Tag: yearning

The Call and the Question

On yearning, and letting it become a question

“What is the Matrix?”
— Neo

If you’re reading this, chances are you hear the call. The silent scream rings in your soul. The call tells you there are still unanswered questions. It’s the feeling that the universe itself is not yet resolved. A distant cry prickles your senses. As you hear it, you become aware of your own yearning. Like the open strings of a guitar, your pain and dissatisfaction resonate sympathetically with what sounds around you. There’s a longing for more understanding and intimacy with life itself.

When they are ready, the student arrives with their particular expression of this yearning. They appear in the meditation hall or by the side of their teacher. While the yearning is uniquely theirs, it is also the same yearning of the students in the suttas of the Pali Canon and the koans of Zen. Just as Neo asks “What is the Matrix?”, so Zhaozhou asks “What is the way?”

The student has been sitting, contemplating, trying, faltering. With humility, they admit their struggle. They let their yearning form into a question. They say, in effect: “This can’t be it. What can I do?”

While the call sounds out to all people — all beings experience suffering — some are less affected. They are more adept at ignoring it, the way people who live in the flight path tune out the sound of planes. Rather than respond to the call, they get used to it or avoid it through busyness. Cypher, who had seen all of it, went back into the Matrix to eat steak in blissful ignorance.

Others are shown the call in such a way that they cannot ignore it. They are initiated through an event that brings great suffering. This may not be their choice or intention, but it is an initiation nonetheless. In a single moment, they are brought into a different life where they cannot hide. They have heard the call and now it rings loudly. Whenever they slow down, there it is, in the background of silence.

The call fills my ears and heart, even as life gets better. I bow down, humbled but not humiliated.

In the path of Zen, the practitioner may be given a koan. This is a phrase or story that they stay with and explore, letting it change them. The first koan in Robert Aitken Roshi’s The Gateless Barrier is Mu, a single word that takes a stand against conventional reality.

How the koan stays with the student is the magic. Aitken shares how Wumen Huikai implores the practitioner:

So, then, make your whole body a mass of doubt, and with your three hundred and sixty bones and joints and your eighty-four thousand hair follicles concentrate on this one word “Mu.” Day and night, keep digging into it. Don’t consider it to be nothingness. Don’t think in terms of “has” and “has not.” It is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You try to vomit it out, but you can’t.

Gradually you purify yourself, eliminating mistaken knowledge and attitudes you have held from the past. Inside and outside become one.

This is how we channel the call into practice. It splinters open a great doubt. “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”, sings Leonard Cohen.

Opened to rather than treated as a problem, the call becomes the question. It’s a fortune cookie that contains all fortunes, but no note.

The student in the zendo, sitting before the teacher, allows a question to form. Neo follows the white rabbit. The meditator practises sitting in uncertainty.

What do you yearn for?
A guided meditation for sitting in the question, 25 minutes.

Desire that Builds Worlds

There’s a kind of wanting that moves underneath the everyday wants. It flows like an underground river. This is deeper than the wanting that has an object – the next thing, the better version, the destination. A current. A yearning that animates us. Try as we might, it can’t be ignored.

To be human is to want. To want is, at times, to suffer – to take on the big creative project, to welcome another into the family, to move toward what we love knowing it may also break us. Many traditions offer ways out of this. This meditation moves the other direction: into desire, and then through it.

The practice has three movements.

First, set aside what you’ve been told about desire – that it’s the cause of suffering, that it’s un-spiritual, that it should be renounced. Let those teachings rest for the duration of this sit. Trust that desire is holding something important for you.

Second, find the wanting in your body. Let a particular desire come into focus, whatever it is. Then go further: under the surface want, what’s the deeper need? Under the need, what’s the yearning at the very core?

Third, when you’ve arrived at something true, open to it. Receive it in your whole body. Let it move through you as a current rather than as an idea or a problem to solve.

What’s discovered, met this way, is that the yearning was never really about lack. The quality we were reaching for is already here, already moving through us. The yearning reaches for itself.

The practice comes from Rob Burbea, whose talk Opening to the Current of Desire goes further into the territory.