Bursting

I took a meditation vacation this weekend. I cleaned my house, got ready for a trip, and rested. After the last few weeks of health anxieties, I think I was a little numb upstairs.

It takes a bit to get back in—it was rather like getting into the ocean this morning—but once there, my resistance took a while to catch up and I had some clear sailing for a bit. About ten minutes.

Nevertheless, I noticed something in that space of time. I noticed that the trees had seemingly suddenly leafed out and closed in on the pond. The house across the pond had almost disappeared.  I had noticed the leaves coming out when I sat in the early morning every day.  I had noted the branches with various catkins and whirly gigs and flowers growing on dark stems. Then the leaves tiny and green. But for the life of me I did not see any of these stages happen. Not where the catkins came from, nor when they were done. I cannot tell you from experience whether leaves unfurl or show up tiny and grow. I suppose different trees do different things. But today it was just suddenly green everywhere—nice, big leaves in every little copse around this old mown property, and all around the pond. The pond is now what they call a “forest pond,” quiet, a hide for turtles, birds, and whatever else lurks about that I also don’t see.

I started thinking (the honeymoon of not-thinking and just perceiving was over) about how we say the couches and trees and everything else must be solid and change only slowly, which means at the rate of our perception of change. But then the trees around me make it clear that it’s me, not the trees, who misses the actually very fast process of a million changes that only look gradual to me.

It's nice to think that slow motion photography gives you the entire opening of a flower. But of course it doesn’t. In order for the flower to open, there need to be millions of steps beforehand, from the formation of the base to the petals and pistils, to whatever molecular mechanisms will allow it finally to open. There must be roots growing into the soil, and the molecules that make up the roots must form before the roots. And on and on.

So if we extrapolate from the flower, we have to admit that we see almost nothing of what is actually happening right in front of us. We perceive too slowly.

Here is the next question: so what? I think one can answer that in many ways, from the ancient Chinese concept of the Tao to the postmodern concept of emergent systems coupled with quantum mechanics (I recommend Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise to read about this more deeply—it’s where I got it.) The “so what” is that our slow perception allows us to see what we need to survive, but not much else, nor even what’s there, really. We don’t perceive that the couch is changing in “nano-nano” seconds, because we just need to know that in the next few years we can sit on it. And while we are on it, we won’t suddenly feel that we and the couch are quanta of energy popping in and out of existence and changing each other, though at one level of reality we are. That would really freak the senses out, as they need to be aware of what the body needs to survive. Nothing else.

We need to perceive objects at the level of reality and the speed of formation and disintegration that is useful to our survival. But that obviously doesn’t mean that’s the only level there is. In fact, that’s why in meditation we sit there, to try to let the body’s concerns drop. If you can do that, then the more clunky concerns and perceptions of the everyday can give way to more subtlety. And somehow the subtlety makes the surface perspective seem functional but truncated and limited, rather than beautiful or calming. The subtle is where we go to truly feel. It is below our slow perception that we can vaguely sense that we are just systems of atoms, bacteria, cells, organs, and so on, each doing its own thing, including our brains. The world that way still looks as it looks practically, but the little connections and impossibly intricate network of the whole blinking, sparking, and flashing universe between somehow come before us, and they are incomparably beautiful and peaceful. Have I sensed that? I think that maybe when I have been meditating with my eyes cast down, in that split second when my head first comes up and I blink, before I name or even know I am seeing, there is a sensation somewhere other than my senses that makes me nearly burst with love.