The Opposite of Zen?

Mindfulness and the sound of writing in your head.

What is it they say about meditation and the search for Enlightenment?

“The Master shall appear when you are ready.”

But what if the Master never shows up? Does that mean you still aren’t ready? That you may never be worthy? Maybe the Master knows you’re operating on a different plane. What if you’re an artist, particularly a poet or someone who writes fiction? Perhaps some of us aren’t meant to be ready.

Yogis and cognitive psychologists tell us that the benefits of meditation and mindfulness come from turning off the verbal mind. Writers, of course, tend to have a hard time quieting their thoughts, even when they aren’t sitting with their keyboard and screen or pencil and paper. I’ve wondered for years, then, whether writing is the opposite of Zen and maybe an impediment to my chance at ever attaining Enlightenment.

I’ve tried to be serious about meditation for years, but I’ve never been very good at exploring psychological frontiers if it means turning off my internal dialog engine — not in the heady psychonautical days of the 1970s and not here in the 2020s. Sometimes I‘m capable of several minutes of calm breathing after lunch, but the truth is I don’t feel comfortable (at all) working to shut down the commentator and storyteller in me. Ever…unless it’s my post-lunch siesta maybe.

Meditation is hard work. If it were simple, everyone would be locking in and calming down daily, and that’s clearly not the case (just turn on cable news). I try. But for me it’s impossible to get nowhere when I’ve trained my mind to swim off into the everywhere of infinite possibility and storytelling.

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