives. What we haven’t lived through will tend to return, either as a chronic and frustrating pattern or as a more intense, acute disturbance.
For example, someone who has suffered early trauma may find herself overwhelmed by powerful feelings many years later, even though the current circumstances of her life are largely benign. We never quite know what will expose these tender and vulnerable places in us. But in an uncanny and deeply intelligent way, the opportunities to touch them do arise. And in order for these partially-lived experiences to truly get into the past, we have to move towards them and feel them. In this way, the very things to which we have intense aversion turn out to be the hinge of our development. By softly and gently approaching what we have avoided, by actually feeling it, we gain confidence that we can navigate life’s vicissitudes with relative openness and ease.
* * * *
Last night, after waking and lying in bed for an hour or so, I got up and went into the study. The house was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator, and the night outside was still.
I noticed worries beginning to insinuate themselves, worries in the form of a coterie of what-if’s: what if something is seriously wrong with me? What if this goes on indefinitely? What if I’ll never be able to sleep well again? What if I’ll be tired the rest of my life? Fearful, anxious thoughts. Reactions to what is presently occurring in the form of heightened and agitated anticipation.
One of the reasons we practice, meditate, learn to work with the mind, is so that when such situations arise, when our routines and expectations are disrupted, we may be less likely to be swept away on a tide of fretful anticipation. In this instance, I could feel the beginning surge of worry and, while acknowledging it, brought my attention to the breath: feeling the exhalation sink into the pause, into the stillness out of which the next inhalation naturally and effortlessly arises.
I noticed that when my exhalation disappeared into the spaciousness of the pause, there was no anticipation. Worrying seems to be correlated with foreshortening the exhalation, moving ahead into the next inhalation before the natural cycle has reached its resting phase. The pause seems to be an anchor in stillness that I can tangibly locate. I don’t have to be swept away.
More settled and aligned with my actual condition, this sleeplessness, I begin to be aware of another level of agitation: not the more frenetic and obvious surface churning, but a deeper, more primordial disturbance that I feel in my torso: what to do at 3:30 in the morning? This empty space and time feels frighteningly immense.
I take a couple of books off the shelf and begin to read the “Insomnia” section in the Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine. The authors delineate two types of insomnia: sleep-onset and sleep-maintenance. What I’m experiencing is clearly the second kind.
Within the course of a year, they write, up to thirty percent of the population suffers from insomnia. Many use over-the-counter medications to combat the problem, while others seek stronger sedatives.
[Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine. Michael Murray,ND and Joseph Pizzorno, ND. Primo Publishing. 1998. (revised edition)]
As I read about insomnia, I’m increasingly aware of feeling some confusion. I want to sleep, and if there’s something here that can help me, shouldn’t I look into it? At the same time, I’m not convinced that this is simply a problem to be combated. I’m aware of another dimension and feel myself drawn towards it. It’s not just an idea, but a different sensibility, a kind of openness and interest that feels enlivening, even in the midst of this discomfort.
I have no idea what this sleeplessness may mean, what message the messenger might be bringing. But I gratefully recognize that a fundamentally different world seems to be disclosing itself, one in which my discomfort may not simply be a problem.
I read further: …the most effective treatment of insomnia is based upon identifying and addressing causative factors. The most common causes of insomnia are psychological: depression, anxiety and tension. If psychological factors do not seem to be the cause, various foods, drinks and medications may be responsible. [ibid].
I’m vacillating between two worlds of meaning: in one, this sleeplessness is a problem. It interferes with and disrupts my plans and routines, leaves me feeling weary and weak, and alters my ability to carry on with my responsibilities. The response to this problem is to try and determine the causes of this disruptive condition in hopes of addressing them effectively so that I may return to my familiar life as soon as possible.
In the other world of meaning, this sleeplessness likewise interferes with and disrupts my plans and routines, leaves me feeling weary and weak, and alters my ability to carry on with my responsibilities. But if I think of it as a problem at all, its one of an entirely different sort, requiring a very different kind of response.
Let’s look more closely at the idea of a problem. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “a question or situation that presents uncertainty, perplexity, or difficulty”. [American Heritage Dictionary. Houghton Mifflin. William Morris, ed. 1981]. This is certainly the case in both worlds of meaning. Beside the difficulty and hardship of prolonged lack of sleep, I’m surely perplexed.
I’m not aware of feeling depressed or anxious. I do have chronic tensional patterns in various parts of my body, and work with them daily with various physical practices. But I’m not aware of any new or increased tension or pain beyond that with which I normally live.
