{"id":9959,"date":"2012-02-24T11:16:28","date_gmt":"2012-02-24T16:16:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=9959"},"modified":"2012-02-24T12:03:43","modified_gmt":"2012-02-24T17:03:43","slug":"sitting-silent-open-minded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/sitting-silent-open-minded\/","title":{"rendered":"Sitting, Silent, Open-Minded"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>[Caption: Vicar’s wife (sympathisingly):\u00a0“Now that you can’t get about, and are not able to read, how do you manage to occupy the time?”\u00a0Old Man:\u00a0“Well, Mum, sometimes I sits and thinks; and then again I just sits.”<\/em> For more information, see the note<\/a> at the foot of this post.]\n

From whiskey river<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n

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 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 flower petal. When body and mind are one, then the whole thing, 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 are propped up by ideas and words, imagines itself to be some sort of an entity (in a society of like entities) may suddenly fall away, dissolve into formless faux 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.<\/p>\n

Like the round bottomed Bodhidharma doll<\/a>, 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”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard<\/em>)<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The wind blows hard among the pines
\nToward the beginning
\nof an endless past.
\nListen: you’ve heard everything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Shinkichi Takahashi [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from whiskey river:<\/p>\n

Extinction of Silence<\/strong><\/p>\n

That it was shy when alive goes without saying.
\nWe know it vanished at the sound of voices<\/p>\n

Or footsteps. It took wing at the slightest noises,
\nThough it could be approached by someone praying.<\/p>\n

We have no recordings of it, though of course
\nIn the basement of the Museum, we have some stuffed<\/p>\n

Moth-eaten specimens — the Lesser Ruffed
\nAnd Yellow Spotted — filed in narrow drawers.<\/p>\n

But its song is lost. If it was related to
\nA species of Quiet, or of another feather,<\/p>\n

No researcher can know. Not even whether
\nA breeding pair still nests deep in the bayou,<\/p>\n

Where legend has it some once common bird
\nDecades ago was first not seen, not heard.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(A.E. Stallings [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

Letter to Denise<\/strong><\/p>\n

Remember when you put on that wig
\nFrom the grab bag and then looked at yourself
\nIn the mirror and laughed, and we laughed together?
\nIt was a transformation, glamorous flowing tresses.
\nWho knows if you might not have liked to wear
\nThat wig permanently, but of course you
\nWouldn’t. Remember when you told me how
\nYou meditated, looking at a stone until
\nYou knew the soul of the stone? Inwardly I
\nScoffed, being the backwoods pragmatic Yankee
\nThat I was, yet I knew what you meant. I
\nCalled it love. No magic was needed. And we
\nLoved each other too, not in the way of
\nRomance but in the way of two poets loving
\nA stone, and the world that the stone signified.
\nRemember when we had that argument over
\nPee and piss in your poem about the bear?
\n“Bears don\u2019t pee, they piss,” I said. But you were
\nAdamant. “My bears pee.” And that was that.
\nThen you moved away, across the continent,
\nAnd sometimes for a year I didn’t see you.
\nWe phoned and wrote, we kept in touch. And then
\nYou moved again, much farther away, I don’t
\nKnow where. No word from you now at all. But
\nI am faithful, my dear Denise. And I still
\nLove the stone, and, yes, I know its soul.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Hayden Carruth [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

…as [Sergeant-Pilot Tommy Prosser] glanced up the Channel to the east he saw the sun begin to rise. The air was empty and serene as the orange sun extracted itself calmly and steadily from the sticky yellow bar of the horizon. Prosser followed its slow exposure. Out of trained instinct, his head jerked on his neck every three seconds, but it seems unlikely he would have spotted a German fighter had there been one. All he could take in was the sun rising from the sea: stately, inexorable, almost comic…<\/p>\n

Halfway across the Channel he allowed himself, like the German bomber crews, to think about hot coffee and the bacon sandwich he would eat after debriefing. Then something happened. The speed of his descent had driven the sun back below the horizon, and as he looked towards the east he saw it rise again: the same sun coming up from the same place across the same sea. Once more, Prosser put aside caution and just watched: the orange globe, the yellow bar, the horizon\u2019s shelf, the serene air, and the smooth, weightless lift of the sun as it rose from the waves for the second time that morning. It was an ordinary miracle he would never forget.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Julian Barnes [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(E.B. White [widely quoted, apparently <\/em>never sourced<\/em>])<\/p>\n

_______________________<\/p>\n

<\/a>Note (about the image):<\/strong>\u00a0The way I always heard that punchline, and remember seeing in various forms — on posters, bumper stickers, ticky-tacky woodburned red-cedar plaques and such — was: Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.<\/em>\u00a0It seemed such an obvious fit with today’s theme (such as it is). And I came this<\/em>\u00a0close to including it in that form, attributing it to folksy humorist “Kin” Hubbard<\/a>. It’s so like something he’d say<\/a>, right?<\/p>\n

But, well, you know how it is. I got to wondering if Hubbard had really said it, or even said it first<\/em>… No, insisted Google (at the outset): it came from folksy baseball great Satchel Paige<\/a>. Okay — it sorta sounded like something he’d say, too…<\/p>\n

<annoyingly loud “wrong answer!” buzzer><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Nope. It was this cartoon in British humor magazine Punch<\/em>, from October 1906 (the year Satchel Paige was born). If you’d like to see the original page in context with the rest of the issue, it’s here<\/a>. (For an index to online copies of the Punch<\/em>\u00a0archives through 1922, see the corresponding University of Pennsylvania’s Online Books Page<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

[back to top<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Caption: Vicar’s wife (sympathisingly):\u00a0“Now that you can’t get about, and are not able to read, how do you manage to occupy the time?”\u00a0Old Man:\u00a0“Well, Mum, sometimes I sits and thinks; and then again I just sits.” For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.] From whiskey river: Meditation has nothing to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,273,5,251,324],"tags":[63,559,836,1192,1435,2825,2826,2827,2828,2829,2830],"class_list":{"0":"post-9959","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","8":"category-comics","9":"category-06_writing","10":"category-poetry-writing_cat","11":"category-researchresources","12":"tag-eb-white","13":"tag-silence","14":"tag-julian-barnes","15":"tag-shinkichi-takahashi","16":"tag-a-e-stallings","17":"tag-meditation","18":"tag-punch","19":"tag-peter-matthiessen","20":"tag-hayden-carruth","21":"tag-sitting-and-thinking","22":"tag-just-sitting","23":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-2AD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9959"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9972,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9959\/revisions\/9972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}