Eternity in an Hour
Reverend Benjamin Maucere
First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia, PA
From Walt Whitman, (Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass, "Song of Myself," sct. 50.)
There is that in me-I do not know what it is-but I know it is in me.
Wrench'd and sweaty-calm and cool then my body becomes, I sleep-I sleep long.
I do not know it-it is without name-it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.
. . . .
Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death-it is form, union, plan-it is eternal life-it is Happiness.
"2300 years ago, Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women seek happiness. While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, every other goal - health, beauty, money, or power - is valued only because it will make us happy." (Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, p.1.)
A couple hundred years earlier, Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, taught that happiness was an unachievable goal - that, in fact, the search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Buddha's insight is a profound recognition that grasping and striving for health, beauty, money or power cannot make us happy. Health fails, beauty fades, and there's never enough money and power. But we in the west are an optimistic culture, and we continue to study the question of what makes us happy. I mean, the Declaration of Independence even guarantees its pursuit!
One approach to happiness is through meditation. It's a kind of therapeutic deep breath. A cosmic "time out." A time to refrain from striving, and just settle in.
Developed over many thousand years in a multitude of cultures, meditation comes in many different forms and styles. Some require you to sit very still for long periods, others use walking. There's the Sufi "Turn," or whirling, which is the practice of the Mevlana Dervishes, There's Tai Chi Chuan, which combines meditation with martial arts. Another is called Vipassana, or mindfulness meditation.
Some forms of meditation use silence, others chant. One of these is a practice in Islam, the chanting of the hundred names of God. The Merciful. The Hearer. The Benevolent.
Some types of meditation try to eliminate thinking. Others use our tendency to analyze and problem solve by focusing on paradoxical concepts. There's the Zen koan, which encourages you to puzzle over riddles like "The elbow does not bend outwards," or "the sound of one hand clapping." This method harnesses our rational mind in the pursuit of the irrational, which sometimes results in a trans-rational breakthrough. Some types of meditation emphasize complete withdrawal from the senses. Others offer visual focus, like mandalas, Tibetan Thankas, or statues or pictures of Goddesses or Gods.
Every Sunday in the meditation time of our service, we invite you to sit up, place your feet flat on the floor, straighten your back, and breathe deeply.
Because mind and body are related, there's a connection between the posture of the body and the attitude of the mind. Think of how the fetal position provides comfort, and protection. Or how feelings of exultation and triumph are embodied by standing tall, with arms outstretched.
In sitting, most meditation practices teach that the back should be straight. Like "an arrow" or a "pile of golden coins." Yoga teaches that energy flows more easily in this position. It doesn't mean to sit ramrod straight, we're relaxed but upright.
And we take a deep breath. Breath is life, the basic and most fundamental expression of our life. In Judaism, ruah, the breath, is the spirit of God that infuses Creation. In the teaching of Buddha, the breath, or prana in Sanskrit, is said to be the vehicle of the mind.
When we breathe deeply, not forcing the breath, but letting it find a natural rhythm, it calms and focuses the mind. In Vipassana, we focus attention on the breath - on the rising and falling of the muscles of the abdomen.
When distractions arise, gently recognize them. Distracting thoughts - note to yourself, thinking, thinking, and return your attention to the breath. When sounds distract you, say to yourself, hearing, hearing, and return attention to the breath. When feelings or sensations arise, say to yourself, sensing, sensing, and gently return your attention to the rising and falling of the breath. This cultivates both mindfulness, or awareness of what you are experiencing, and concentration - the ability to stay focused.
Different methods work for different people. The point to keep in mind is that meditation itself is not the method. Claudio Naranjo makes this point in The Psychology of Meditation. Meditation, he says, "cannot be equated with thinking or non-thinking, with sitting still or dancing, with withdrawing from the senses or waking up the senses: meditation is concerned with the development of a presence . . ." (Naranjo, 8.) It's not something you do; it's a way of being in the world.
It's a way of being that results from a trained mind. Untrained, we are at the mercy of our emotions. We can't be happy when we're constantly grasping, judging, lusting, coveting, lashing out in anger.
I'm sure the long-term effect of meditation is to decrease the frequency of these feelings. But in my unenlightened state what I've experienced is that it tends simply to make me more aware of them, so that I can make a choice about whether to act on them or not. It gives you more self control. One Zen master described it as emptying the heart, so the world can fill it.
The ultimate goal is to bring one fully to this place - to this moment - to the eternal now which is all we really have. The point is made in a ninth-century Buddhist story about a man who is being chased by a pair of rogue elephants. Fearing for his life, he climbs into a well and grabs hold of a vine growing out of the wall, just beyond the reach of the elephants' tusks. He relaxes a moment, then sees that two mice are gnawing on the vine. "Oh great!" he says, then looks down and sees four poisonous snakes climbing up the walls of the well toward him. Just when it seems it can't get any worse, he sees that beneath the snakes, on the floor of the well, lie three fierce fire-breathing dragons. He looks up and chances to notice a few drops of honey clinging to the vine. He reaches up with one hand, scrapes off some of the honey, and savors the sweetness. He lets go of his striving, of all he wants to do in the world, of his precious self and lives totally in the sensation of flavor in the now. At that very moment, he is freed from all his fear.
There's another approach to happiness, through a different but related discipline.