For more than two decades, I’ve been mindful of what I eat and drink. I’ve always had a high-strung nervous system that is usually quite sensitive to stimulant foods. Not only do I not take any caffeine, but I’ve learned to be careful with stimulating herbs and sweeteners. I do best when I keep within the range of what for me is a calming diet. With this in mind, after the second night of sleeplessness, I eliminated all foods and supplements that are towards the edge of this range.
And I haven’t taken medication for more years than I can remember.
It is possible, at my age, that my body melatonin levels are low. Melatonin is a hormone produced by the pineal gland and has a sedative-type action. As we age, production of this hormone may decrease, in which case supplemental melatonin often proves effective in restoring normal sleep patterns.
I’m reluctant to play around with hormones. But if this is the cause, it seems stubbornly foolish to resist the experiment. If I take it and it works, perhaps it’s as simple as that.
But then again. The medicine may work, may give me to sleep long and soundly and thereby mask the problem. For if, as may be the case, this disruption of sleep is a messenger with a message, inviting me into relationship with a wider intelligence, I don’t want to mute or disregard the message. And though I have no idea what it may be, and fortunately am too weary to venture much in the way of interpretation, I do have a sense that the best response to this sort of problem is to be still, attentive and patient.
Our word “problem” comes from the Greek—problema—and means: “thing thrown forward”, from—proballein–, “to throw forward.” The root is—gwel–, meaning “to throw, to reach.” [ibid.]
What is the nature of this situation, this question that I’ve been thrown into or that’s been thrown at me? Is it a problem to be eliminated or fixed, or one to be listened to and understood? I don’t really know. What I am discovering, though, is that a shift has subtly been happening over the past two or three years. While for most of my adult life I’ve inclined and actually reached towards a world of meaning consonant with those quotes from Ibn Arabi and Jung, I’ve only partially inhabited this world. To a significant extent, I’ve lived under the spell of a more materialist and mechanistic sensibility while feeling oppressed by it. And though I’ve never felt at home in this latter, culturally pervasive orientation, it has been a formative and formidable structuring force.
As I sit here tonight, feeling my way through this perplexing and difficult situation, I recognize that without any striving I’m more fully open to this other, more vibrant world of meaning. I put down the Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine, turn the light low, and sit quietly. It would be a stretch to say that I feel energized. But I do feel awake, alive and free. No problem to solve, nothing to fix in this moment, I sit here in this odd space between discomfort and gratitude. The sense of freedom arises within this space.
* * * *
I feel some apprehension tonight as I get ready for bed. Earlier today I purchased some melatonin. But I’m still reluctant to take it. If there’s something I need to go through as I feel my way into this ambiguous situation, I want to be faithful to it. But it’s conceivable that the meaning of my sleeplessness is a deficiency in melatonin production. And I’m mindful of the Buddha’s story of the man who, when seriously wounded by an arrow, wouldn’t let anyone remove it and attend the wound until he’d been satisfied as to who the archer was, what motive he had, what kind of bow he used, what material the arrow was made of, etc. Insisting on answers to untimely questions, he died.
What I hope to do is remain open, test out this intimation that there is a wider intelligence at work here, without insisting on it in advance. I know that I’m capable of delusion in this regard, of attributing a meaning to this sleeplessness that is aggrandizing. I also know the cynical chorus that looks dismissively upon such deeper meaning with contempt and scorn. I’ve lived much of my life in the shadow of that arrogant insistence.
So between these two poles of inflation and reductionism, the romantic and the banal, I hope to find a poised and centered place of inquiry. And actually, feeling tired seems to aid this aspiration. By way of insomnia, I’m encouraged to move slowly. The discipline is to remain at ease; neither react nor draw conclusions, even in the midst of discomfort.
The truth is, I just don’t know. And feeling tired seems to stabilize me in this not knowing.
What do I do at 2:30 in the morning?
Sit quietly.
Breathe.
Attend what’s emerging.
Navigating this ambiguous world.
* * * *
The common word for what I’m experiencing is “apprehension”. The practice is to get beneath the word, to the sensation itself as felt in the body. This word has an interesting dual action: it both points to and conceals a more direct, immediate experience. In the famous Zen story, our attention is called to the finger pointing to the moon. And we’re reminded not to take the pointer for that to which it points.
It’s all too easy, and quite common in our disembodied culture, to assume that we’re in direct touch with our feelings when in fact we’re spinning round in emotionally-laden narratives. These stories are important insofar as they point us towards a more direct, embodied experience. But all too often, they become a fixed form of identification, and hence a hedge against direct and raw experience.
* * * *
Somatic Meditative Inquiry is the name of the practice that I’ve been alluding to. It’s a mode of exploration, of inquiry, of transformation that has been arriving for my wife and me over the course of many years. The idea is very simple, though the practice often is not. In Somatic Meditative Inquiry we direct our attention to our body, often at first to those places of discomfort, holding and pain. The invitation is to feel sensation directly, a task that for many of us is itself a profound shift in orientation. For most of us experience ourselves, others and the world-at-large through ideas and stories. This seems so second nature that the possibility, let alone the possible virtues, of a more direct experience, never dawns on us.
