The practice of intimacy is beginning to see how we separate ourselves from what we’re doing. It’s a gentle practice. Little by little, we begin to have moments when we are totally there with what we’re doing—whether sitting on the cushion or vacuuming the rug. This is the heart of the practice: the raw, direct experience of life as you live it. You know about raw food? It is food in its natural state that hasn’t been heated or broiled or pressure-cooked. That’s just the way it is. Then we cook it. Not only do we apply heat, we season it and do everything to make it wonderful and tasty. That is what we do with our experience: we cook it with ideas, concepts, theories, and explanations. The original experience—just the is-ness of it, of the simple breath or the simple sensation in the knee—gets colored or veneered in a certain way. We name it and conceptualize it. It is now a long way from its original state.
Our practice is not so much being concerned with whether the mind is happy or unhappy, or whether the moments are interesting or uninteresting, but whether we can be in touch with the way the moment is—the way it actually is. That’s a radical shift that is not easy to learn. We tend to keep adding to what’s happening to us, and filtering it. We cook it with idea and notions, and that’s what we think is happening.
Our mind has received a great deal of training in what you could call “in order to…” thinking. Whatever it is we’re doing, it’s for some other reason. Probably, if you meditate, you sit down on the cushion with some purpose in mind. I hope you can learn to just deposit that purpose in the garbage—what you were going to gain from that sitting, what you were going to get out of it. If you have that purpose, probably it will get in the way between you and what is actually happening, Far more valuable would be to have an expansive, open approach and to experience the way things unfold, to the full range of whatever happens in that period of time. If we bring intentions to the cushion, it’s much harder to do this, even if it’s just an intention to have a good sitting.
It seems we’re forever propelled into some future state that will solve everything for us. We think that if only we do the right things, we will be all right when we get there, and we bring that expectation to our meditation sittings as well. We bring it into our practice. True, the intention of practice is to awaken, but we approach this by being attentive, by using the energy of the intention that gets us to the cushion. Each moment is its own absolute truth; it’s precious for its own sake. It may lead somewhere and it may not. If you want to reach some of the contemplative states where we all want to go, the best way is not by trying to get there but by being where you are—learning to be exactly where you are.
This does not mean future enlightenment doesn’t matter. All Buddhist teachings are about enlightenment, about the actual possibility of being awake, liberated from suffering. And this, of course, sounds like a goal. It sounds as if we’re not free now and that in the future, if we’re good yogis and do exactly what the teachers tell us to do, then we will be free. Oddly, though, what takes us anywhere on this path to freedom is the ability to thoroughly and fully receive the present moment.