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Question of the Month  |
I'm trying to figure out
what else I can say
that I didn't say yesterday
that sounds profound to you
without actually answering
your question.
- George W. Bush, 7.19.05
Once a month, Dean responds to a question on meditation, awareness practice, spiritual books and concepts, or any other topic related to the attempt to live a more enlightened life. Please submit your question to deansluyter@yahoo.com with "Question of the Month" in the Subject line.
JUDGMENT & PRESENCE (AUGUST 2008)
QUESTION: I attended your talks at One Tree Yoga in Omaha recently. They were very inspiring and powerful - thank you for that. I have a question that I didn't have a chance to ask you. I am finding that being present comes fairly naturally to me during meditation, at home, in the car, etc. However, I'm having trouble being in the moment at my job. I think part of the struggle is that I'm a graphic designer and have to "judge" things all day long: Is this color right, is the person in this photo the right demographic, etc. In meditation we're taught not to judge our thoughts, but in many jobs, people have to make decisions about something being good or bad all day long. Any suggestions?
First of all, just to be clear, we're always in the present - where else could we be? (I used to joke that one day Ram Dass, the author of the spiritual classic Be Here Now, forgot to follow his own advice ... and disappeared.) Of course, what you're actually asking about is being consciously present, so that your attention doesn't get so lost in thoughts about the past and future that you forget they're being experienced in the present, which is where all experience takes place. (If you're not clear on this point, try moving your finger in the past. Now try moving it in the future. Now move it in the present.)
It's certainly true that, for most people, mental work usually overshadows the experience of presence more powerfully than simple physical work. I love washing dishes, weeding my lawn, or any other such activity that allows my mind to settle into the moment-by-moment ease of just being present, without anything to decide or figure out. You're quite right in connecting such activities with the nonjudgmental simplicity of meditation. This connection is recognized in such traditions as Zen, where "chopping wood and carrying water" becomes a meditative practice at least as important as silent sitting.
It's also important to distinguish between deciding, or evaluating, and judging. Life requires us to make hundreds of decisions a day. Do you drive through that yellow light? (How long has it been yellow? Is it safe? Is there a cop around?) Do you fire that employee? (How is his work record? Have his alleged misdeeds been properly documented? Can you find a replacement?) There's nothing wrong with that, although it's certainly refreshing to take a break from it in the nothing-to-decide atmosphere of meditation or pulling weeds. Judging, in the sense that the Bible and other spiritual texts advise us to "Judge not," means more than just evaluating with our minds. It implies that, based on our evaluation, we close our hearts, we condemn this person or thing as "bad." (I hate that pain-in-the-neck traffic signal. That employee is a total jerk.)
As Hamlet says, "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"; beneath the overlay of our thinking, everything just is what it is. When we add the spin of judgment to our experience of the world, we build a world of judgmental spin, and then we have to live in it. Thus the full (and profoundly insightful) advice from the Bible is "Judge not, lest ye be judged." If we insist on putting good-guy white hats or bad-guy black hats on everyone, we eventually wind up (in our own judging minds) having to wear one of those hats ourselves. We deprive ourselves and everyone else of the more human, generous, realistic privilege of wearing shades of gray. Failing to give others a little slack, we find ourselves tightly bound.
But back to your question. When your job requires you to spend the day at the computer (or anywhere else) making one decision after another, there are ways to keep from getting completely sucked into that constrictive mental mode. Perhaps the simplest and most effective is to take frequent mini-breaks. Every time you press "Save," either close your eyes or raise your gaze from the screen and, for a few moments, look out a window or at a wall, settling into the distant focus point that's called "infinity" (!) on a camera. If your software autosaves, you can set a little alarm to go off a few times an hour. In these mini-breaks you'll regain your sense of presence, your consciousness of the vast, silent ocean of being, within which your hundreds of decisions are merely small waves. Through repeated alternation of work/break, work/break, you'll find a growing sense of integration of the two, so that more and more you can surf the waves without losing contact with the ocean. In this way, your work becomes a paradigm of the whole enlightenment path, which is not about finding the bliss of nirvana by rejecting the ordinariness of samsara, but rather finding that nirvana is inseparably present within - is the very essence of - every drop of samsara.
It also may be helpful to know that grace (the full-blown, totally vivid, no-doubt-about-it preview of nirvana smack in the middle of samsara) can come any time, unbidden. The New Testament says "The kingdom of God comes like a thief in the night," and a Zen teacher once said "Enlightenment, when it comes, is an accident; all our spiritual practice just makes us more accident-prone." A close friend of mine recently had just such an experience of grace descend upon him as he sat at home at his computer. He'd been completely immersed in a project for several hours, with loud rock music playing on the stereo the whole time. So you never know. So relax.