must not be done. If one’s expectations are followed in this selection there is the danger of never finding anything but what is already known.
Our contemporary practice of mindfulness is exactly this evenly hovering attention: deliberate alertness, being in the present moment without judgment, allowing the experience to unfold without critical interference, not holding on to only what we already know.
In 1817 John Keats spoke of Negative Capability: “The ability to remain within Mysteries, Uncertainties & Doubt without the irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Negative Capability is the poetics of listening. It is a skill that can be cultivated through practice, and like many skills, lost again and found again.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, published at the dawn of 1900, Freud contrasted this open state of mind with self-clinging, critical reflection: “The whole frame of mind of a man who is reflecting is totally different from that of a man who is observing his own psychical processes.” Freud used reflecting to mean self-critical, discursive thinking and observing to mean evenly hovering attention. “In reflection, there is one more psychical activity at work than the most attentive self-observation, and this is shown amongst other things by the tense looks and wrinkled forehead of a person pursuing his reflections as compared with the restful expression of a self-observer.” If we wish to visualize Freud’s reflecting, look at Rodin’s famous sculpture The Thinker, with his gnarled, uncomfortable posture and tight brow. Rodin was inspired by Blake’s illustration of a brooding bird-headed man, looking pained and unbalanced, muscles strained. For a very different view, that of observing, look at images of buddhas and bodhisattvas, smiling, happy, and balanced, their backs relaxed and stable: breathing.
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In 1996 my wife and I attended a week of teachings by the Dalai Lama in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. On this occasion His Holiness was under protection by the United States Secret Service. Normally Secret Service agents are guarding a visiting foreign president giving an hour-long talk on trade, military policy, or cultural exchange, and then they are off traveling to the next engagement. But here the Dalai Lama was taking five full days to explore the Indian philosophers Nagarjuna and Shantideva, whose writings in the first millennium remain the foundation of our modern ideas of mindfulness.
The Pasadena Civic is an ornate Art Deco building from 1930, gilded patterns festooning the tall walls of the proscenium. The Dalai Lama was surrounded by dozens of sitting lamas and monks in bright saffron and maroon Tibetan robes, as well as representatives of other Buddhist traditions, arrayed in concentric semicircles, a bit like a symphony orchestra. An enormous thangka painting hung from the rafters above them. Contrasting with this colorful display of people and artwork stood the men in black, at intervals around the back of the stage, with curly communicators tucked behind their ears. They stood there all day long, scanning this audience of three thousand people for the remote possibility of a weapon’s glint.
The Dalai Lama was speaking about being present to the minutiae of experience as a unified mind and body, about going to more and more subtle levels of consciousness, until we are fully awake and aware of everything around us. He was speaking of the simplicity and energy of a stable posture, the stability and inner quietude that enables us to listen, see, and feel clearly, to be able to act single-mindedly when other living beings need our help.
As the hours flowed on, I found myself fascinated by the Secret Service agents standing in the background. These men in dark business suits seemed to come from the opposite end of the universe. But they were actually demonstrating what the Dalai Lama was talking about. They were utterly alert, calm, observant, standing motionless for an hour at a time, after which they quietly exchanged places with each other to refresh their view. At the end of each day they seemed as relaxed as they had at the beginning. One day there was a man who was clearly not a “real” Secret Service agent; perhaps he had been pulled in from an office job. He was visibly uncomfortable, constantly shifting position, leaning up against a column. As demonstrated by this gentleman (by most of us!), it actually takes a lot of energy to stand still. Standing or sitting, not wasting energy with unnecessary effort is a skill that takes practice, which the experienced agents showed in their quiet way. They were able, as Henry Miller put it, to stand still like a hummingbird.
In Tibetan and Zen styles of meditation, one sits with half-shuttered eyes. In Japanese this is called fusoku furi, unattached and undetached. Not open to the public world, not closed into a private world. In this way we sustain concentration and stillness while remaining fully aware of our surroundings.
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In 1980 my teacher Gregory Bateson was dying. He was in the hospital for three weeks, then the San Francisco Zen Center invited him to be there for what turned out to be his final week. Beyond the big hospital bed that had been imported, there were black-robed figures, young American men and women in long-term Zen training. Four of them would sit in meditation in the corners of the room, facing the wall, breathing slowly in time with Gregory, who had lung disease. They seemed oblivious, like human furniture, while friends and family came to visit each day, talking with each other and with Gregory. But the moment something was needed in the room, including some of the ugly things that accompany the dying process, the Zen students would pop up and do what was needed, instantly, carefully. Then they would sit again and disappear into meditation. The image of those Zen men and women came back to me sixteen years later as I watched the Secret Service agents, with their evenly hovering attention.
• • •
In medicine the most common errors are due to premature closure — arriving at an initial diagnosis that seems to fit the case but does not encompass a deeper investigation into all the phenomena and all the patient might have to say. As institutional pressures mount up on doctors to see more patients per hour (“productivity” is one of the most unfortunate buzzwords of our age), premature closure is implicitly encouraged. The physician too eager to fill in the chart from a set list of diagnostic codes will be less likely to see the patient.
How often do our well-intended efforts to fix things end up making them worse? How many of us have tried to fix a mechanical item with repeated, frustrated force and ended up breaking it instead? To remain present long enough without knowing the answer, to take the time to closely examine how the parts of the machine are connected, to respect its complexity, to perceive details and relationships that are not immediately apparent, can itself be a lubricant. To remain open-eyed and open-minded, while still retaining access to the technical information we have accumulated through our years of learning, is one of those balancing acts that comes under the heading of “wisdom.” Cherish peripheral vision. The activity of our nervous system, conscious and unconscious, is constantly parsing the signal-to-noise ratio. Yet signal and noise, figure and ground, need to change places from time to time. The ignored detail that seems to be nonsense or unimportant might be the crucial thing that pops up as danger, opportunity, or inspiration — playful, off-the-wall, improbable.
Psychoanalysts will tell you that the great practitioners don’t interpret. This is a funny statement coming from a discipline whose most famous book is The Interpretation of Dreams. To pause and allow listening to flower is an art that takes discipline and gives material a chance to develop in surprising ways.
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The practice of intent listening, which we will encounter in a later chapter — paying attention to birds, to water, to industrial sounds, to the human sounds around us, to our partners in conversation — seems like the easiest thing in the world. But it is amazing how much we miss. Something else is always going on amid the endless tape-loops of consciousness. Remembering, repeating, and rehearsing clog up our ability to listen. We retell our inventory of hope, fear, anger, triumph, resentment, and jokes. Once I was taking the two-hour drive from my home in Virginia up to Washington, DC, listening, or trying to listen, to an audiobook. The CDs were divided into three-minute tracks. There was a segment early on, with an especially elegant sentence that I had vaguely remembered from reading the book long ago. I wanted to catch it and taste the words. But I kept missing it.