In the last few months my meditation practice has deepened considerably. In November, during a day-long at-home retreat I decided to stop pining for a practice group here in this little town I live in, and actually inaugurate one. The result, Sangha, has had mixed attendance. Some Sundays I have one or two people. Some Sundays I have none. (Those are what I call slow days.) Attendance is by people new to meditation, experienced meditators with little or no Buddhist background, and practicing Buddhists.
Lately I’ve been retrospecting on my practice, how it’s changed me, and what parts of it I accept now that I didn’t used to — and what parts I feel much more confident about rejecting. A big shift for me took place in about 2002, when I finally gave up on the notion of having a soul. That was surprisingly painful, given that I was an avowed atheist by then, and had been for half a decade or so. It was strange to see the illusion, the clinging to a notion, and to watch it evaporate as I let it go.
It wasn’t that I felt I was sliding into a nihilistic pointless life; to the contrary, I was finding all sorts of new ground to explore and experience. It was simply the idea that I missed, a sense of losing something I’d always taken to be there, a constant companion. I felt much the same way when Carl Sagan died, and again with Douglas Adams, and even Jim Henson. These people had done things that mattered to me, and though I’d never met them I still felt I’d lost something important when their minds were at last deliquesced.
Hope is a strange thing. We talk about it, we claim to have it, we put energy into it — but I don’t know how thoroughly we actually analyze it. When someone we know is sick, we say, “I hope you get well soon” — but do we, really? Or is it more likely that, thirty seconds later, I’ve forgotten all about Sylvia and her cold? How is this an expression of hope for her recovery?
And is it really even much of a hope? Colds are not, by and large, fatal; generally they’re little more than inconveniences. (Though the two-week marathon rhinoviral infection I just got over, which included seven full days of full sinus concretization, seemed a hell of a lot more than that when I was in the middle of it.) So when we express the “hope” that someone will recover soon from a cold, what are we doing apart from spouting vain platitudes?
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