Eating the Menu or the Meal? (5)

Pieces of the Whole Storyis a blog about the return to wholeness of our self and world, both of which we tend to see as broken, isolated, and wrong. I draw on the world’s spiritual traditions, therapies of psyche, soma, and spirit, poetry, folktales, and the epiphanies of everyday life to bring us into awareness of the whole story.

The map is not the territory is the old saying.
I offer a variant: the menu is not the meal.

Following a path of mindfulness means choosing to see what you experience when you let go of your grip on the mental concepts you get from reading the menu, the mental description of experience internally being recited by your mind.  Instead, you choose to taste the meal of your life, directly. With a literal meal this means being moment by moment available to the tastes, smells, textures, subtle sounds of cutting, biting, chewing, and the visual forms and colors of, let’s say, butternut squash made golden in butter with sautéed red onions, shell pasta, fresh sage, and a little cream with ground pepper, umm! Not being with those words but with how the actual meal tastes at this moment, not the last time you had it. Extend that to the meal of your whole life, and it means dropping the concepts of what an experience means (how it gets languaged) in preference to being with the feelings and sensations of the experience as you choose to allow the experience to permeate you entirely. It means you can choose to not hold back from Life; you can choose to let go of what you believe you already know, and instead risk being freshly present with what is.

One of the great lightbulb moments of discovering the power of mindfulness comes when you notice the difference between what you THOUGHT an experience would be, and what you FEEL (with all of the senses) the experience actually is. This is the primordial moment of fresh learning. Ah, so all attractive people aren’t going to shame me! Or, I can feel anger fully and not act it out in a terrifying way (like Dad/Mom/my ex- did)! That gap perceived by noticing the difference has a flavor of freedom about it. You remember you are more than your thoughts. A friend once told me that for him the essence of James Joyce’s Ulysseus was real quite simple (despite the thick complexity of all the layers of meaning in the text). Joyce was just calling out to us: Come on in! The water’s fine!

In truth our experience isn’t purely of the map or of the meal, but some blend of the two. As you try practicing to see how much you are willing to let go of the menu and just be with the meal, you may notice that any moment has a dimension of depth to it. You can stay on the surface, and, as it were, read the labels on the passing boxes of your experience. Or you can slow down the conveyor belt and drop into the box of the moment to feel its depth. This is an action of relaxing, of willingness, of opening oneself fully.

So I leave you with these three metaphors as invitations:
 

• let go of the map and enter fully into the territory
• quit chewing on the menu and eat the mystery food
• slow down the conveyor belt and drop below the box label into the depth of experience.

Lost (& Found) in Thought (4)

Q. - What is the mind full of in mindfulness?
A. – It is full of awareness.

When I began to explore mindfulness, noticing-where-I-am, I noticed there were many times when I wasn’t actually aware of where I am. Where was I when I wasn’t aware? I asked myself. Aren’t I always here?...
              ...But it seemed that I was coming back to being here by asking myself, Where am I? So, where could I have gone off to when I was away from here?

Where I was was lost in thought. What can bring me back to here is touching in with “the body” (perception with the five senses) rather than going off into thought (which in Buddhism is understand as a sixth sense). This recognition of how frequently I can be lost in thought can lead those of us interested in knowing “here” to mistrust thinking. But thinking is just another place I can be. Thinking is such a compelling “place” to be that I can lose awareness of where I am. Mindfulness can be a means for discovering where I go off to in my thinking. And this becoming aware can help so much with our suffering. (We'll explore this much more later).

Let me give you one (in a series) of images I’ve come up with to help me understand the power of choosing to be mindful, choosing to be aware. By choosing to pay attention in the present moment without judgment, mindfulness allows the veil between what is conscious and what is unconscious to get thinner and to back away (as it were), so that we glimpse more of what had been unconscious. Picture a large ocean liner anchored off a coast. All that we can see of the boat from a distance (let’s imagine standing on the shore) is the conscious mind. From that distance, there seems to be a sharp division between the visible part of the big boat, and the invisible parts below the water line. Mindfulness, in this analogy, would be approaching the big boat in a small craft that we can propel with a little effort. Making only minimal effort allows the water around our small boat to not be too stirred up. Still, some effort needs to be made. That effort is the sincere desire to know our self truthfully and fully. As we approach the big vessel and allow our self to coast in the water, we notice that we can see a lot of the boat that is below the water line. What we now see is neither perfectly clear nor completely hidden. Much of our unfolding and awakening occurs through our curiosity about that perception of what is there, between the conscious and the unconscious. We are entering the twilight zone!