If perception of sound depends on our state of mind, then conversely a state of mind can hardly exist without an external world with which it is in relation and that conditions it — either our immediate present environment, or something that happened in the past and that now echoes or goes on happening in our minds. There is never any state of mind that is not in some part, however small, in relation to the sounds around it — the bird singing and a television overheard as I write this now, for example. (...)
It’s fairly easy to concentrate on the body in motion. If you’re running or swimming, it’s possible to move into a wordless or semi-wordless state that gives the impression of silence for long periods. In fact one of the refreshing, even addictive, things about sport is the feeling that the mind has been given a break from its duty of constantly building up our ego.
But in Vipassana you concentrate on sensation in stillness, sitting down, not necessarily cross-legged, though most people do sit that way. And sitting without changing position, sitting still. As soon as you try to do this, you become aware of a connection between silence and stillness, noise and motion. No sooner are you sitting still than the body is eager to move, or at least to fidget. It grows uncomfortable. In the same way, no sooner is there silence than the mind is eager to talk. In fact we quickly appreciate that sound ismovement: words move, music moves, through time. We use sound and movement to avoid the irksomeness of stasis. This is particularly true if you are in physical pain. You shift from foot to foot, you move from room to room.
Sitting still, denying yourself physical movement, the mind’s instinctive reaction is to retreat into its normal buzzing monologue — hoping that focusing the mind elsewhere will relieve physical discomfort. This would normally be the case; normally, if ignored, the body would fidget and shift, to avoid accumulating tension. But on this occasion we are asking it to sit still while we think and, since it can’t fidget, it grows more and more tense and uncomfortable. Eventually, this discomfort forces the mind back from its chatter to the body. But finding only discomfort or even pain in the body, it again seeks to escape into language and thought. Back and forth from troubled mind to tormented body, things get worse and worse.
Silence, then, combined with stillness — the two are intimately related — invites us to observe the relationship between consciousness and the body, in movement and moving thought. Much is said when people set off to meditation retreats about the importance of ‘finding themselves’. And there is much imagined drama. People expect old traumas to surface, as though in psychoanalysis. In fact, what you actually discover is less personal than you would suppose. You discover how the construct of consciousness and self, something we all share, normally gets through time, to a large extent by ignoring our physical being and existence in the present moment. Some of the early names for meditation in the Pali language of the Buddhist scriptures, far from linking it to religion, referred only to ‘mental exercises’.
by Tim Parks, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Judy Shreve, Winter Leaves