* * * *
Where in my body do I feel what I’m calling “apprehension”?
* * * *
The first step is to find the place of stillness. This is the anchor for this form of inquiry. There are many ways to do this. A technique that I like is to bring my attention to the breath as already described. I observe that my exhalation has become shortened…….. Just follow the breath down into the abdomen, down to the pause. Feel the inhalation arising naturally. Nothing to do. No doer. Just this gentle, non-coercive attention in response to which the breath deepens and settles.
As I relax into the stillness, awareness moves to my solar plexus.
All these questions about what to do–should I take melatonin? Should I try to stay awake during the day or nap when I’m tired? Should I get up or stay in bed when I can’t sleep?–seem to be concentrated there somatically. A fluttering, airy sensation, a sort of subtly vibrating emptiness.
I breathe into it, gently, softly. Not trying to get rid of it or change it. Simply opening to it. This is the essence of meditative inquiry. Not trying to wrest an answer from what is arising. Not trying to make something of it. Just bringing a gentle awareness to it and patiently, quietly, staying there.
Sometimes the next step arises with perfect clarity. It happens now, and I take the melatonin. When I eventually crawl under the covers, I continue to attend my breath. No more apprehension; those sensations dispersed a while ago. Opening to the action of the melatonin, I enter the wonderful experience of falling asleep in slow motion. As though borne on a gentle current, I progressively let go and feel myself dropping, as the familiar daylight consciousness slips away.
* * * *
It was such a pleasure to fall asleep so attentively. Now, a couple of hours later, I’m awake again. I lie in bed for awhile before yielding to the fact that I feel fairly rested. I’m not going to be falling back asleep anytime soon.
I get up and check the clock on my way out of the bedroom. 1:34. There’s a smile inside. And outside too. Whatever this particular process is that I’m calling “insomnia”, it has a sense of humor. No black or white. No easy generalizations. No answers. A lovely sense that the melatonin worked and I’ve awakened, just as I have the past several nights, at just the right time.
The right time for what?
I have no idea.
I go into the study, take my cushion, and sit. Breathing into, and out of, the stillness, I begin to scan my body. At some point a particular site of sensation begins too stand out: a pain in my chest, varying in intensity and duration. I acknowledge it, breathe into it, feel it come and go. I notice the tendency to anticipate it, brace against it, and I welcome that as well.
In time I observe that this painful contraction in my chest is coordinated with anticipation. As the mind leaps ahead, imagining this scene and that, the contraction intensifies. When the mind is more at ease and spacious, the contraction is negligible or disappears.
One might suppose from this description that I’m suggesting a causal link, where anticipatory thoughts give rise to these contractions in the body. I do think such a link can sometimes be observed. But that would be an inference in this situation, and not in accord with what I seem to be finding.
I’ve noticed this before, this circular dynamism where it sometimes seems that anticipatory thoughts precede the pain. But at other times, the thoughts themselves seem to already be a reaction. The more I study these phenomena, the more they appear to behave as a coordinated complex where the distinction between body and mind is an abstraction from an integrated operation. This operation is what we commonly, and unreflectively, call time. My sense is that I’m studying the happening of time as it appears concretely in my embodied experience.
How does time happen? Let’s return to the word “anticipate”. It has the sense of looking forward, looking ahead. Literally, from the Latin anticipare, it means: “to take before”.
To take before what?
Before whatever may happen has happened. Anticipation is fundamentally oriented toward the future. When we anticipate, when we desire, plan, expect, dread, look forward to, we are oriented toward the future.
But what is the future? What kind of existence does it have? I’d like to suggest that the future appears by way of anticipation. That is, anticipation is not simply oriented towards, but actually constitutes the future. Without anticipation, there is no future as we tend to experience it.
So perhaps we can provisionally say that time happens by way of anticipation. Consider for a moment your day-to-day life. Is it punctuated with anticipated events, measured by our familiar clocks? Are your days organized around these divisions of twenty-four hours, with places to be and things to do? Consider for a moment that there is nothing inherently true or real about this division into hours, minutes, seconds. And yet our lives are profoundly structured in these terms.
When we attend our stream of mental activity, we observe a leaping ahead in eagerness or dread. And while it’s certainly true that the other primary dimension of what we call time, viz., the past, is also a vector of orientation, as well as preoccupation, modern life in fast-paced, consumer-oriented society is essentially oriented towards the future. It is at the metaphysical core of capitalism, where desire is constantly stimulated and there is never enough. Unending production and consumption depend upon the hope and promise of future satisfaction.
