We had our Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss yesterday. We continued working with the four foundations of mindfulness inspired by the teachings in B. Alan Wallace’s Minding Closely: The Four Applications of Mindfulness.
We practiced with the third application: mindfulness of thought. We started by establishing centered awareness in the sensory field of the body. Then we shifted attention to the domain of mental experience: ideas, thoughts, images, desires, emotions and aspirations. Alan encourages students to experience the more nebulous, boundaryless nature of our minds. He says the space of experience precedes any other space we can perceive. He asks some provocative questions:
Is the space of your mind susceptible to outside influence? Might it contain events that are accessible to you and others simultaneously? Perhaps the spaces of our minds interpenetrate. To test with experience, release all grasping on to your own psych, fixated upon “I, me, and mine.” . . . The psyche is a tiny cell in which to be confined – the substrate [“space of the mind”] is infinitely spacious.
It was fascinating to hear students share how they felt each other’s presence in practice. Many could draw on a sense of support, togetherness and even shared aspiration. I take courage in knowing that many caring people are drawn to contemplation and stillness in order to live more compassionately. I think shared practice can strengthen our capacity to pay attention, to really listen and to really see. Our consumer, technology driven culture makes it all too easy to distract ourselves from that which may be difficult to face. I get easily lost in the noise of distraction and mirage of entertainment. Coming together in stillness is like a magical antidote to this sense of alienation. We breathe, sit, walk and talk together. We experience the spaciousness of each moment and somehow realize life’s preciousness.
Inspire yourselves by exploring the radio program about Teilhard de Chardin “On the Planetary Mind & Our Spiritual Evolution.” The coming stage of evolution, he said, “won’t be driven by physical adaptation but by human consciousness, creativity, and spirit.” De Chardin was a world-renowned paleontologist, Jesuit priest and philosopher. His ideas seemed mystical in the mid 1900s but are now coming true — humanity has developed incredible capacities for collective, global intelligence. Yet our well being depends on a vision of the earth and the universe that includes, as he put it, “the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter.”
Do our minds interpenetrate? Do our hearts? I will live with these questions in practice. I will think of you and smile.