Yesterday Mona and I were chatting on the phone, and she told me about a recent experience while meditating that was - illuminating. What she was describing was something we have both encountered in Buddhist discussions, and the more I consider the concept the more valuable an insight opportunity it becomes.



Illuminating is a good choice of words, because the whole experience centers around a kind of inner light that represents the innate consciousness we all posess. In the Buddhist way of thinking, we spend (one might say waste) an awful lot of time distorting everything we experience - filtering stuff through our past memories and conditioning. This prevents us from really being present and dealing honestly with what we encounter, and causes us to construct all sorts of elaborate (and often unproductive and inappropriate) reactions and stories around otherwise innocuous happenings.

Here is the model Mona described - as embellished by me.

Our basic awareness is like a warm omnidirectional penetrating light. It has the capability of illuminating everything, revealing whatever we encounter in undistorted clarity. Ah, but we have elected to focus that light instead, and direct it tightly through a strip of motion picture film - projecting it onto a screen. The film contains images derived from our current experiences with input from our senses, but etched right on top, frame by frame, are fabricated images derived from our past experiences - and our hopes and fears (which are themselves objects of our past experiences). All these images are blended on the same strip of film, like some output from an Industrial Light and Magic post-production shop.



The lens that throws the image from the film onto the screen further distorts the picture in various subtle ways, altering its shape in response to emotions spawned by our thoughts. The resulting image that flickers on a the screen is what we take to be reality from moment to moment.



Which part of our narrow little film-watching experience is representative of our genuine current experience, and which part is a mutation of some old stock footage we have churned up from our vast collection of recycled nice/bad/hopeful/scary/love/hate and other snippets? Being able to make this distinction is one of the greatest aspirations of followers of Buddhism, and the reason so much effort is made to develop mindfulness. One could say that mindfulness just describes a way of seeing and experiencing honestly.

One way of looking at the process of meditation (there are a lot), in the Buddhist tradition, is that we just sit quietly and see if we can be free for a while from the mirror and lenses and film and screen, and just experience being present with that warm pervasive light. As thoughts arise - hopes or fears, good or bad, happy or sad - we just let let them pass without judgement. Without the projector whirring away, the raw light that is our essential awareness just dispells these artifcts before they can form real images or create a big theatrical production.

It's nice to have a break like this occasionally. Maybe in the rest of our ordinary life, away from the opportunity to sit quietly in meditation, we can take a little of this clarity with us.

---