What we so often find, of course, is that our looking ahead is in fact a pattern of living, a structure of existence. We get through our days by anticipating a coming event, whether it be desired or feared. We grasp at the one and seek to avoid the other. And even when we get what we want, the satisfaction may be fleeting. Even in the midst of our enjoyment, the mind grasps at what we have, in anticipation of losing it. Or it is already looking ahead to the next object of desire or dread.
The root of the word “anticipate” is—kap—and means “to grasp”. Let’s pause over this and try to feel the connection. When we look forward to our vacation next summer, to our friend’s visit next month, the concert this weekend or to supper tonight, is there an element of grasping involved? Or when we find ourselves anxious about tomorrow’s meeting, the pending lab report from the doctor’s office, the prospect of a deepening economic recession as well as the certainty of our own death and the death and loss of everyone we love and everything we hold dear? Are we in some way grasping?
One way to explore this is to notice the extent to which our lives are oriented towards what we want and what we wish to avoid. Try stopping this activity and see what you find. If you’re at all like me, you may discover that to stop anticipating is a considerable challenge. It occurs so automatically and incessantly that trying to stop it for a while, say thirty seconds, is like trying to hold back the tide.
The tide, and natural rhythms in general, disclose a different time than the time of anticipation and recollection. The change of color of the goldfinch. The melting snow. The whirling intensity of a hurricane and the gradual disintegration of a decaying log. All this is time. Not occurring as days, hours, minutes and seconds, but a continual and dynamic arising, transforming and passing away; the on-goingness of a vast now.
Time, as most of us live it in the modern West, is a fundamental aspect of a particular structure of consciousness, what Jean Gebser has called the mental rational structure. For the most part, we live our lives in a bubble; within ideas of what is not, what might come and what has been. Because this is an essential aspect of our structure of consciousness, we take it as the way things are. [We see this repeatedly in guided Somatic Meditative Inquiry sessions, where there is often an initial difficulty distinguishing a sensation from a thought].
Time in this sense is an artifice of human consciousness, and may be more or less in alignment with what arises and passes away. To the extent that it is more closely aligned, we feel ourselves at ease and at home. When we aren’t as well aligned with this deeper sense of time — time as happening — we feel out-of-sorts, anxious or depressed, grasping toward what is not yet and what is no longer.
The sense of ourselves as separate and discreet entities is predicated on this artifice of time. The more we live in openness to what arises and passes away, the less separate we feel. The marvelous and incomprehensible, always-emerging-and-disappearing, comes to be felt as an uninterrupted flow from which we are anything but separate.
[See Jean Gebser: The temporicity of myth differs from the temporality of the mind. The temporistic movement of nature and the cosmos is unaware of the temporal phases of past, present, and future; it knows only the polar self-complementarity of coming and going which completely pervades it at all times. It is devoid of directionality, whereas the past and future, viewed from the present of any given person, are temporal directions. It is this directional character of “time” which underscores its mental nature and therefore its constitutional difference from natural-cosmic temporistic movement which is mythical in nature.
Let us…inquire into the root of the word “time.” When we do this we discover that all of the words of our familiar languages for “time”, German Zeit, Latin tempus, French temps and so on---can be traced back to the Indo-Germanic root –da --. We have encountered this root before: it also formed the Greek verb daio, which in the Ionian dialect, the original language of Greek philosophy, meant “to divide, to take apart, to lay apart, to tear apart, to lacerate.” In Sanskrit the root forms the words dayate and dayati,that is, “he divides, he cuts;” on this the German word for part or share is based. And the root is also the basis of the word “demonic”.
“Time”, in other words, conveys the idea that it is a divisor, separating as well as cutting asunder. Jean Gebser. The Ever-Present Origin. p.173. Noel Barstad with Algis Mickunas, trans. Ohio University Press, 1985.].
* * * *
So here I sit in the early morning, feeling this pain in my chest. I visit it from different angles. Moving in closely, I feel the discomfort acutely. I notice that while it remains within my thoracic area, the sensations shift from front to back. In a while I widen the view. While maintaining felt contact with these sensations, I feel them as though from a greater distance as I attend to other phenomena as well: my heart beating, the cicadas and crickets singing, the ringing in my right ear, varying patterns of darkness in the room, the furniture within view, the floor, the walls… Moving closer and further away, I attempt to meet the sensations in my chest — what I’ve referred to as “pain”— with freshness and acceptance.
