PRESENCE OF MIND

by Stanley

In the 60s, carried along with the spirit of the times, I was very taken by Zen. Eastern Ways of Liberation were all the thing – Aldous Huxley, the Beatles, Alan Watts and Timothy Leary: “Turn on, Tune in and Drop out.” I loved the outrageous anti- intellectualism of the old Zen Masters who ask the monks questions like: “Does a dog have a Buddha nature? If you say it has I’ll give you thirty blows; if you say it hasn’t I’ll give you thirty blows.” For me, at the time, was all such a relief from Aristotle. As far as I could see, Zen was the only religion (can you call it that?) that perfectly understood how words and systems are not the things themselves. They had no holy book and were even disrespectful of their own traditional origins: “What is the Buddha.” Answer, “A lump of dung.” But along with this apparent bravado they had the keenest perception of what it is to have presence of mind.

Something I learned all those years ago from Zen and the Art of the Motor Cycle Maintenance – a wonderful little book: when a machine goes wrong you can rush in to try and fix it; or you can spend time just looking before you do anything. The first way usually generates more trouble; with the second way you almost don’t have to do anything – after a moment the fault just stares you in the face. Fixing it is now a piece of cake. You could call it the art of pausing.

You could almost claim that simple presence of mind fixes the machine. And when you think about it, pausing like this can fix a lot of other things too. Isn’t what we do in therapy and meditation just giving ourselves an extended pause? Isn’t that too what Darwin did on the Galapagos Islands: “Hey, Wait a minute. How come these finches have different shape beaks on different islands?” But first he had to notice it. Before he even asked this, what turned out to be a world shaking question, was noticing that it was so.

That’s the big trick isn’t it – noticing that it is so !

But it takes time. You have to give things time to show themselves; and time for them to cut through all one’s ready made assumptions of how things are. And don’t say how they are too quickly.

And don’t say you don’t know how they are too quickly either.