It's my 7th year as a volunteer life story writer for our local hospice. I spend time with people who are approaching the end of their lives and listen as they tell me their stories.
This work has taught me that I don't know what matters for someone else. Something that seems significant to me may warrant only a passing mention, or they may unfold what seems like an apparently inconsequential detail into something much larger. I can ask questions and return to something that seems unfinished, but ultimately I am there to help someone who wants to tell their story, not to interpret what I'm hearing, or tell them what their story is.
This seems obvious, but it's surprisingly easy to cross the boundary. We hear something and immediately begin to make sense of it. We decide what is important, what caused what, what it means. Instead of listening to what is being revealed, we start telling the whole world what it is.
James Low often speaks about this habit of ours. We fill experience with our concepts, judgments, explanations, and interpretations, rather than allowing it to show itself. Many hours of listening to others describing moments from their lives has made me much more aware of how frequently I do this.
And it isn't confined to listening to other people. I often do the same thing with my own experience. Something happens and almost immediately I know what it is: good or bad, important or unimportant, something I want or don't want, something that shouldn't have happened.
Practice offers another possibility: to remain present long enough for experience to show itself before I tell it what it is. And now here's James Low on this very topic...
From Working with Life and Death, 2018, James Low
We imagine that we see trees and motor cars and other people. But what do we actually see? If I allow myself to receive the world before I tell the world what it is, everything is there and there's nothing for me to do with it.
Once I get into concepts, then I can make a judgment. "Oh, someone's parked their car not very well, now that car can't get out," and so on. "Well, that tree looks as if it could fall over in a storm. If that happened, it could fall on the roof here. I hope they've got insurance."
Our mind can run and run and run with all sorts of thoughts and elaborations, but that's talking about the world. We fill the world with our concepts and, of course, that's a never-ending task. Once you commit yourself to being a stream of thoughts, you can't stop thinking, because then who would you be? So the function of meditation is to relax our addiction to thought and to enter into another domain. It's not an altered state of consciousness. It is exactly what has always been here, but it's as if it's a paradigm shift. By not filling the world with our concepts what is the immediate presentation of the phenomena? We see the tree. When the thought starts to arise in the mind, just relax into the out-breath as if you were focusing on the breath. Take the same focus onto the tree.
Something is there, or something is appearing. Even before we think of it, and grammar is very difficult here because we always insert thing into everything. Something is there, but certainly appearance manifests, appearance shows. Stay with that.
The empty mind receives the world as it is. The conceptual mind tells the world what it is. So this is a major kind of fulcrum point or turning point, and if we open to the world as it is, the whole process of being sick, of getting limited, and moving towards death is just that. Now this may be rather annoying for other people...