Pablo J D Ors - Biography of Silence: An Essay on Meditation

FOR THE FIRST YEAR , I was incredibly restless when I sat to meditate: my back hurt, my chest, my legs.To tell the truth, almost everything hurt. Nonetheless, I soon noticed that there was practically never a moment when some part of my body did not hurt me; it was just that when I sat to meditate I became conscious of that pain. So I got in the habit of formulating questions: What hurts me? How does it hurt? And while I asked and attempted to answer myself, the truth was that the pain would disappear or simply change places. I did not take long to extract a lesson from this: pure observation is transformative. As Simone Weilwhom I began to read at that timewould say, there is no weapon more effective than attention.

The mental restlessness, which is what I perceived right after my physical discomfort, was no less a battle nor any more bearable an obstacle. On the contrary: an infinite boredom lay in wait for me during many of my sittings, as I began then to call them. I was tormented by the idea of getting stuck on some obsessive idea, which I was not sure how to eradicate, or on some disagreeable memory, which persisted in presenting itself just at the moment of my meditation. I breathed steadily, but my mind would be bombarded with some unfulfilled desire, with my guilt over one of my numerous mistakes, or with my recurrent fears, which tended to present themselves in new disguises each time. I fled all of this with considerable clumsiness; cutting short my periods of meditation, for example, or compulsively scratching my neck or nosewhere an irritating itch frequently showed up. I also imagined scenes from my life that might have happenedI am very imaginativeturning over phrases for future texts, given that I am a writer; composing lists of pending chores; recalling incidents from the day; daydreaming about tomorrow.Should I continue? I confirmed that remaining in silence with oneself is much more difficult than I had suspected before trying it. It did not take me long to come to a new conclusion: it was almost unbearable for me to be alone with myself, which was the reason why I constantly fled myself. This principle led me to the certainty that, as ample and rigorous as the analyses of my consciousness I had made during my decade of university education had been, my consciousness continued to be, after all that, a seldom frequented territory.

The sensation was that of someone writhing around in the mud. I had to wait some time for the clay to settle and the water to become clearer. But I am headstrong, as I have already said, and with the passage of the months I knew that when the water became clear, it would begin to fill with plants and fishes. I also knew that, with even more time and determination, these interior flora and fauna would grow richer the more they were observed. And now, as I write this account, I am amazed at how there once was so much mud where I now discover such varied and exuberant life.