These last few days have been strange in that I have felt unable to write, to think, or even to read much. It is as though my intellectual faculties and all my sensations have been dulled. There is no excitement, nothing that fills me with enthusiasm or that I really want to do. Reading novels, always a fallback when feeling listless and bored, is no longer an escape. They seem superficial and inconsequential, with cardboard characters in unlikely situations dealing with exaggerated emotions. And so I dither about, unable to engage fully and wholeheartedly in anything, listless and dissatisfied with myself. It occurred to me that these symptoms are not dissimilar to those described by John of the Cross talking about the Dark Night of the Senses. He, however, makes the DNS seem a situation of all-pervading gloom, a nightmare from which there is no escape. If this is what I am experiencing then it is nothing so dramatic. It is really very ordinary and not some spectacular spiritual achievement.
All it means is that I have caught a glimpse of something, in comparison to which ordinary life with its day-to-day pleasures and excitements has become trivial and dull, of secondary importance compared to the existential depths that lie within. The irony is that I have had no ecstatic experiences, no supernatural revelations, no transports of delight. There is nothing that I can put my finger on except a feeling – no more than that – that I have caught a glimpse of a beyond. I have seen the footprints of the ox, though ‘seeing’ is the wrong metaphor. Felt, experienced, would be better.
I am also much more critical of what I read on meditation. There seem to be three types, or categories of writing. There are those who, I suspect, have no experience and are doing no more than regurgitate what they have read, or worse, made up. They do not seem to be aware of the difficulties, or of the fact that there will be differences of experience even among those following the same methodology. They make vague generalisations of what will happen. In the second category are those, like some Vipassana meditators, who are concerned almost solely with techniques and whose goal is a raw awareness. Finally there are those, Zen especially, who acknowledge the transcendent. I do not want to achieve mindfulness just for the sake of mindfulness. It is not the goal. It is the path.