* * * *
I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here. But eventually it softens. The contraction in my chest releases and softens as soon as I realize I’m still resisting this “insomnia”. I’ve been sitting in these painful sensations unawares, hoping that if I do this, reliable sleep will return. To put it differently, I discover that I’m not truly present to my sensations, though I thought I was. Instead, I’ve been relating to them as a means to an end. I thought I was awake. But I’ve been sleeping. The sleep of conventional, directional time.
By staying with the sensations, it becomes clear that I’m still at odds with this fact of my experience. I’m still oriented towards tomorrow, and the next day and the next. A life divided. Anticipating being tired. Bracing against it. Directed towards the future. Trying to make something happen while appearing not to.
I acknowledge this resistance, accept and welcome it, along with this complex of phenomena that I’ve been calling “insomnia”. And as I do so, a shift occurs. My consciousness widens, becomes more spacious. No longer oriented and narrowed towards what might happen tomorrow, I feel at peace with what is. I’ve entered a different time. And with it, a sense of wholeness. Not directed towards the future, but trusting what’s emerging. No conclusions, but an open attention instead. I feel light and easy. Awake and tired. I return to bed and fall off to sleep.
* * * *
Somatic Meditative Inquiry (SMI) invites us into a different kind of experience and learning. We might even say, into a different world. It’s a world that isn’t organized in terms of our familiar temporal coordinates, not oriented towards the future nor explicable by way of the past. This is not in any way to reject the virtues of directional temporal experience: remembering, anticipating, planning and a kind of learning from experience that this can sometimes foster. The important point is the recognition that this is a mode of experience, a conventional, navigational framework and not simply the given nature of reality. Because our social, political, economic and psychological existence is organized along these directional lines, it is perhaps the principle structuring dynamism of both collective and personal life. As I write this, much of the world is going through the throes of a financial crisis, a crisis rooted in anticipation, ever- increasing progress (the word literally means “to go forward”) and ever-expanding consumption and accumulation. The engine of directional time moves us and we delude ourselves and imperil the earth to suppose that it is either necessary or that it is our doing.
Within our familiar form of consciousness, structured along the lines of chronological time, of past, present and future, our lives take on a narrative character. We not only understand ourselves, but assume that the very nature of understanding itself proceeds according to this sort of linear, developmental trajectory.
The kind of inquiry that we cultivate in SMI moves in a different way. To begin with, we learn to distinguish between sensation and thought. For many of us, this isn’t as simple as it may seem. We often find that people who suppose they are in touch with their feeling life, with their embodied reality, are actually awash in ideas, stories and explanations about their feelings.
Because the unreflective structure of experience is along temporal, i.e., narrative lines, most experience, including our somatic reality, tends to appear within this formation. For anything to seem to make sense, it requires a story of where it’s come from and where it’s going.
In meditative inquiry, we learn to feel bodily sensation directly. That is, we feel whatever is arising without the contextual aid of a story. A narrative context may arise during the process of inquiry. For example, a memory, image or symbol may occur. When they do, these are seen as way stations, fingers pointing to the moon. We acknowledge and welcome the urge to grasp for closure while continuing to sit in openness and wonder.
Insofar as we try and know ourselves by way of story, and as this contributes significantly to our rather pervasive disembodiment, it becomes apparent why distinguishing between sensation and thought is both challenging and important. It’s challenging because direct experience can only occur right now, where “now” is never a simple point or moment squeezed between past and future, i.e., between mental representations of what was and anticipation of what will be. What we call “now” is not an in-between point in a linear sequence but a dynamic fullness that is always whole, not fragmented by directional time. But because our form of consciousness is so thoroughly mental, such that we relate to everything, including ourselves, through ideas that are structured along narrative lines, we rarely live in this now. Instead, the now we inhabit is a complex of thoughts and emotions about the past and the future. This anemic and deficient now is but a fleeting and intangible wisp between the more or less determined past and the ever-hastening future. In this way, we are prisoners of thought.
The path of wholeness is always right here, right now, not between or on the way to anything or anywhere. There is no place to get to, no future destination that will put an end to the ceaseless striving. The only end is right now. And this now can never be grasped in terms of past and future. Its vastness exceeds chronology and is essentially irreducible.
And this is why the body, and direct sensate experience in particular, is so important. For we only directly feel sensations right now. Not ideas about sensations, where they come from, where they’re going, but simply how they immediately appear. In Somatic Meditative Inquiry we don’t so much attempt to make sense of sensations, but to feel them. We enter into a respectful, accepting relationship, and within this relationship, sense and meaning happen. We come to experience a deep belonging within the unfolding and indivisible flow of the real. Not apart from, nor even a part of, but an integral unity at once beyond the mind’s grasp and immediately knowable. There is no closure to the now , because now is all there ever is. The story is always underway, ever fresh, every conclusion a splintering of the irreducible whole.
