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There is no Spoon:
Why We Meditate
by Si Hing A. J. Boyer
INT. ROOM OF POTENTIALS (MATRIX) - DAY
Neo enters and finally understands the attention given to his age. The Potentials are all little children. The room feels at once like a Buddhist temple and a kindergarten class. The children's heads are either shaved or thick with dreadlocks. Some are playing, others meditating or practicing their gift. Neo watches a little girl levitate wooden alphabet blocks. A skinny BOY holds a SPOON which sways like a blade of grass as he bends it with his rnind. Neo crosses to him, sits. The Boy smiles as Neo picks up a spoon and tries to imitate him. Despite his best efforts, Neo cannot make it bend.
SPOON BOY
Your spoon does not bend because it is just that, a spoon. Mine bends because there is no spoon, just my mind.
Neo watches as it curls into a knot.
SPOON BOY
Link yourself to the spoon. Become the spoon and bend yourself.
Neo nods, again holding up his spoon.
NEO
There is no spoon. Right.
He concentrates. The spoon begins to bend just as the Priestess touches his shoulder.
PRIESTESS
The Oracle will see you now.
Spoon Boy smiles.
Before you start thinking that there’s some freaky cultish reason to why we sit, usually Japanese-style, on the hard wood floor to relax and close our eyes, let me offer some explanation about meditation and why we always begin class this way. It does happen to be an important part of our daily training ritual, so it goes without saying that you ought to have an understanding of the purpose for this aspect of our martial art. Obviously, an entire book can be dedicated to discussing the various tools and techniques of meditation, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. We’re just going to brush on the topic of meditation, but in doing so go into the very fundamental core of why we do it. And perhaps the essential reason anybody in the world really does it.
So, do you really want to know? Okay, read closely. The secret is this: ultimately, and I mean that in the truest sense of the word—there really is no reason. I don’t mean that to sound like some poorly interpreted Bruce Lee philosophy. But really, it’s the truth. Don’t completely disregard this; allow me to explain to you what I mean and why I say this. I’m sure you’re tempted not to take anything seriously from a guy who’s about to spend an entire article explaining reasons why there is no reason for something (meditation). And actually, that’s a pretty good attitude to take. You don’t really need to take anything I say seriously. But rather—as Alan Watts would say—sincerely.
I think it can be agreed, especially among martial artists, that all of our meditative practices come from the Far East. Whether they be of Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan, or Indian tradition. Different schools of thought across Asia have different reasons, methods and goals for meditation. However, the ultimate goal for most schools is the eventual attainment of enlightenment. Enlightenment is not thought of as an actual place, as is the concept of “heaven” in our culture, but rather as a state of mind or being. Here in the west, meditation has primarily become used as a tool for relaxation and overall wellness of body and mind. And I think that’s great, but we’re going to expand on that. In fact, I’d rather you not think of it as goal-oriented meditation.
Even though in the east enlightenment isn’t thought of as a physical place like heaven, it is thought of by some schools
of thought as something that must be attained (through meditation and perhaps other spiritual practices) and therefore something that is not reached until after years of training. In other words, it’s a goal. For some, it’s not even possible to achieve until you die, which sounds like a pretty bum deal to me. “Spend all your life perfecting a calm meditative state, but you won’t really be enlightened till you die. Good luck.” So I have no way of really knowing what’s
going to happen to me when I die because I’ve never died a death before that I can recall, but that is supposed to be the only point in my life when I will find enlightenment? Ah! Now that might just depend on how you define enlightenment. But even if that’s true, (and hey, it could be) it’s beside the point. Remember, we don’t want to meditate with a specific goal in mind, as that is exactly opposite to what meditation should be. To set the record straight, I’m definitely not saying that goal-setting is a bad strategy in life. I’m strictly referring to the practice of meditation.
I don’t advocate meditating for religious purposes either, for reasons which are irrelevant to this topic. A lot of people out there do generally associate meditation with eastern religions, but there doesn’t necessarily need to be a religious purpose to meditation. Even the idea of enlightenment needn’t be a religious one, as some people think. You don’t have to be a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Taoist or a monk to experience enlightenment. You could be anything from an Atheist to a Death Metal singer and still experience “enlightenment." For now, let’s think of meditation as simply an exercise.
My guess is before you read this article most of you didn’t have any thoughts about becoming enlightened while you meditated. Maybe you still won’t. A lot of you probably weren’t really sure why you did it, but you did it anyway because you had to, right? (Obviously, some people are exceptions to this.) Yet, if you found yourself sitting there, simply taking in all the sensations around you without attaching any thought labels to them and just doing nothing else but being there, living in the moment (key words), even if only for a minute—then you had it. You were in the groove. Without knowing it, you were in that meditative, very “Zen-like” state. And you didn’t even need to read the Bhagavad-Gita. But you see, that’s the whole point. You don’t need to know it. In fact, you shouldn’t know it! Because it’s not about knowing anything.
