27. The Art of Doing Nothing

There’s a story from 2012, I think. But I only recently stumbled on it online about a woman who was on a tour bus in Iceland. And at one point when the bus stopped near a scenic Canyon, rest stop, she got off and decided to change your clothes. And once you return to the bus, nobody recognized her. So when it came time to leave, many people grew concerned that the woman in her original likeness was missing. And they told the driver that an Asian woman in dark clothes had not yet returned to the bus. And apparently, the woman in question didn’t recognize this description of herself. And so she too, became concerned about the missing traveler, and a search party was quickly formed. And she joined it. And the search apparently went on all day and into the night. And the police were notified, and the Coast Guard was notified to and they even ready to helicopter for use in the morning. And it wasn’t until 3am, that the woman finally realized that she was the missing person. And of course, the search was called off. Now, this is obviously a quite crazy and comical situation. But we’re actually in a similar position with respect to our own minds.

Because we spend our lives seeking. And the goal of our search is poorly defined. We get inducted into a search, by our culture, by the expectations that others place on us, and which we learn to place on ourselves. And we learn that there are things we want out of life, largely because others want them. We want to succeed in various ways rather than fail. And we need to acquire skills to do this. And we want all the social advantages that come with success. We want others to respect us why we want this is never really inspected. It goes without saying this is something we crave. Of course, various sources of danger and disappointment seem to lurk everywhere. And however much we succeed, things naturally fall apart. Everything needs to be shored up against the forces of entropy. And the landscape continues to shift. Expectations change. Culture is like a vast tide that keeps sweeping everything out toward a horizon that we can’t clearly see. Where is all this going? What will life be like in 10 years? Think of everything that captures your attention, the things you buy, or wish you could buy, how you dress, and all the preferences that are enshrined there in your closet, your exercise routine, your relationship to sleep, your diet, consider all your efforts to improve these things, or to maintain them, or to reconsider them. And of course, all the while you hope to have whatever fun you can have, while making these efforts, right to entertain yourself socially, or binge watch the latest series on Netflix, you’re continually in motion as a matter of attention. This is one damn thing after the next. And then occasionally something big happens, somebody close to you dies, say and you have a moment to reflect on the whole spectacle of what is otherwise normal. And you might think what is the point of all of this? What am I up to really? i am not saying the details of life don’t matter. It’s not that fun, doesn’t matter, or work, or money, or clothing. There are countless transitory sources of satisfaction. And if we have our priorities straight, these are ranked in a hierarchy of sorts, at least implicitly. And we spend our time and attention in ways that are proportionate to what we actually value. Now, we might be lying to ourselves about what our hierarchy actually is. For instance, I might believe that my kids are the most important thing in the world to me. But if that’s true, they should get more of my time and attention then my following college football does is Against this background of seeking satisfaction, amid ceaseless change, that you can see how radical and act meditation actually is. Meditation is the act of calling off the search is the art of doing nothing. But we should be clear about what it means to do nothing, because it actually matters what sort of nothing one is doing. For instance, you can just space out and make no mental effort at all. And then you’ll naturally be lost in thought, just daydreaming. Now, this is actually our default state when we’re not explicitly paying attention to something or trying to get something done. In fact, it started to fall in state even when we’re doing many things that do require our attention. like driving a car, Foster’s keep coming. And we keep thinking them, for better or worse. And if you pay attention to the character of your thoughts, you’ll find that you’re mostly talking to yourself about all the things you want to do or wish you had done to become happy. You’re continuously narrating the search. So that’s not quite the doing nothing, we’re after one, one first begins to meditate, the practice seems like it requires effort, it doesn’t seem like you’re doing nothing, you’re actually struggling to pay attention to the breath, for instance, or to other sensations in your body, or to sound or even to thoughts themselves. And the struggle is to sustain one’s mindfulness for any significant amount of time, without being lost in thought. And it’s true, this apparent struggle continues for quite some time. But once you know how to meditate, you discover that real mindfulness is free of effort, it to simply appears like anything else, the clouds part on their own. And you just noticed the next thing you notice. And you can even try to practice this way from the beginning. And rather than strategically pay attention to an object of meditation, like the breath, you can practice what’s often called choiceless awareness, where you just notice whatever you notice, without making an effort to stay focused on any specific object. But this isn’t quite doing nothing, either. There’s still this fluctuation, this feeling of being lost, and found, this game of cat and mouse with attention. And there can still be this subtle or not so subtle sense of seeking to get somewhere. And the sense that there’s a self that is doing the seeking, the only way of truly doing nothing, is to recognize how consciousness always already is - open, unobstructed, effortlessly aware of its apparent changes. You have to recognize what you would otherwise seek - the very context of any effort you could make, to pay attention. You have to turn about and realize that nothing is or can be lost.

Think of that woman on the bus, the moment before she realized that she was the object of the search. She’s looking for a lost tourist. And think of that next moment, when she suddenly realizes that she is the one who has been presumed lost. Now, is it accurate to say that she has now found herself? Was the search ever fulfilled? No, there was a false premise that had been unrecognized. Just think of how the sense of seeking evaporated In her case. The recognition of consciousness reveals that the contents of consciousness are beside the point. And all seeking is an effort to improve or to maintain or to otherwise modify the contents of consciousness. So the freedom that you find in meditation is not a change in experience, really, it’s the recognition of the context of experience itself. You simply need to drop back and recognize the condition in which everything is already appearing - thoughts and intentions and moods, and emotions, sensations, perceptions. Everything is simply appearing. As a matter of experience there is no you apart from this flow.

So the real way of doing nothing, isn’t to stop doing anything - it is simply to recognize it. Everything is already happening on its own.