Asked once what a contemplative life had given him, the thirteenth century Japanese Zen teacher Dogen answered in four words: enlightenment is intimacy with all things.
Mindfulness lets us see a flower, or watch a sunset, or eat a mango, with nothing standing between us and the experience. When we are this intimate with a thing, we have gotten over ourselves.
an additional dimension is waiting for us
Many practitioners report discovering an additional dimension to life. Emily Dickinson wrote of it in a letter to her friend Thomas Higginson, in the winter of 1871:
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
But at the start, far from fresh and marvelous discoveries, we discover instead that our minds are busy judging, evaluating, comparing ourselves and our experiences against some measure we rarely question.
The judging mind carries us far from the intimacy Dogen spoke of. We may long for a deeper connection with the world, but our conditioning, to judge first and react to the judgment, gets in the way.
meditation gives us a way to work with the judging mind
Working with the judging mind in meditation lets us open to whatever arises, and rest in the presence that judging otherwise blocks out. Robert Aitken put the aspiration this way:
When thoughts form an endless procession I vow with all beings to notice the spaces between them and give the thrushes a chance.
Practicing this way, we start to recognize the brief gaps in the judging mind. Those gaps are a chance to be simply alive to the world, free for a moment of the habit of grasping for more of the pleasant, resisting the unpleasant, or checking out into a phone or some other compulsive small escape.
We come to be with life, rather than only dealing with it.
Larry Rosenberg describes what opens up when we practice this way as
Being with life, not just dealing with it.
Whatever irritates us, disappoints us, or saddens us only needs a seat at the table, received the way we might welcome someone home from a long journey.
Tara Brach names the quality underneath this kind of welcome:
Attention is the most basic form of love. By paying attention we let ourselves be touched by life, and our hearts naturally become more open and engaged.
We find the feeling of being alive, not the meaning of it.
As we bring attention to more of our everyday life, we notice something shift. Joseph Campbell said once that he did not think people are really seeking the meaning of life. He thought what we seek is the experience of being alive.
We get small tastes of this experience already, in the hues of a sunset, in the feel of a partner’s hand while walking on the beach, in the plain sensations of a bagel finished with a hot cup of tea, in playing with a dog, in watching birds work a shoreline.
A quiet aliveness waits under the noise.
These are all ordinary, everyday happenings. What changes is the quality of heart our practice can bring to them. The late Zen teacher Toni Packer wrote about how rarely we arrive at this:
We rarely contact this simple moment. So used to constant input and excitement, we lack fine-tuning into all the subtleties of this instant, the ability to register a quiet aliveness without the stirring of expectation.
Seeing this way is a knowing without thought, without associations. It is nonverbal, intuitive, some say pre-verbal, closer to the seeing of a child than the seeing of an adult who has already named everything in the room.
In these moments, we give the thrushes their chance, as Aitken would say. A mango on the tongue. A hand in ours on the sand. The particular slant of light on water, gone before we can hold it, and somehow, for that reason, completely ours.