A University of Chicago professor with the difficult name of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Me-high-ee Chick-sent-me-high-ee) has made a life's work of the study of happiness, outlined in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
In the introduction, he quotes Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist whose experience in concentration camps, including Auschwitz, resulted in Frankl's landmark book, Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl's advice is "Don't aim at success - for the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue . . . as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself."
So Csikszentmihalyi asked, "How can we reach this elusive goal that cannot be attained by a direct route? My studies of the past quarter-century have convinced me that there is a way. It is a circuitous path that beings with achieving control over the contents of our consciousness." (p2.)
He began with the insight that all of us have experienced what he calls optimal experience, or what he calls "flow." When we feel in control of our actions, a sense of exhilaration, timelessness, a full presence in the moment and heightened awareness, an experience that we remember as a landmark for what life is like at its best. It is being being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost. I think it's what we mean when we say, "I enjoyed myself." Myself I enjoyed - who I was at that particular time and what I was able to do.
"It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair, when the boat lunges through the waves like a colt - sails, hull, wind, and sea humming a harmony that vibrates in the sailor's veins. It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator.
"Such events do not only when the external conditions are favorable, however: people who have survived concentration camps or who have lived through near_fatal physical dangers often recall that in the midst of their ordeal they experienced extraordinarily rich epiphanies in response to such simple events as hearing the song of a bird in the forest, completing a hard task, or sharing a crust of bread with a friend." (p 4.)
Csikszentmihalyi continues, "Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times - although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves. Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer's muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue_yet these could have been the best moments of his life." (p 4.)
Pleasure is different than flow. Pleasure is usually passive - eating, watching a movie or TV, having a drink at the end of a long hard day. Flow is active - it occurs at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges we face are balanced by the skills we've developed, and we find ourselves "in the zone."
In the course of his research, thousands of people have been interviewed by Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues, to ascertain when they've had this "flow" experience and to learn how to improve the odds of it happening to us. They started interviewing rock climbers, composers of music, chess players, and amateur athletes. Later studies included white and blue-collar workers, young mothers, retired people, and teenagers, asking them to describe how it felt when their lives were at their fullest, when what they did was most enjoyable.
In some of their experiments, individuals carried pagers that were set to go off at random, about eight times a day. The participants jotted notes on what they were doing and how they were feeling, and to indicate, on a ten-point scale, how many challenges they were experiencing, and how many skills were being used. "Flow" was defined as when skills and challenges were reported as above the norm for the week.
"As expected, the more time a person spent in flow during the week, the better was the overall quality of his or her reported experience. People who'd achieved this level reported that they felt "'strong,' 'active,' 'creative,' 'concentrated,' and 'motivated.' What was unexpected, however, is how frequently people reported flow situations at work, and how rarely at leisure."
At work, flow experiences came in at about 54%. At leisure, reading, watching TV, having friends over, or going to a restaurant, it was only about 18%. Leisure responses tended to what the researchers termed "apathy," characterized by the respondents saying they felt passive, weak, dull, and dissatisfied. At work, 16% of the responses were in the apathy region; at leisure, it was an astonishing 52%.
So if most folks felt better at work - happier, stronger, more creative, and satisfied - and dull and bummed out when not, then what do you make of this: "One of the questions in the response booklet asked respondents to indicate, on a the-point scale from no to yes, their answer to the following question: 'Did you wish you had been doing something else?' . . . The results showed that people wished to be doing something else to a much greater extent when working than when at leisure, regardless of whether they were in flow."
Which suggests to Csikszentmihalyi , and certainly seems clear to me, that we're simply not paying attention. Our dissatisfaction is rooted, not in our own sensory experience, but in cultural attitudes that tell us that work is an imposition, a necessary evil, a burden to which we submit under duress, that gets in the way of our true happiness, when the reality seems to be contrary. We were enjoying ourselves, and we didn't even notice!
This is not to say that work is paradise. The three major complaints American workers have about their jobs are lack of variety and challenge, conflict with bosses and co-workers, and stress. Yet these can be addressed. If it's true that half of the time we're enjoying ourselves, it's certainly worth it!
And we can address the general dissatisfaction expressed regarding leisure activities. Work is conducive to flow because it contains the optimum conditions: built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges, all of which push us to become involved, use our skills and talents, and lose ourselves in something larger than ourselves. Our free time can do the same, if we bring some structure and challenge to it, to shape it into something that challenges us to activity and enjoyment. For that to happen, we must be willing to build up skills - to take up activities that challenge us and tolerate our own incompetence in order to get to the point where skills and challenge balance.
When we are able to shape our lives like this, we develop what Csikszentmihalyi calls an "autotelic," or self-directed self, characterized by four qualities: 1) we set goals, responding to their challenges by developing the requisite skills to meet them; 2) we become immersed in the activity, balancing the opportunities for action with our skills; 3) we pay attention to what is happening, remaining in the moment, much as mindfulness councils us to do; and 4) we learn to enjoy immediate experience - be it the feel of the breeze on our faces, the warmth of the dishwater when we wash dishes, the colors of spring, or the face of another human being.
This is where they meet: techniques of flow and the wisdom derived from the discipline of meditation, for both directed to this end: that we become able to bring ourselves to this blessed place, the only reality - where we are able, in the words of William Blake:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
May it be so. AMEN
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