Big Mind

The sashimi of mindfulness

Do you ever think about how you think? I mean, do you watch your­self do it? (…get your mind out of the gut­ter… the topic is think­ing, not doing it…)

It seems to me that there are lev­els of thought,
or help­ful ways and non-helpful ways.

Let me tell you a cou­ple of brief sto­ries that illus­trate what I mean.

Story 1:

Dar­bella and I are in Peter­bor­ough, vis­it­ing Dar’s mom. We’re also going to hang out with our favourite niece, who soon turns 22. Back when Lisa was 16 we took her on a short road trip to the U S of A. On the way home, we stopped at Nia­gara Falls. She’d never seen the Falls, despite never liv­ing more than 2 hours away. Any­way, we walked a bit and ended up hav­ing lunch in a Japan­ese restau­rant. Lisa would not even look at the sushi that Dar and I were hav­ing, let alone try a piece. She swore up and down that raw fish would never cross her lips.

Tomor­row, we’re tak­ing Lisa and her boyfriend out for din­ner. At a sushi restau­rant in Toronto. Her choice. Fig­ures it will be eas­ier to intro­duce her boyfriend to us and to sushi at the same time. She quite likes sushi (and sake, if truth be told.)

Here’s the first point. At 16, Lisa did not like sushi. At 21, she does. Lisa’s sto­ries about sushi (“I’ll NEVER eat sushi!”) are obvi­ously mean­ing­less. She didn’t, until she did.

Which is pretty much the way it actu­ally goes, for every­thing. Think bike rid­ing, dri­ving a care, sex…

Story 2:

We were watch­ing TV last night, and

1) Ontario just set a record for pre­cip­i­ta­tion in July. In other words, it’s been rain­ing. Buck­ets. We had to crawl into Peter­bor­ough last night, so much rain was falling, and

2) they showed a pic­ture of a light­ning strike. Seems the bolt hit a chim­ney, exploded it (debris cir­cle was 10 feet or so) and then the elec­tric­ity trav­elled to the ground, found a pipe, slid along the pipe to the third house down, exited the base­ment wall, blow­ing a hole in it, explod­ing the con­trol on the washer, and set­ting the clothes in the laun­dry room on fire.

Now I have to admit that was a new one for me.
I com­mented, “Holy crap! Amazing!”

But what “struck me” was the reac­tion of the peo­ple involved. The guy with the laun­dry room was bemused and smirk­ing. The wife with the blown chim­ney was “shaken and dis­turbed.” Her hus­band was giv­ing tours of his back yard, tak­ing obvi­ous delight in the atten­tion and rev­el­ling in the odd places he was find­ing bricks.

Here’s the ques­tion: what was the “cor­rect” response?

Story 3:

I’m read­ing Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shun­ryu Suzuki, and he writes,

“A won­der­ful paint­ing is the result of the feel­ing in your fin­gers. If you have the feel­ing of the thick­ness of the ink in your brush, the paint­ing is already there before you paint. When you dip your brush into the ink you already know the result of your draw­ing, or you can­not paint. So, before you do some­thing, “being” is there, the result is there.”

I don’t know if I men­tioned it before, but I started paint­ing when I was 14 or so. I’m an OK artist; used to get A’s in Col­lege Paint­ing Classes, did some shows, but I like pho­tog­ra­phy bet­ter. Every now and again I get the “bug” to paint.

I decided to paint Kuan-yin, who is the bhodis­attva of com­pas­sion. I decided to use a photo I took a cou­ple of decades ago as the model. Then, I read about Green Tara, another bhodis­attva, and thought, “Hmm.”

So I re visu­al­ized the paint­ing and started. I tend to work in spurts, and framed out the whole thing in an evening.

Dar walked by, stopped dead, and said, “Geez! She’s green! And her eyes are scary!” I hadn’t painted them yet, and real­ized that, when I painted in the blocky start to the paint­ing, I was see­ing it fin­ished, and there­fore hadn’t noticed the miss­ing eyes.

So, who was see­ing which paint­ing, and how?

No, it’s not done yet, by the way. I decided that I wanted the high­lights to be yel­low and orange, and am chang­ing the image in my head. So I can paint it.

One artist I know never fin­ishes a paint­ing, because she over-thinks and under paints. I do fin­ish mine.

My point with these three sto­ries is that our minds are trained to label and judge, when our focus might bet­ter be put on doing. “I do not eat sushi NOW” is so. “I eat sushi NOW” is also so. “I will never eat sushi” is a waste of energy, and in this case, not so.

The light­ning strike is a light­ning strike. Now I know one can set laun­dry on fire, in the base­ment three door away. Is this good, bad, ter­ri­fy­ing, inter­est­ing, delight­ful? No, it’s a light­ning strike. The rest is just our minds, blow­ing things out of proportion.

My paint­ing existed in my head until my hands did their thing. The paint­ing is as it is, and was as it was, miss­ing eyes, then included eyes. It’s a green woman or green, orange and yel­low. I can say noth­ing of how it will be, as it is not other than it is, right now. You may like it, hate it, or be indif­fer­ent. That is about you, not about the painting.

This week, watch your mind, as it takes stuff in, cre­ates stuff, directs your hands. Notice how often, as I said to a client this week, you talk about doing some­thing, and do not do some­thing. Notice how quickly your mind goes to judge­ment—good, bad, indif­fer­ent. Notice how the labels are all about you, and have noth­ing what­so­ever to do with the thing you are judging.

Think, design, and do. Think, design, and do. Drop the pre­tense, the delays, and the judge­ments, again and again. Things are as they are, not as you judge them to be. Bet­ter to have the expe­ri­ence than to spend your life play­ing with your judgements.

Shock­ing, eh?