I know what you’re thinking: “Slow down, Yoda.” There I go again talking in psycho-babble riddles. Actually, no. I'm not. Allow me to continue.
Alan Watts was a scholar of Eastern Philosophy, and I believe it was during the 1970s that he lectured. You can find published books, articles, internet sites and even Google Video and YouTube videos that feature his lectures. He gave the majority of, if not all of his lectures in person and he was an absolutely brilliant philosopher. In one of his lectures, entitled “Alan Watts Teaches Meditation” he made a very interesting point when he explained that there’s a difference between reality as it is and reality as we perceive it in our minds. For example, whatever ideas we have about ourselves and who we are can be completely different from what others actually think of us. Or conversely, you may allow other people’s opinions about you to define who you are (we all probably do a little of both). Neither can tell you who you really are because opinions and ideas are like symbols—they represent the things they stand for but are not the things themselves.
I’ll quote Bruce Lee (who is actually referring to an old Buddhist teaching, perhaps attributable to Siddhartha Gautama, although East Indian and Chinese philosophies instruct similarly) on this one too: “It is like a finger pointing to the moon.” (Classic line right there). “Don’t focus on the finger or you will miss all of that heavenly glory.” In other words, the finger points to the moon, but it’s not actually the moon right? Well that’s exactly how symbols and ideas about reality work, too.
To quote another source (the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu): “The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.” It’s the same with everything else. In the same way that words stand for things in reality, but are only symbols—so too our thoughts and ideas about reality shouldn't be mistaken for the real thing. If you’re too busy thinking about reality, how can you experience it as it is? You can’t because it’s impossible to think anything else but thoughts.
So it can be said that meditation temporarily releases our connection to symbols. Everyone has different ideas about the world, which is why everyone sees it in a different way. A beautiful place, a gloomy prison, an obstacle, a stepping stone on the way to eternity. Whatever. Of course, all of these are rather fragmented world views (and I borrow that term Ken Wilber, author of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution), even the good ones. I believe that a holistic personal view of the world can be achieved through a healthy study of various cultures, world views, religious beliefs and philosophies from around the world. But I’m getting off the subject.
Granted, we’re human. We can’t possibly spend every minute of every day in a meditative state, viewing reality “in its suchness” (Bruce Lee/Siddhartha Gautama) without thoughts or ideas. So how is it we civilized people can take the time to get in touch with reality, which is absent of all those thoughts and ideas?
….Drum role, please? You guessed it: meditation! Okay, that was lame. Moving on.
Goswami Kriyananda struck home, I think, when he said in his book Beginner’s Guide to Meditation, “it is the key to the core of existence (p. 63).” The core of reality. Because when you meditate, you quiet all the noise and voices in your mind so that you’re not doing anything else but what you’re doing, not even mentally. You’re living right there in the moment. The “eternal now” as it’s referred to by some philosophers (such as Eckhart Tolle). You’re effortlessly experiencing reality in the simplest way possible. Your mind is at ease, without, as Alan Watts said: “The sensation of a second mind, or ego-mind, standing over it with a club.”
So I want you to think of meditation, for one, as a way to ultimately get in-touch with reality, because as civilized human beings we’re fundamentally out-of-touch with reality on a daily basis.
Coming back to the subject of enlightenment, I’m going to discuss a concept that is common to Zen philosophy. Zen, also known as Ch’an in China, is a type of Buddhist philosophy. It is not a religion. The concept of enlightenment in Zen Buddhism, especially as it is explained by Watts, is that it’s not thought of as something out of your grasp. It’s not something that you must attain—which implies therefore that you don’t have it, that you have to get it. Instead, enlightenment is already here. It’s always here. Where else could it be? How else can it be attained if not in the immediate moment? The entire point of life is only reached in the immediate moment. After all this moment is all that exists, existed or will ever exist. Even when you plan for the future or reminisce about the past, it’s all happening right now. Past and future can’t possibly exist in reality as we know it except as concepts.
So becoming "enlightened" really becomes a matter of just realizing that you already are in the first place. We see that this idea of enlightenment is really a realization, rather than a long-term goal. You may have it one moment in your life, and not have it the next. Alan Watts once said that many people, in the course of their Zen training say, “I’ve realized that there was nothing to realize. It was all there from the start.” But you don’t have to become a Zen Buddhist to understand that yourself. Even if you’re new to this subject, you have what is often called “the beginner’s mind,” and that’s a very good thing. I think it was a man called Christ who said something like, “To enter the kingdom of heaven, one must be as a child.”
