I Can't Stop Fiddling

So many of these blogs have been about the ‘doing nothing meditation’ in which we (hopefully) manage to rest for perhaps at first no more than a few moments in an entirely natural awareness that is both vividly spacious and clear. An awareness in which thoughts and emotions may come and go without our engaging with them in much the same way reflections play across the face of a mirror while leaving its reflective surface unchanged or marked in anyway. The instruction for this gives it its name - just do nothing. But the problem is that for many of us, how ever often we have heard this, we just can’t stop ourselves doing something to somehow improve the experience. We can’t stop fiddling.

This was the subject that our small sangha talked about this evening but we approached it slightly differently. We asked ourselves who is it within us that wants to practice meditation, that takes us to our seat even when we don’t really want to give it the time. Who has kept us doing this for years even when it’s hard to keep going. Who is it that values being mindful? Who is the 'manager'?

It’s an interesting question. Our answers were in many ways very human. I want to feel happy, I want to feel safe, I want to feel calm. Mine was very much about needing meaning in a world I find terrifyingly out of control and dangerous. Meaning offers some sort of defensive control. And I could feel it as a felt sense within me, a kind of one pointedness that carried an intention - I even had an image of it. It looked like the beak of a rook or crow.

The thing with this part of us is that it is undeniably valuable. Why would we not want something within us that seeks our wellbeing, that makes wise choices, that has a fierce determination to practice meditation, to keep at it and get somewhere? That when I sit in meditation that it should be a ‘good meditation’ and not just a long unconscious drift.

And then came the next step: while having a sense of this manager part of ourselves, we just let it go. Just drop any sense of the person who feels they are meditating, of the person who feels there is somewhere else to go, something to get. Of the person who feels they are only doing it right when they are doing something. Dropping all this and relaxing into knowing right here and now everything is as it should be. It’s already alright. It’s finished. There is nothing to do - it's already here.

Hard. Very hard.

The wonderful thing is, the non-dual and intrinsic awareness that this form of meditation may enable us to initially glimpse is already present. It’s not something like intentionally calming our mind by using breathing techniques or cultivation concentration. (Though both are indispensable preliminaries.) And it’s certainly not any form of cognitive insight or emotional break through. It’s the basic state of the mind when not obscured by thoughts and emotions. It can only be revealed or uncovered, not created or made. Just do nothing and when the clouds clear the bright blue sky that was always there is immediately present. Not because it has just whooshed in but because it was here all the time. And the final irony is that all that good intentioned stuff that brought us to our seat is now of no value at all. It’s just more clouds because it is all about achieving, realising, knowing, understanding - all forms of doing. And the one thing we know about this is that any form of doing cancels not doing. Or another way of putting it: the ego will never become enlightened.

My own feeling on this is that this requires enormous trust - there is also a part in me that just does not believe that if I let myself fall backwards I will be caught. It is this part that keeps on saying, ‘Is this right?’, ‘Have I got it?’. This is doubt, the most corrosive of all the hinderances. It also requires surrender and faith. The thing is only intrinsic awareness can know itself, using our ordinary mind never delivers the rock solid confirmation we seek because it simply can’t. So we have to learn to give this up too. Sit on our cushion, follow the instructions and the rest can sort itself out.

And one last thought, mimicking this whole thing: When we don’t trust, when we can’t surrender the need to know and be in control, when deep down inside we believe that we will never get this, then it may seem a second best option to pretend that we do. This is not as hard as it seems. We can learn how to say it so it sounds real. We can secretly pump up an emotion and believe it is something more. We can even have an authentic experience and kind of trade off it for ever after. Adding it to our sense of self and in our meditation mimicking our memory of the glimpse by trying to reproduce it. And it is for this reason that Zen Buddhism gives us a radical teaching: when you see Buddha on the road kill him! Drop him dead.

NW. Again thanks to the group. 3 July 2025