As we learn to relate directly to our bodily sensations, to meet them with tenderness, openness and acceptance, we’re likely to discover another pervasive feature of our conventional temporal orientation. Even when we think we’re simply bringing our attention to our sensate experience, we often discover that in fact we’re doing so as a means to an end. This is especially true when we’re attending some form of discomfort. Whether we want to eliminate pain, confusion or insecurity, we find ourselves resisting what is arising, trying to do something with or to it. That is, our awareness continues to be embedded within, and structured along the lines of, chronological time.
The invitation of SMI is to meet whatever is arising and passing away just as it is. When we do so, we find that felicitous action occurs spontaneously and naturally. We wouldn’t be amiss to use the word faith here, suggesting an openness to experience, attuned to and aligned with a wider intelligence. Not the activity of the calculating, anticipating, grasping mind but the care of a responsive attentiveness that isn’t up to anything.
[One of my teachers, the late Carl Whitaker, told the following story many years ago. He and his co-therapist, whom I believe was Carl Malone, had been seeing a young man in psychotherapy for several years. The young man carried a diagnosis of schizophrenia. As their work was moving towards termination, one day Drs. Whitaker and Malone asked their patient if he was aware of any particular turning point or critical event in the course of the therapy.
“There was one,” he answered. “There was a session a couple of years back when, for awhile, nobody was up to anything!”].
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Something has begun to shift, so that as I prepare for bed tonight, I’m not braced against the prospect of awakening early.
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And when I do awaken, once more around 1:30, I immediately know what to do. Sitting on my cushion, I openly accept this situation. When thoughts about tomorrow or the next day arise, I accept them too. I feel an immense spaciousness, aware of but not bound by chronological time. Not carried away by anticipation, expectation, dread or hope. I’m given a glimpse of freedom. Not just from the pressure of directional time, but freedom for primordial time.
The very word “insomnia” implies chronology: lack of sleep over a period of time. Chronic (from chronos) sleeplessness. So while the concept” insomnia” emphasizes continuity of experience, it also casts a shadow over emergent uniqueness. We do not hear, nor even know to turn our senses towards the message from the messenger. For the messenger does not arrive in chronological time.
We tend to think of something like insomnia as an affliction. But what is an affliction but a process that upsets our subjective views, plans and intentions? What Jung called God. I find myself more inclined to speak of a wider intelligence. The word “God” is so heavy with associations of this or that sort of being that it’s easy to miss the sense of an on-going, dynamic, non-locatable intelligence that pervades all that occurs. This intelligence isn’t reducible to, but supersedes while simultaneously encompassing, mental consciousness. Our subjective views, plans and intentions occur within the form of chronological time. As beings that are oriented by way of a particular kind of mental/emotional center, what we call ego, we are thoroughly temporal. The ego is bound to, and by, directional time.
But to attune to and align with the wider intelligence is to begin to waken from the sleep of conventional time, with its chronological and narrative directedness. We get a glimpse that the temporal orientation of our lives, hurried and preoccupied, is not simply the way things are, but rather a mode of consciousness, albeit the pervasive and dominant one.
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Eighteen years ago, while out for a walk between sessions, I was literally brought to my knees by an intense angina episode. The following day I was in the hospital for a cardio-vascular procedure. When, in a follow-up appointment, I met with the cardiologist and he discovered that I was a vegetarian, marathoner and non-smoker with no history of heart disease in my family, i.e., that I didn’t meet the typical profile, he indicated that I was doing all the right things. His advice was to keep doing what I’d been and take the prescribed medications.
Needless to say, I wasn’t encouraged by his counsel. After doing some investigation of the medications, I decided not to take them. Beyond that, and much to my dismay, I found that I wasn’t able to resume endurance sports and the training they require. Unlike the medications, this wasn’t a matter of deliberation and decision. Had I been able to resume my previous level of activity, I would have done so, consonant with the medical advice but contrary to an intimation that, at the time, I didn’t have the maturity to take up directly.
Consequently, my body intervened. When I tried to run long or hard, my calves would seize up, forcing me to slow down to a walk. I sensed at the time that there was an intelligence at work there. And that I’d been ignoring other manifestations of it for quite a while.
Chest pains, in particular, had occurred before. And I’d noted that these pains were most intense when I was pressured. Athletes learn to ignore their bodies, to push through discomfort and pain. I’d been used to this kind of inattention and practiced it daily, without giving much of a nod to the pain.
Later, following the angina event, I came to notice a correlation between pain in my chest and the tendency to be ahead of myself. The more pressured and hurried, the more intense the pain. Meanwhile I explored traditional medicines, Ayurvedic and Chinese in particular, hoping to gain some perspective on, and ways of working with, this pressure. I discovered the importance of a more careful diet and lifestyle, and I was subsequently able to moderate the internal pressure some of the time. But I also became increasingly aware that I was working with a long-standing — what is sometimes called a constitutional –pattern.
