Waves of the Mind
Poppies, collage and acrylic on paper, © 2021 by Rami Schandall
In my last post, I touched on uncertainty, and meaning. I have been thinking, since, about the ways we see pattern in the world, and read meaning into it. This happens on a cultural level, interpersonally, and intrapersonally. It is a strategy for working with uncertainty, which can be benevolent, or not.**
I delight in pattern and my experience of it — visual pattern, musical pattern, daily life patterns. I like to feel that I understand what is happening around me, and observing patterns of belief and behaviour fuel that sense of understanding.
Creatively, I feel a joyful sense of being “on the right path” when wide-ranging explorations resonate and echo each other, in patterns of meaning. I feel I am in alignment, my curiosity and the world are in synch. For example, I encountered this wonderful passage this week, attributed to Virginia Woolf:
Style is a very simple matter: it is all about rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on.
[...] What rhythm is [...] goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave of the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.
She is writing about writing, and she is writing about perception — much as Patanjali describes chitt vriti, the waves of the mind, in the Yoga Sutra, which I am currently studying and learning to chant. So many types of waves of the mind are described here, all these natural waves of pran — distracted, multi-pointed, outward-oriented — analytical, insightful, full of bliss. Patanjali writes that these latter forms of chitt become more available with sustained, whole-hearted practice — the waves get smoother, like a deep ocean swell, rather than coastal waves crashing onto the object of attention.
When I encounter mental patterns in meditation, I become clearer about my engagement with them. If I can see the waves, I see better how I engage in the world, what I have capacity to accept or to change. Insight arises. Waves of the mind move toward understanding, insight, and even bliss, when we can make space for them to do so.
Then, buddhist wisdom teaches that beyond the waves of the mind, beyond pattern, beyond meaning, the waves of the mind can become still —
gate gate paragate paramsamgate bodhi swaha
gone, gone, gone beyond the farthest shore
— where truth simply IS, and we are that — beyond naming, beyond interpretation. Empty and complete.
May you be safe, may you be well, may you remember the way
riding the waves of the mind, making friends with uncertainty.
** Care is necessary with the dark side of our pattern-recognition super-powers — confirmation bias, and bias more generally, and the rigidity that comes with holding on, tight and intolerant, to belief.
