Meditation

But Kinkaju likes honey, and Kinkaju raised bees. Lots of bees. Raising lots of bees means putting together many bee hives. The edges of bee hives fit together like the fingers of two hands, and for every "finger" there must be a nail. So that means driving about 100 nails for every bee hive box. That's a long, monotonous job. It won't do not to pay attention, or you'll hit your finger. The net result is a kind of relaxed attention.

As Kinkaju made more and more bee hives, 'e stayed in a state of relaxed attention for a longer and longer time. During that time, the truth of what Badger had said about him began to seep through Kinkaju's protective barriers. At last 'e saw, without the need to be defensive about it, that Badger had been right.

When people are under attack, they put up defenses. That's natural and necessary. But those defenses may prevent them from seeing clearly all that is going on. When one is under attack all of one's energies are going toward fending off each blow. And, without training, one's awareness can shatter. A shattered mirror cannot produce a clear and useful reflection.

The advice, "Just relax!" is easy to give but difficult to accept and put into operation. How can you relax when Goliath is preparing a thrust with hirz javelin aimed right for you? Or even: how can you relax when your best friend is getting ready to direct a punch straight toward your head in a karate practice exercise that is definitely required to be "non-contact"? Similarly, how can you be relaxed as you prepare to speak in public for the first time, meet the President, etc., etc.?

Almost from birth we are taught how to contract muscles, but those muscles are counted on to relax of their own accord once we go on to some other motion. Walking, talking, sitting, hammering, sewing, just about anything we are called on to do involves contracting our various muscles in a coordinated way. So if we are told to tighten our fingers into a fist we can very easily comply. But if somebody suffers a cramp in hirz right calf and is ordered: "Relax that leg muscle!" 'e will most likely regard the speaker as a crazy person.

Relaxing muscles "on command" is a skill that most people never learn. The most systematic approach to this task is probably that of yoga, but there are related techniques taught in the West, such as the Alexander method sometimes learned by musicians. In what Kinkaju would regard as a good karate school, every lesson is begun with both stretching exercises and also a brief kneeling meditation exercise so that both the mind and also the body are helped to relax in preparation for the lesson on karate techniques.

It is not easy to learn to relax muscles, but it is far from impossible. The most direct approach is to tighten a set of muscles and then let them go and immediately tighten another set of muscles. This approach, when used systematically, can allow one to fairly effectively relax all of the muscles of one's body.

Don't stop there, however, for one important goal of one's practice is to learn how to give a certain kind of non-verbal command, a command that says to one's muscles, "Relax!"

Once one has learned how to consciously relax muscles one can direct this conscious command toward the mind itself.

In the first chapter of the Dao De Jing, Lao Zi indicates that there is benefit to be gained from taking a tranquil view of the world, a view that is not made turbulent by passions, the view of a mind that truly reflects the outside world. In the second chapter of the book that bears hirz name, Zhuang Zi tells the story of a student who came into the room of hirz teacher and found him coming out of a deathlike trance. The teacher said, "Just now I succeeded in losing my self." From these brief mentions, we know that deep relaxation was vital to early Daoist practice, but we receive no instructions in how to meditate.

When Buddhism came into China it melded with Daoism, since both were meditative traditions, and Chan Buddhism (called Zen Buddhism in Japan) was produced. The best introduction to this form of meditative action is given by D. T. Suzuki in his book, Zen Buddhism and Japanese Culture.

Preparation for Meditation

One of the hindrances to successful meditation is physical discomfort, especially physical tension. For that reason, in the yoga ashram the teacher will typically direct the students in hatha yoga before leading them in meditation. Hatha yoga involves a good set of stretching exercises that will relieve much of one's predisposition to experience physical tension, cramps, etc. Similarly, in the karate dojo the sensei will have the students do around ten minutes of systematic stretching exercises before having them kneel down to meditate.

Postures for Meditation

One can meditate in any posture, but there are certain postures that provide a beneficial kind of bio-feedback. In Japanese martial arts, and in Zen Buddhism, the seiza or kneeling posture is used. In yoga and in Chinese Buddhist practice, the lotus posture is used. Sitting with the legs crossed can be equally effective, especially if small pillows are used to support the knees if one is not flexible to get both knees to the floor.

The reason these postures are effective is primarily because they provide a stable and even foundation for the buttocks and so make it possible for the back, neck, and head to easily be held perfectly erect. The best instruction in this erect posture comes from studying statues of monks kneeling in meditation. Another helpful approach is to imagine that a rope is attached to one's head at the point near the back of the top of the head where all the hairs point out along the radii of one circle, and that that rope is passed through a pulley attached to the ceiling and is then pulled down by a weight that is sufficient to pull up the whole trunk of the meditating student while not being heavy enough to life that student off the floor.

I think you will discover something interesting when you begin to meditate in this way. First, it is not easy to maintain a relaxed state. Tensions will come out of nowhere to make you uncomfortable, and you will gradually learn to direct your attention to them and to relax them away. But something much more interesting will happen. After you have been meditating for some time you will notice that your back, which started out nice and straight, is now curving forward. As you gain more practice, you will notice that your spine begins to curl forward when certain kinds of memories sneak into your consciousness. These will be memories of things that make you uncomfortable, perhaps unkind things that were communicated to you by other people.

These unhappy thoughts are called klesas or "affective contaminations" in Buddhism. They are the emotional scars left over from emotional and/or physical attacks made on us. They are painful experiences in the past that for some reason we must relive, over and over again. When we experience these attacks we hang our heads and "tuck our tails between our legs" just like a beaten dog. We need to cast these affective contaminations off and free ourselves for truly autonomous activity in the present.

Ordinarily, these emotional traces operate on us unnoticed because we are busily coping with all the necessities of daily life. But in meditation they stand out against a relatively clear background. Moreover, in meditation we can begin to free ourselves from them.

Suppose that a person had an abusive parent, and every time 'e indicated a desire to stretch hirz wings the abusive parent said, in the most derisive tones, "You can't do that!" That negative message has stayed in hirz mind, and pops up every time 'e thinks of setting out on some challenging project. Now this person has decided to use meditation to rid himself of the affective contaminations that make him self defeating. 'E begins to meditate, keeping hirz mind still, relaxing away all discursive thoughts by turning them off the same way 'e relaxes the twitch in hirz upper thigh. Then, after a while 'e loses focus a bit, hirz mind begins to drift, and finally 'e notices that 'e has assumed the "whipped dog" posture.

In order to counteract the "poison" in the demeaning phrase that was repeated over and over by the abusive parent, 'e now takes possession of that phrase hirzself. 'E repeats over and over, actively, in hirz own inner voice, "You can't do that!" And as 'e does so, hirz spine gradually straightens itself on its own. 'E doesn't give it a mental command to straighten up, 'e merely repeats the demeaning phrase in hirz own voice, and, as though under automatic control from some secret place, hirz spine begins to straighten.

By using meditation, all sorts of negative messages, preconceptions, and prejudices can gradually be purged from the mind. Sometimes the results are dramatic, as when this exercise makes a submerged memory break through and one "relives" an earlier traumatic event. But more often the results are gradual and will only be noticed when some event brings one's "new self" in sharp contrast to one's "former self."

That's enough for an overview of meditation. There are many good books on meditation available, and there are many ideas about what should be considered the "right way" to meditate. Kinkaju thinks that how one should meditate depends on what one wants to get done. More on that later.