Natural Contemplation

Natural Contemplation

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2:7 Any valid inquiry begins with not knowing, or else it merely serves to confirm what is already known. Making a shift from knowing to not-knowing opens up a space for new understanding to arise. Clearly this shift is necessary for creativity, but many people don’t realize that it is also the basis for contemplation.

2:8 Contemplation as a meditative discipline is looking into some matter for oneself with the intent to discover what’s true about it. To some degree, we all contemplate throughout our lives, but serious contemplation requires great discipline, great curiosity, or great stubbornness. As a child I possessed two of those three qualities in abundance. I would frequently set my attention on some puzzling matter and wonder about it steadfastly until something more was revealed. Around the age of six, for example, I became fascinated with the idea of time, and began to investigate it.

2:9 Like most children, I lived in a pretty simple and yet continually emerging world so it wasn’t unusual for me to start wondering how it could be that “now” changed, and became “later,” but was still always now. I had to check this out. I sat on the edge of my bed and imagined a future of standing up, knowing that once I stood, the experience would be as real as sitting. Then I would stand, and find myself in the world that I had only imagined. Although I knew I was only imagining the future, the future kept coming to pass.

2:10 I remained fascinated by this puzzle for some time. Standing and sitting, I repeated my little experiment over and over. Eventually something strange began to sink in. I realized that my whole life was somehow already happening now. It was all now, even though I could only perceive what seemed to be occurring one piece at a time. Then I suddenly got something rather startling to me. Just like moving from sitting to standing, I would move from life into death, and experience dying as the present moment. I felt like there was no separation between my present experience of being a child standing in my bedroom, and being an old man dying in my bed. This had a profound effect on my experience of life. Aside from being somewhat unnerving, it was probably the time when I first began to grasp what could be revealed through a persistent kind of wondering.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I

stay with problems longer.

—Albert Einstein

2:11 Some of my questions led to insights, but most only led to more questioning. By the time I was a teenager studying martial arts, it was natural that I would spend as much time “contemplating” Judo as I did practicing it. Unable to train as much as I wanted, I’d spend hours working out the throws in my mind. One day, I suddenly realized what the “essence” of Judo was, and my skill took a giant leap forward. Virtually overnight, I became good at it, whereas before this insight I was no better than any other beginner in my class. From this experience, I became convinced of the power of contemplation to bring about insight. I wanted more, and naturally continued to investigate things on my own, but then at age twenty I took up the study of Zen.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Book of Not Knowing, Chapter Two, Moving Beyond belief

Peter Ralston