Take the Plunge: an Autobiographically Tangential Peptalk

There is this really neat book store where I live... Some days, when I have time to kill, I grab a cup of coffee and head there... Right outside the store, they have this cart with $1 and $2 used books for sale. A while back I stumbled upon an 1975 issue of "Crystal Mirror," an annual journal by Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Center... What a find!

This morning, as I was heading out to take my dog for a walk to the park, I took the journal with me. I've read and re-read it many a time and wasn't quite sure why I really took it. I had a feeling there was a "blog post" in it somewhere... And there was...

But first, let me tell you a little story from my childhood... It won't take but a minute.

As a kid, growing up in Moscow, I attended a "sports school" (a peculiar Soviet secondary education institution designed to both educate scholastically and to also cultivate the "olympic reserves") with a "specialty" in water polo. I was an okay swimmer and did okay on the "water" field. With the last name (Somov) that approximately translates from Russian as "son-of-a-catfish," I was a natural water-born. What I couldn't, however do, is a backflip from the side of a pool.

Here's how I went about learning it. First, I gathered information from my more acrobatic friends. Struggling for words and relying primarily on gestures and body language, they shared their know-how with me. Armed with this information, I tried doing a backflip and hurt myself a few times before I got it right. In retrospect, I realize that the information I gathered had essentially no value; as I tried to do a backflip, I was following no one's blueprint but enacting a kind of intuitive kinesthetic visualization that I had in my mind long before I consulted my friends. Having materialized that kinesthetic vision, I had acquired experiential awareness of how a backflip is done, my own know-how of the backflip that cannot be adequately expressed in words.

Informational awareness (such as the one I acquired about the kinesthetics of a backflip) is a vital precursor of change. Without having the illusory comfort of knowledge about how to do a backflip, I would have probably never attempted it. But informational awareness is nearly not enough: there has to be a leap of faith with a subsequent trial-and-error fine-tuning...

With this auto-biographical detour aside, let me get back to the business of East-West synthesis and the matters of meditation.

So, here I flip through the pages of the "Crystal Mirror" - watching my dog tear up a stick - and I stumble upon the following words by Tarthang Tulku, instructing on meditation:

"When you are trying to understand conceptual instructions, at that time, yes, listen and try to be aware. But once you enter into this process (of meditation) , accept everything as fine and beautiful, just as it is" (p. 147).

And: "Once you are within the meditation, do not try to find some better experience, or try to be more "aware." This only creates fixations about what meditation is and what it should be" (p. 147).

I flip through a few more pages: on the margins of the book I see the markings of a previous reader. Next to where Tulku writes "Starting to meditate is very simple..." - there is a circled 1. Next to where Tulku provides what could be conceptualized as step 2, there is a circled 2. I flip the page: there's a circled 3 right in tandem with Tulku's next point of instruction.

So, here's the evidence of a Western mind (that belonged to the former owner of the book) getting ready for a meditative backflip... and trying to arm itself with "conceptual instructions."

At the risk of being redundant, let me quote Tulku again: "When you are trying to understand conceptual instructions, at that time, yes , listen and try to be aware. But once you enter into this process , accept everything as fine and beautiful, just as it is" (p. 147).

What's my point? Well, be it meditation or a backflip - yes, we do need some illusion of a framework to even consider the endeavor. But ultimately - and there's no way around it - we have to take the plunge...

Here: I left for you a fresh towel...

Copyright, 2009
Pavel Somov, Ph.D.