Read an Excerpt
1
I began to sit to meditate in silence and stillness on my own account and at my own risk, without anyone to give me any basic notions of how to do so or to accompany me in the process. The simplicity of the method—sitting, breathing, quieting one’s thoughts—and most of all, the simplicity of its intention—to reconcile a person with what they are—seduced me from the beginning. As I have a tenacious temperament, I have remained faithful for several years to this discipline of simply sitting and gathering myself; and at once I understood that it was about accepting whatever came—whatever it might be—with good humor.
During the first few months I meditated badly, very badly; keeping my back straight and my knees bent was not at all easy for me and, as if that was not enough, I breathed with a certain agitation. I was perfectly aware that this sitting without doing anything was something as foreign to my education and experience as—contradictory though this seems—it was equally innate to who I was at my core. Nonetheless, there was something very powerful that pulled at me: the intuition that the path of silent meditation would guide me to encounter my own self at least as much or more so than literature, which I have always been very fond of.
For better or worse, since my earliest adolescence I have been someone very interested in delving into my own identity. That is why I’ve been an avid reader. That is why I studied philosophy and theology in my youth. The danger of an inclination of this type is, of course, self-centeredness; but thanks to sitting, breathing, and doing nothing else, I began to notice that this tendency could be eradicated not through the path of struggle and renunciation, as the Christian tradition that I belong to had taught me, but through the path of absurdity and exhaustion. Because all self-centeredness, including mine, when taken to its most radical extreme, demonstrates its ridiculousness and impracticability. Soon, thanks to meditation, even my narcissism displayed a positive side: thanks to it, I could persevere in my practice of silence and stillness. And having a good image of yourself is necessary for spiritual progress.
2
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 Weil—whom I began to read at that time—would 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 nose—where an irritating itch frequently showed up. I also imagined scenes from my life that might have happened—I am very imaginative—turning 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.
3
Before I decided to practice meditation with all the rigor I could, I had had so many experiences over the course of my life that I had reached a point where, without fear of exaggeration, I can say that I did not properly know who I was. I had traveled to many countries, read thousands of books, had an address book with hundreds of contacts, and had fallen in love with more women than I could remember. Like many of my contemporaries, I was convinced that the more experiences I had and the more intense and stunning they were, the sooner and better I would become a complete person. Today I know that that is not the case: the quantity of our experiences and their intensity serve only to bewilder us. Experiencing too many things tends to be prejudicial. I do not believe that humans are made for quantity, but rather for quality. Experiences, if one lives to collect too many of them, jostle us, they offer us utopian horizons, they inebriate and confuse us.… Now I would even say that any experience—even one which appears most innocent—tends to be too vertiginous for the human soul, which is only nourished by pausing the rhythm of the experiences it is offered.
Thanks to this initiation to reality that I have discovered with meditation, I know that the colorful fish that exist at the bottom of the ocean that is my consciousness, those interior flora and fauna that I have referred to above, can be seen only when the sea is calm, and not during the waves and storms of my experiences. And I also know that, when that sea is at an even greater calm, not even the fish can be made out, but just the water, water and nothing else. But human beings tend not to be satisfied with the fish, and even less with simply the water; we prefer the waves: they give us the impression of life, when the truth is that they are not life but just liveliness.
Today I know that it is a good idea to stop having experiences, whatever the genre, and to limit oneself to living: to allow life to express itself as it is, and not to fill it with the artifice of our travels or readings, relationships or passions, spectacles, entertainments, searches.… All of our experiences tend to compete with life and almost always manage to displace it and even cancel it out. True life is located behind what we call life. Not traveling, not reading, not talking: not doing these things is almost always better than doing them when it comes to the discovery of light and peace.
Of course, to discern something from all this that is written so quickly and understood so slowly I had to familiarize myself with my bodily sensations and, which is even more arduous, to classify my thoughts and feelings, my emotions. Because it is easy to say that one has distractions, but very difficult, on the other hand, to know from what type of distractions one suffers. It took me more than a year to begin to give a name to what appeared and disappeared from my mind when I sat to meditate. Until that moment I had been a spectator, yes, but hardly an attentive one. At the end of a sitting I could describe little of what had really happened to me during it.
To be attentive to the distractions themselves is more complicated than one imagines. In the first place because distractions, by their own evasive, nebulous nature, are not easily understandable; but also because in trying to retain them long enough to memorize and then be able to give an account of them, one winds up distracting oneself with that new activity. Despite all that, I could recognize and name a good part of my distractions and, thanks to this necessarily approximate typology, I could know, with significant precision, what level I had reached in my practice of meditation after a year and a half of assiduous perseverance.
4
As untarnished as my interest in silence and stillness was, it was clear to me that at any moment, before the least mishap or adversity, I might give up on what I had decided was my most crucial spiritual practice. And it must be said that I would have some good reasons for abandoning it: the pain in my knees, for example (a traumatologist strongly advised me against the posture in which I meditated), the loss of time (my work piled up), the impossibility of training a body shaped by forty years of bad posture (I began to visit a chiropractor), the lack of results. After all, and I asked myself this question many times, what had I really gotten after hundreds of hours dedicated to simply sitting and breathing? I still did not realize that resistance to the practice is the same thing as resistance to life.
Judging from the little that my meditation practice tidied up my life and by the great sacrifice that it entailed, everything pointed toward my leaving it aside—in one way or another, sooner or later—to devote myself to activities that I then considered to be more beneficial. Against all odds, I persevered, I inexplicably persevered; and if it is true that the power of an ideal can be great, the power of reality—when one is in front of it, when one can feel it—is mysteriously so much greater.
To strengthen my conviction and support my willpower, I focused on what I considered to be most crucial: silence. I refer as much to what exists in silence as to silence itself, which is an authentic revelation. From here I must nonetheless issue a warning that silence, at least as I have lived it, is nothing special. Silence is only the frame and context that makes everything else possible. And what is everything else? The surprising thing is that it is not anything, absolutely nothing: life itself going by, nothing special. Of course I say “nothing,” but I could also say “everything.”
For someone like me, Western down to my medulla, it was a great achievement to understand, and to begin to experience, that I could exist without thinking, without planning, without imagining, to exist without making the most of things, without producing: to be in the world, to merge into it, a worldly being and the world itself, without the Cartesian divisions or distinctions that I was so accustomed to because of my education.