Meditating has nothing to do with “knowing” how to meditate. You can know techniques, you can know postures and mantras—which are great, because all those things do help, they’re of course “tools” of meditation—but meditation in and of itself is an effortless and mindless thing. Mind-less in the sense that oriental philosophy has of wu-hsin in Chinese or mushin in Japanese, both which are translated as “no-mind.” The less mind, the better. No, that doesn’t mean you need to reduce yourself to a cross-eyed, drooling idiot. It’s simply used to describe your state of mind during meditation. And this state is important because this is how we connect to reality in the simplest and purest way possible and it is also how we live presently and completely in the immediate moment. Have you ever seen Cesar Milan, the “Dog Whisperer”, on television? That guy’s got it. He must be a guru or Zen master in disguise. He understands living in the moment and applies that wisdom to what he does. Anyone can do it.
The point I’m trying to make here is that when you meditate, don’t try to do anything or try to get anywhere or arrive at a particular goal. Because the point of meditation is not to get somewhere. If you think that, you’re missing the point. The point of meditation is meditation itself. It’s the moment. Watts very wisely compares this to dancing. As he says, anyone who loves to dance obviously doesn’t do it to arrive at a particular spot on the floor, nor do you dance as quickly as you can to see who can finish first. No, the point of dancing is the dance itself—the enjoyment you get out of it. Which should basically be the entire point of meditating—ultimately, you do it because its fun, or because you enjoy it.
There’s no need to assign any terribly mystical or deeper meaning to it because the whole meaning is that there is no meaning. It’s the same with beautiful music as well… there’s no real purpose to music other than the music itself. The music is the purpose and vice versa.
Perhaps the same can be said of life. You hear people ask this question all the time: “What’s the meaning of life?” Well, what if the meaning of life is the living of life itself? Like dance or music, perhaps life needs no meaning.
Whether you wish to experience enlightenment, reach a higher state of consciousness or find some deeper meaning of life, meditating in itself has no meaning outside of itself. If you’re trying for something as you meditate, you can’t get to it. You don’t even try to be relaxed or empty-minded or enlightened. It’s like saying to yourself, “I MUST relax!” It doesn’t work. Because that’s directly contradictive to the effortlessness of meditation—you’re doing nothing but just being there. You just do it.
And that is precisely why the profound reason or meaning for meditation is that there really is no reason or meaning. There doesn’t need to be.
It’s like a heightened state of pure awareness in which the mind is silent and calm and taking in all the sounds, scents, feelings and sensations without the interference of thought. It may seem like a difficult task—the fact that meditating is so simple is exactly what makes it so complicated (by now you can probably see that paradoxes are quite common to eastern philosophy).
So, after all that—what do we get out of meditation? What are the results, if any?
And it’s quite ironic actually: even though during meditation we don’t have any particular purpose in mind because we shouldn’t have anything at all going on in our minds, there are direct benefits of meditation.
Things you don’t even need to think about, they’re just natural consequences of being in the meditative state. There’s another paradox for you. You don’t need to meditate strictly for the purpose of relaxation or connecting to the environment around you. In other words, you don’t’ need to say to yourself, “Okay, I’m going to try to be real calm now, relax and connect to my environment.” Remember, there’s no try involved. Meditate for the purpose of meditating and the results of meditating come naturally in and of themselves.
So, in just the same way that you don’t need to consciously will your heart to be healthier, your muscles to grow or get stronger because you’ve started an exercise program, the effects of being in the meditative state come naturally, the less you force it. We may say that relaxation happens to you. So does stress relief, a higher sense of consciousness (as some say), a greater sense of self, or even the experience of enlightenment.
There’s no need to mentally reach for any of these things. Remember that one can never exist without the other and so as soon as you attempt to reach for a certain goal, you’re simultaneously acknowledging not being relaxed, or stress-free, or enlightened. That is the fundamental problem of all thought, which is dualistic. What do I mean by that? Think any thought you can possibly think of and you can think the opposite of that thought. Hence, thoughts are dualistic. So if you think that you need to attain enlightenment, you’re thinking that you need to attain it because you don’t have it.
That’s mistake number one.
My advice to you would be to simply allow it to happen to you—above all, meditate because you’re meditating.
That’s it. Then you’re in it. You’re jamming to the rhythm of the whole universe. And all it takes is mindlessness. Meditation. As Alan Watts once said, “When you lose your mind, you come to your senses.”
In fact, I would like to end in gratitude to him and his wisdom as part of my inspiration to write this article.
Just remember to keep it simple. You don’t need to imagine yourself a Samurai warrior to get into the proper mind set for meditating. I highly encourage anyone interested in meditation to pursue it as a study and learn a variety of methods; you have nothing to lose in learning about this ancient tradition.