Almost as far back as I can remember, I’ve had a high-pitched nervous system and rapid metabolism. I recalled the family story that I didn’t walk until I was three; I ran until then. For most of my life, I experienced a near-continual running: the body, the mind, always on-the-go. Oriented towards the future. Living in anticipation.
Though I found both Ayurvedic and Chinese medicines very helpful, I also felt that neither of them got to the root of this condition, which I came to think of as the inexorable pressure to be ahead of myself. This pressure was both mental and physical. I tried to address this in two courses of psychotherapy, but to no avail. In both instances, I felt that my analysts didn’t grasp the issue at all.
Somewhere along the way I found myself imagining that this pressured quality of my life wasn’t simply personal; not only my particular constitution, but a transpersonal structure. And not just a structure, but a potency, an autonomous force with a life and logic of its own. The very heart of our culture is this pressured being-ahead-of ,moving ever faster. A culture of progress (which literally means: going forward).
[That keen observer of America, Alex de Tocqueville, noted this characteristic in the early 1900’s! He was only a month into his travels in the United States when he wrote that one of the “distinctive traits” of Americans was their restlessness. Later, he elaborated, “in the United States, a man plants a garden and {rents} it out just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops; he embraces a profession and gives it up…Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which forever escapes him.” Quoted in “Grab and Go: A Restless Nation Tanks Up”, by Maggie Jackson, in Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. Vol.8, #3, pp.33-34.]
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Wilfred Bion proposed that the psychoanalyst abandon memory and desire. In this way, he or she can be present to the patient, to what is currently arising, without it being shaped by recollection or anticipation. [Wilfred Bion. “Notes On Memory and Desire”]. Bion also understood that our theories, in this case our therapeutic theories, for all their heuristic virtues, also have a significant defensive function as well. They shore up the ego of the therapist; give a feeling of understanding and potency in the face of suffering, ambiguity and insecurity.
Needless to say, this hasn’t been a popular method in psychotherapy. For the I-sense, one’s identity, the very sense of who one is, is organized along the lines of memory and desire, of past and future. For most of us, this just seems to be the way things are, the way we are. And yet, there is sometimes a glimpse or intimation of a life and a world that isn’t ordered in this way. It’s been spoken of as eternal, timeless, the Now, ‘the moment in and out of time,” [T.S.Eliot. Four Quartets.]. I like the term primordial time, with its hint of originating dynamism. Time as happening, fundamentally indivisible and without direction. A continual and unitary unfolding; arising, passing away, no moments but a perpetual plenitude that eludes the grasp of mental consciousness.
Let’s listen to Aldous Huxley:
…there is also the life of the spirit, and the life of the spirit is the analogue, on a higher turn of the spiral, of the animal’s life. The progression is from animal eternity into time, into the strictly human world of memory and anticipation; and from time, if one chooses to go on, into the world of spiritual eternity, into the divine Ground. The life of spirit is life exclusively in the present, never in the past or future, life here, now, not life looked forward to or recollected. There is absolutely no room in it for pathos, or remorse, or a voluptuous rumination of the delicious cuds of thirty years ago. Its intelligible Light has nothing whatever to do either with the sunset radiance of those heart-rending good old days before the last war but three, or with the neon glow of those technological New Jerusalems beyond the horizons of the next revolution No, the life of the spirit is life out of time, life in its essence and eternal principle. Which is why they all insist—the people best qualified to know—that memory must be lived down and finally died to. When one has succeeded in mortifying the memory, says John of the Cross, one is in a state of union with God. It is an assertion that, at first reading, I found incomprehensible.
[Aldous Huxley:Time Must Have A Stop. p.282.Harper, NewYork].
The glimpse of primordial time, the advent of grace or terror or both, poses a sort of cosmic koan to our mental consciousness. We sense that there is something more, that the world we live in, the world of our longings and disappointments, our hopes and fears, regrets and anxieties, is a veiled and constricted one. We have felt the spaciousness of primordial time. But how do we get there, how do we recover and secure what we have tasted and then lost?
The paradox is that as long as we strive to get there, we remain within chronological, directional time. Primordial time is neither ahead of nor behind us, not some place or state to get to. That is why it can also be called timeless.
But primordial time is neither ethereal nor abstract. Huxley’s use of the word “spirit” may suggest a lack of substance, materiality, even reality, at least as we know it in our day-to-day lives. A peaceful, floating, disembodied state that we periodically experience and must reluctantly abandon in order to return to real life in the world.
