When we strip away memories, dreams, fantasies, plans for the future, and stop defining ourselves by our values, our opinions and beliefs, and all the rest, do we confront our humanity or an empty shell, because actually those are the qualities that make us human – just as if you go on peeling the onion, eventually there’s nothing left?

When I sit down to “meditate” or when other people are trying to focus on their breathing or a mantra or a special quality, I just sit and don’t attempt to do anything in particular. Usually after a while the mind grows quiet – at least as quiet as when I was trying to achieve something. I don’t usually go to that place that someone calls “la-la-land” – “a pleasant place in which you can spend years”, as a friend describes it.

Probably the first persons who learned meditation were hunters. They had to keep their body still, remain as vigilant and ready for action as a cat that is ready to pounce. But a better analogy for meditation in the animal who has to remain attentive to danger, rather than the one who is focused on the prey. You can startle a cat while she is in the act of concentrating on her prey, but it is hard to startle a fly on the wall. He has multiple eyes and lives in a time dimension that is faster than ours.

When I read books about spirituality I find it more satisfying to go to the sufis, the bhaktas, the devotees, even though I share nothing with their practice. I can no longer read Krishnamurti for example, even if my experience is in closer accord with his, and nothing from Buddhism. I think it is because the divinity of the devotee gets closer to raw existence than any simple and straight description of raw existence could actually be.

But in my own writing I don’t want to prettify reality with fine metaphors, hawk illusions, or anything else. I’m only trying to come to terms with my experience. Sometimes I write instead in my notebook. It doesn’t really matter. In any case, once you begin to touch on the important things, there is nothing really personal. It isn’t about “my” experience, because I’m trying to strip away the person – the persona. The word we use to describe ourselves actually comes from the word that the Greeks used to describe the masks that covered the actors in their plays. The characters were identified with the masks. We are all playing our character very well. Below the mask there are other things lurking – secret desires, things we don’t want to talk about, hidden hurts, and all that. But this is not what I mean. These are just another mask for a reality that is also deeper than these. That’s the interesting place.

So I ask again what’s there, beneath the dreams, plans, fantasies, ideas about what we are? Anything or nothing at all? A kernel? A kernel of the kernel, as Ibn Arabi called it? A something that can only be described in negative terms? Most people don’t want to go there. Even if everything else in our lives depends on it. Just as, as someone has said, we go through life averting our eyes from the sun, though its energy is the source of all life in our world.

These are just thoughts. It doesn’t matter who reads them or if nobody reads them, or if they are erased tomorrow. They are as trivial as everything else that’s written here and tomorrow I will have forgotten that I expressed them, or repeat some variation of them, forgetting that I’ve already broached these subjects previously.

Action is something that takes place within a background of inaction, just as noise is heard against a background of silence. It shouldn’t be that we run and run and then pause to rest, but that our actions emerge appropriately, at the right time and place, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. Most people find the encounter with silence and inactivity difficult. We can’t bear to be caught doing nothing. When we finish our work we run home and seek other activities with which to entertain ourselves. We hate to stand in a queue with nothing to do, so we play with our phones. If we need to take long journeys we fill our time with inflight entertainment systems, magazines, books – anything, as long as we don’t have to deal with the boredom of having nothing to do. If we “practice” meditation the teacher makes sure to give us a focus of concentration, like the breathing or a mantra, and then meditation becomes just another “activity” like all the other activities that we do. I wonder why we are so afraid of empty time, why we are scared to be alone with ourselves? To confront ourselves as we are, rather than escaping into plans, dreams, memories and fantasies. I remember as a teenager seeing old men in Afghan villages whiling away the hours in teashops and roadside stalls and thinking that they know something that we in the west have lost. And I remember my grandfather sitting in his armchair for hours and hours doing nothing in particular. That’s where he was when he died.

I think it’s a nice idea to place here references to things that come up in actual conversations had with people. Yesterday I was speaking with a former monastic who said that the main cause of his being overworked in the monastery was that he could do many things, and therefore was “too useful”. I told him about the following passage in Chuang Tsu:

Shih the carpenter was on his way to the state of Chi. When he got Chu Yuan, he saw an oak tree by the village shrine.

The tree was large enough to shade several thousand oxen and was a hundred spans around. It towered above the hilltops with its lowest branches eighty feet from the ground. More than ten of its branches were big enough to be made into boats. There were crowds of people as in a marketplace. The master carpenter did not even turn his head but walked on without stopping.

His apprentice took a long look, then ran after Shih the carpenter and said, “Since I took up my ax and followed you, master, I have never seen timber as beautiful as this. But you do not even bother to look at it and walk on without stopping. Why is this?”

Shih the carpenter replied, “Stop! Say no more! That tree is useless. A boat made from it would sink, a coffin would soon rot, a tool would split, a door would ooze sap, and a beam would have termites. It is worthless timber and is of no use. That is why it has reached such a ripe old age.”

from Chuang Tsu, Inner Chapters. A new translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English

Here in Palestine, apart from useful trees like olives, the only large old trees are those at religious sites, such as those that shade a cemetery or sheikh’s tomb. The rest were long since cut down for timber by one or another of the land’s occupiers.
(Many other things could be said about the role of trees in the current conflict.)

However in Chuang Tsu, the fable concerning the tree is meant to illustrate one of the the teachings of Taoism, which, as usual turns conventional wisdom on its head.