My friends” children have been learning to swim this past summer and I received glowing reports about how well they were doing. At the beginning, the children themselves told a very different story.
“Just looking at all that water makes me scared,” they told me. “I”ll never be able to swim.” They believed that and acted on it.
Now, they look forward to coming to the pool; they swim back and forth, play games under water, even dive in the deep end. This did not come about overnight. It came through hard work, under the guidance of a good swimming teacher who knows just how to demonstrate the strokes and skills she wants her students to develop. The transformation starts in the “kiddie pool,” where drowning is difficult even if you have a talent for it. There, the children learn to duck their heads under the water and hold their breath. They learn to blow bubbles. They hold on to the side and learn to kick.
Finally comes the time for the big pool, of which they are scared stiff — drowning is too distinct a possibility to ignore, lifeguard or not. And it looks so far from one end to the other. But after a while, through guidance and experience, they lose that fear of the water. Now they are at home in the pool.
With the right training, any of us can learn to be at home in the world of the mind, just as those children learned to be at home in the water.
Beneath the surface
Classical Indian mysticism compares the mind to a lake, which for most of us is being continually lashed into waves by the winds of emotional stimulus and response. The real storm winds are four: anger, fear, greed and self-will. One or another is generally blowing. As a result, the water is in a constant state of agitation. Even when the surface appears calm, murky currents are stirring underneath.
Through meditation and the other powerful allied disciplines, however, the lake of the mind can be made absolutely clear. When not even a ripple disturbs the surface, you can look into the crystal waters of the mind and see the very bottom: the divine ground of existence which is the basis of our personality, which in Sanskrit is called simply Atman “the Self.”
On the surface level of awareness, everyone seems separate. We look different, wear different clothes, have different speech patterns, different ambitions, different conditioning. This is the physical level of awareness, below which the vast majority of us cannot see because of the agitation of the mind. Just below the surface is the level of personal, individual consciousness, a comparatively shallow region which is easily stirred by the winds of sense impressions and emotions. The more physically oriented we are—that is, the more we identify with our bodies and feelings—the more caught up we will be in this mind-world of constantly changing forms.
In this state it can be difficult to get close to other people; all our awareness is caught in the things that make us seem separate from them. Their differences seem to keep getting in our way. Underlying this level, largely unsuspected, lies the depths of the collective unconscious. There is only one collective unconscious: at the bottom, everyone”s unconscious is the same. The deeper we get, the more clearly we shall see that our differences with others are superficial, and that 99 percent of what we are is the same for everyone. To the extent we can turn our back on our petty, private mind-world and learn to dive into deeper consciousness, we can free ourselves from the influence of the storms that stir up those shallow waters at the surface. At the same time, as we get deeper, we move closer and closer to other people; we feel closer to life as a whole. This, in effect, is what learning to swim in the unconscious is all about.
Passage Meditation Clearlake Satsang (fellowship) meets every Thursday evening at 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
Contact Steve Shields at 350-2613 or steve@steveashields.com for meeting place and information. For more information on the other points of the Eight Point Program of Passage Meditation, go to www.easwaran.org.
