No-where To Go Meditation

“You’ll know when your absolutely in the present moments when there’s nowhere else to go.” – Suti Na

In presence, there’s nowhere for the body, emotions, moods, feelings, and senses to escape. Experience is right here, right now. But the system we call “Bryan” doesn’t care about being in this “location” for very long. It has survived by moving quickly between attention in reality and what the system senses, interprets, and manipulates to it’s advantage by “thinking” about reality. In the “streaming thoughts” perspective, everything is imagination and fantasy manifested by the process we call “thinking.” In the other perspective I’m sitting and breathing in a room. One’s attention on sensing in presence, the other is attention on streaming thoughts. Simple, one or the other will be noticed in the field of attention at any given moment.

I guess that’s really it, isn’t it? Once I stop playing in the “mind-field” of imaginings of future and recovering bits and pieces of the past, and breathe into the present moment, I am profoundly here and in presence. There’ nowhere to go or be. Everything that exists in my sense world is directly in front of me in proximity. There I am, sitting in a room, people, carpet, lights, chairs, windows, tables, posters, a small table, all combined to form passing moments in presence. Sitting and breathing, noticing and absorbing here-ness. It manifests that way, reality does, no matter where we are, outside, inside, good or bad weather, “reality is”, isn’t it?

And, seamlessly, without consciously noticing, the attention in presence disappears into streaming thoughts. The conditioned separate personality is “off to the races.” In attention, the stream of thought is worried about this woman it doesn’t like, wonders about whether another person is OK, and considers walking meditation and how others might think of it walking instead of sitting. a beach scene appears from a vacation I took with my mom’s parents, I’m alone somewhere in Michigan and burying a plastic army man in crystal white sand, a hot sun blazing baking everything, and then a flash of a sexual encounter in a moving car decades ago on a street called Canter, in Warren, Michigan, only to be replaced by a scene when Ray and I, Ray of stock-boy fame, are stealing candy from the Neisner’s storeroom, a flash of looking out the window of a car and watching lightening strikes in the desert, and then waiting nervously in third grade because the teacher, Mrs. McGlaughlin, is obsessing about our nails and insisted on a weekly inspection, I’m in love and she’s one seat away and I’m looking at my young boy imperfect nails, but that’s Ok because suddenly I’m looking through records at Virgin Records in Orlando………………………….

And suddenly “I” reforms because the focus of attention drops away from the streaming thoughts and attention turns to exactly where I am in time and space.

That’s it folks. It’s what I’m working with at this point. Is there Nirvana in there? Enlightenment? Can I “train the mind” for a future experience, when in reality there’s no “I” that’s busily creating streaming thoughts to train or be trained. “I am thinking” is one of the philosophies that gives us as sense of control, and enables us to believe we have power in our little world. And whenever there is an “I” thinking, we find a singular separate egoic self trying desperately to figure out the world before it gets gotten. It’s a somewhat useful story, with the emphasis on “story.”

This is the only pattern I’ve ever seen in meditation, a process, a flow, back and forth between thoughts and reality. In fact, it’s the only pattern I’ve noticed period.

So I pay attention, and see when I fall back into these present moments, and there I practice conscious dharma when I remember, until the world slides back into the misty world of thoughts, fantasies, delusions, and illusions. (I’m going to “train, manipulate, and control that? Really?)

There’s a lava lamp on the table, another one shines in the reflection in the window. There’s a buzzing in the worn out ears, and the Goldberg Variations play thanks to Alexa. Suddenly a scene from “Silence of the Lambs” appears and the words “ready whenever you are” tease me with more fun useless thoughts of nothing at all. In the movie, the Goldberg Variations sing on, as Hannibal takes his revenge on the free range rude.

Bryan Wagner

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