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Winter Evening at the Inn
Inn Along the Way, Chapman Farm, Damariscotta, Maine
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A person questioned the Sage about meditation -
Teacher...
Please drop the "Teacher." I'm not a Teacher. All I say and do is point you to the inner Teacher, whatever that means to you.
Okay. My apologies. Some who call themselves spiritual teachers say to drop all methods in our meditation. So, I dropped mine after years of meditation.
And how's that working for you?
Seems not very well. What's your suggestion?
Stay with your method. In time, it will let go of you.
At times, the Sage would say, when speaking of technique and meditation, "When the ripe fruit falls from the branch, does the branch let go of the fruit or the fruit let go of the branch?"
*Brian K. Wilcox. "Meetings with an Anonymous Sage."
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Over the last almost three decades, my journey in meditation has been from method to no-method to no-method-and-method. In the latter, one is not overly concerned about using or not a method, and one may experience a flow back-and-forth between what I call just-sitting and engaging a technique. For me, sometimes I cannot use a method... I can only rest in the Quiet and Stillness. This rest is not a slumber. It is an alert, alive sense of being, of presence.
Just-sitting is your being present and aware. It is not anything unnatural; it is our natural way. In Christianity, it is called Contemplative Prayer, in Soto Zen, Shikantaza. Strictly, just-sitting is not meditation, and it is not, as some call it, meditation beyond meditation. Also, just-sitting does not mean one only experiences this when sitting. One can experience it in any suitable posture for stillness and quiet. Sometimes for this, I use the one word Silence. There is really no suitable word for this act of presence.
From beginner to advanced meditators, the main thing is to be present - totally to be where one is, not to leave home. Now is your home address. Even advanced meditators will venture from home into the illusion of past and future. Yet, that is not a problem, for in leaving home, they realize they cannot leave home. Every address is your home address - you cannot escape now, only lose awareness of it. This is like a saying the Sage sometimes spoke: "Truly, you can never leave God, for when you leave God, you meet God." He would say, "But, first, you must lose God many times to know you can't lose God."
In just-sitting, leaving and returning home is one act, so there is no place one can speak of as the absence of home. If we could talk about absence - that, too, would be home. This is saying, theistically, "God is as present in your experience of God's absence as in your experience of God's presence." In that sense of absence, I recommend one relax into the sense of absence, and one will find absence is a taste of presence. Finally, attachment to home or not-home, God or not-God, drops, and clinging to a method or no-method does, too.
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*©Brian K. Wilcox, 2022.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
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