Meditation is a struggle to concentrate. There are so many things which come pressing in on the mind, worries, anxieties. Like little terriers, they will not let go but come back again and again to worry and gnaw. In prayer one can pour out all these worries and anxieties, pains and hurts in a wordless flow to God, to Christ. Off-load it all. Here you are. This is too much for me. You take care of it. This can be very satisfying and therapeutic. But meditation is not like this. There is no off-loading, no passing on to another. In meditation you are intensely aware of all the hurts and worries and you just have to let them go. There is no philosophising, no rationalising. These can help to make sense of life but they do not change anything. In meditation there is simply you, sitting, experiencing. I am beginning to understand what tanha means. It is not just wanting or craving. It is being tied in to, hooked to something which, however much you may want to, you cannot let go. It becomes a real effort to detach, to focus, to try to let them go.
The question arises – to what point? What for? Is not this, the ‘real’ me, inextricably part of my relationships? What other me can there be to find? One has to leave the ‘real’, the day-to-day me behind in search of … what? This is the scary part. In the moments of concentration and calm there is nothing, just the raw experience of sitting, breathing. Where does this raw experience lead?
I came across this in Dumoulin’s Zen Buddhism in the 20th Century.
The individual shell in which my personality is so solidly encased explodes at the moment of satori. Not, necessarily, that I get unified with a being greater than myself or absorbed in it, but that my individuality, which I found rigidly held together and definitely kept separate from other individual existences, becomes loosened somehow from its tightening grip and melts away into something indescribable, something which is of a quite different order from what I am accustomed to. (D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism: Second Series p. 36)
This is an echo of William James – “the further limits of our being plunge into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ‘understandable’ world.” (Varieties of Religious Experience p. 506)