Comments on Meditation in The Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen
[90] Meditation has nothing to do with contemplation of eternal
questions, or of one's own folly, or even of one's navel, although
a clearer view on all of these enigmas may result. It has nothing
to do with thought of any kind—with anything at all, in fact,
but intuiting the true nature of existence, which is why it has
appeared, in one form or another, in almost every culture known
to man. The entranced Bushman staring into fire, the Eskimo using
a sharp rock to draw an ever-deepening [91] circle into the flat
surface of a stone achieves the same obliteration of the ego (and
the same power) as the dervish or the Pueblo sacred dancer. Among
Hindus and Buddhists, realization is attained through inner stillness,
usually achieved through the samadhi state of sitting yoga. In Tantric
practice, the student may displace the ego by filling his whole
being with the real or imagined object of his concentration; in
Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear,
pure stillness of a seashell or a flower petal. When body and mind
are one, then the whole being, scoured clean of intellect, emotions,
and the senses, may be laid open to the experience that individual
existence, ego, the "reality" of matter and phenomena
are no more than fleeting and illusory arrangements of molecules.
The weary self of masks and screens, defenses, preconceptions, and
opinions that, propped up by ideas and words, imagines itself to
be some sort of entity (in a society of like entities) may suddenly
fall away, dissolve into formless flux where concepts such as "death"
and "life," "time" and "space," “past"
and "future" have no meaning. There is only a pearly radiance
of Emptiness, the Uncreated, without beginning, therefore without
end.
Like the round-bottomed Bodhidharma doll, returning to its center,
meditation represents the foundation of the universe to which all
returns, as in the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness
between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation.
In this “void," this dynamic state of rest, without impediments,
lies ultimate reality, and here one's own true nature is reborn,
in a return from what Buddhists speak of as "great death."
This is the Truth of which Milarepa speaks.
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