My physical energy reserves are pathetic. Five non-consecutive hours on my feet and I’m as tired as a normal man would feel after a day’s physical labor. It’s been like this forever, but I seem constitutionally incapable of fully recognizing such things when they are ambiguously intermixed with moral failure. Fortunately, that is no longer the case.
I can feel each new acknowledged limitation like a link in the chains binding my body, settling me into fixity, diminishing superfluous possibilities. And how do you escape unbreakable chains? By becoming the chains.
The whole thing, all of it, is chains. Every heartbeat, every breath is a reminder of the limits of flesh. We are living dissections stretched on the glass of time. The true path, forged link by link by act of will, is the path of least and most resistance. Chain does not bend, suffer or break; it simply is. Yet pulled taut, it transmits every sympathetic tension, up and down the line.
I finally did it; I started surfing the fatigue. I’d already reduced the ambiguous moral failure to a meniscus; either I was submerged and halted or meditating and productive. But when fatigued without sleepiness, I couldn’t force myself to rest, instead reading uselessly albeit pleasurably.
The concept of becoming the chains did it for me. Duty, the act of meditation, weakness, and my limits all became part of one and the same chain, filling the present moment. A single, undivided act of existence, in which it became natural to close my eyes when fatigue submerged me, until the natural bouyancy of sensory deprivation returned me to the surface. Instead of wiping out with the wave, I was surfing.
This concept is very freeing, in its fatalism and removal of alternative. In the absence of choice, there is joy. Yet it combines perfect realism with perfect duty. The act of existence is the same as identity is the same as unconscious right action.
The eye that has never enough of seeing, and the lizard brain’s lazy hands that foldeth for a little rest, have been set against each other, and the house of vice, divided against itself, cannot stand.
So, in sum, I changed my hand koan from “Doing Discipline” to “Become Chains”. But it is merely the reason and best fitting label, not part of the meditation itself. The reminder and spur, and perhaps also an echo of the unconscious thought that shapes it.
All in all, it’s a subtle difference, I suppose, like that between traveling for the journey versus the destination. But in meditation, both must be the same… and the traveler too.
I think perhaps the best way to represent this tweak to the meditation is to occasionally visualize the links of a chain sliding through the current meditation loci, one link per heartbeat. The point is better for maximizing focus; the chain is better for motivation, identity, or suffering.
In fact, thank God I have this new option. Focusing while experiencing severe physical pain heightens the sensation and is a very bad idea. Given how the two work, it’s probably best to use the chain whenever unable or unwilling to bring focus to a point. Nothing speaks to wayward flesh like a chain in the dark. And nothing stills the urgency of unfeasible action like the implacable advance of its cold links.