If you don’t know anything at all about meditation, what it really is is it’s about
paying attention
in a systematic way and for no reason other than to be awake, because a lot of the time,
if you
pay attention to where your mind is at, it’s not in the present moment.
It’s off someplace else,
either in the future or in the past.
You know all this.
You spent huge amounts of time worrying
and planning and then being upset about what happened or what didn’t happen, and the
present
moment, which is the only time we have to create or to be in relationship or to love
or to do
anything, it gets kind of squeezed, and so we’re blasting through our present moments
to get
hopefully to better moments at some point, whether it’s the weekend or vacation in
the Bahamas
or whatever it is, where it’ll all fall together, and of course it doesn’t, because
it rains and the
kids are cranky or sick or you can’t go or whatever it is, so the conditions are never
actually right
for being in the present moment, which is why we don’t want to be there so much.
I mean, if
they were just great, then we’d all just be here all the time, but since it’s never
really satisfactory,
we drive ourselves insane, really, trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic
as opposed
to sort of understanding that we’re not the Titanic to begin with.
So anyway, that calligraphy is
the calligraphy for “mindfulness,” and I just want to say that in Chinese, various
ideograms are
made up of other ideograms, and the character for mindfulness is made up of the ideogram
for
“presence.”
That’s the top one, like the little hat over the character for “heart,” so when
you hear
the word “mindfulness” you have to understand that it’s “presence of heart.”