We might say that primordial time is a different way of being in the world. But perhaps it’s more accurate to describe it as a different world. Not a world in opposition to that of conventional time, but one that includes it as a temporal possibility. Time as the increasingly apparent dynamic ground, the very nature of all happening.
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That was the last night of waking early. Having met what was arising in the body that night, without expectations or hope, without trying to alter or take hold of it as a persistent condition called “insomnia”, but simply yielding to what was arising, I began to sleep through the night again.
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If you’ve followed me thus far, perhaps you sense another iteration of the paradox. It’s easy enough to formulate this experience in hypothetical terms, the scope of which can then be tested: when faced with some persistent discomfort, if I bring awareness to embodied sensation, without memory or desire, without narrative or story, but with gentle acceptance, then the discomfort will often diminish, perhaps even disappear. I’ve found this to be true enough of the time, both in my own life and in working with others, to have some confidence in this formulation. This, then, is one level of Somatic Meditative Inquiry that warrants continued exploration. But as you may already suspect, even if and even though this hypothesis turns out with some reliability to be accurate, the very structure of it threatens to conceal primordial time.
Waking from insomnia is a glimpse of a wider orientation, a different consciousness with a different sort of center than my familiar “I”. It discloses a world in which everything belongs, not theoretically or just in principle, but immediately, experientially, clearly. To return to the image of the messenger with the message, what I’m given to imagine is that this mode of inquiry—SMI—is not simply or even primarily a way of overcoming discomfort. It’s a way of engaging with discomfort as an intelligence which invites, or perhaps prods me, into openness, into a creative undertaking that arises, by way of fidelity to actual sensate experience, as the happening of primordial time. What I find most encouraging is the possibility that Somatic Meditative Inquiry may be a practiceof real transformation. Not a change of ego states, nor even a means of healing, at least as we conventionally think of healing, but a way of consciously participating in the transformation and evolution of consciousness itself.
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Concluding Thoughts
Over the course of eight or ten consecutive nights, I found myself unable to sleep more than two or three hours each night. I’d fall off too sleep and then awaken between 1:15 and 2:00 AM. For the first several nights, I’d lie in bed awhile, hoping to get back to sleep. Eventually I’d give up and get up, and try to find some way of dealing with this problem.
I read about insomnia, made some dietary adjustments and tried melatonin for a couple of nights, but to no avail. The pattern persisted.
I was also interested in meeting this situation with openness, listening and feeling into it, into a wider intelligence that might be moving here. This proved to be quite challenging. Over the course of these nights I became increasingly aware of various ways that I was resisting the simple facts of what was arising. In particular, I discovered that even as I was able to move closer to my actual embodied experience, I was doing so with an end in sight: eliminating the insomnia and recovering my normal sleep pattern.
When I was eventually able to abandon hope or striving and just tune into my body, sitting with sensations as they arose and passed away, I had a glimpse of what I’ve called primordial time. This isn’t time as we typically experience it. Our lives, indeed our very form of consciousness, is organized in terms of, and both enabled and profoundly limited by, chronological, directional time; of past, present and future, with the present being mostly an elusive moment in which we are more or less unconsciously orienting to what is no longer or what is yet to come. Chronological time is an essential structuring element of ego consciousness, and as such is also a particular mode of unconsciousness. From the perspective of the ego, chronological time appears to be the nature of time itself; simply the way things are.
Primordial time is the interrelated happening of the world. Unlike directional time, which is structured in terms of division, primordial time is the whole, the occurring, transforming, disappearing of what is. It doesn’t eliminate chronological time, but renders it conscious as partitive, divisive and fragmenting, an autonomous force that both orders and disorders our lives. This deepening and intensification of time consciousness makes possible the use of chronological time as a practical, navigational instrument, while freeing us from its oppressive tyranny. Not bound by memory and desire, we remain able to anticipate and plan without living towards the future. When the happening of the world unfolds in unexpected ways, we remain aligned with and abide in this primordial giving. Disappointment, remorse and grief only occur in chronological time. In primordial time, everything belongs.
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As I bring this report to a conclusion, I should mention yet another instance of the paradox that seems to weave through this study. This essay is itself a narrative account of events that unfolded in chronological time. I’ve also tried to show a thread of continuity between these more recent events and a life-long tendency to be ahead of myself. Though I can feel the genuine possibility of living in primordial time, this isn’t where I live. And if it were, I would no longer be this “I”. For the form of consciousness that is writing this essay is bound to chronology. But the binding is itself a form of unconsciousness. As I’m given to imagine it, in attuning to the body, by learning again to feel our sensate life which is never separate in its happening from the happening of all that is, we awaken, if only a little more, to the evolutionary movement of consciousness which is always arriving as primordial time.
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