Concerning Techniques

All of us who become aware of a complex universe—personally, actually aware, not merely repeating learned beliefs without genuine personal effort to understand—then experience the dilemma of a split. The ranges of reality not readily accessible to the senses become real; but our attention is pulled into the world. To detach is difficult, to detach effectively almost impossible. Nor does it always seem appropriate: we have responsibilities, and not merely for those things immediately before us. We are embedded in the society as a whole. We form links in myriad networks. As members of families we have loved ones we care about, and these networks grow enormously as we age. And beyond our families are others, ranging from those who are, for all intents and purposes, powerfully related to us, sometimes closer than relatives. We have friends, neighbors. And although the feelings diminish with distance and numbers, the welfare of humanity as a whole is our concern. We are our brother’s keeper. This makes it problematical to leave the world go hang—even if we had the wealth or dared to live in genuine poverty such that we could entirely look away. We’re in the world, like it or not. And out attachment follows our attention; nor is attention a kind of neutral sort of power; it produces identification. And thus we tend to become the prisoners of our own concerns.

Interesting techniques have come down to us over time, developed by the gifted—or the stubborn. They range from periodic, but daily, detachment and remembering—prayer and meditation. But my experience is that all things repeated decay into habit. Whatever becomes routine loses its force. Therefore it’s good to develop an arsenal of techniques so that when the morning’s meditation begins to lose its power—and an hour after meditating, driving to work, we find ourselves literally or internally shouting obscenities at some driver who’s cut in front of us—then it’s time to pick up something else, wipe it clean, begin to use it again, until its potency is weakened too. Then something else.

One technique I’d heard about—and used—is to split the attention, thus to attempt, at all times, to be aware. This is sometimes rendered as “remembering the self.” This one comes from Sufi sources. A Christian variant is the Jesus Prayer, repeated constantly. It has its counterpart in the Hindu mantra and in the repetition of the names of God in Muslim culture. “Self-remembering” is a secular version of these. This technique is powerful when you first attempt it—but the problem is that you have to remember to remember; and by the time you’ve trained yourself to do so, the technique may have lost its effectiveness. But at times like that there is always something else worth trying.

One time I had the notion that it might be useful to use my own habits as a reminder. Most of us wear watches, and most on the left wrist. But the right side is available. So I switched my watch to the right side. For a while this worked quite nicely. The absence of the watch reminded me. It broke the spell of identification. And that is the value of such techniques—to serve as reminders.

It’s also useful, sometimes, to be reminded—which a blog entry like this can do. Hence it serves a purpose. But victory in this realm—indeed in this dimension—is never due to any kind of technique. If it were, we’d all be walking on water.

And this, then, managed to get me past the furies that this morning’s paper managed to produce in me. But something reminded me—in effect it was Brigitte’s recent teaching me how to tie my shoelaces so that they’ll lie across my shoe, rather than pointing at its tip—reminded me that I mustn’t indulge but get past all that. It’s a big universe, out there, and in the end, all is well.