Mindfulness and living life backwards

In Zen there is a law called the backwards law. What this means is that when you try to stay on surface of water you sink, when you try to sink you float. There is very little effort or indeed no effort in staying afloat, all you do is fill your lungs with air...easy really. When you try to hold your breath, you have lost it. If you want to breathe just don't interfere with nature. There is a saying in Sufism "if you want to save your soul, then lose it." 

But what does this have to do with mindfulness meditation? Well we all find ourselves in a bit of a pickle about life. We find ourselves feeling afraid, confused and insecure. We may prefer to keep these "beasts" at arms-length or better still just pretend they are not there. Another way out of the pickle can be to find the opposite. So our lives become a pursuit to feel ok about life, to blot out the anxious, insecure tremble we feel. We may try to get a "job for life", we may make sure everyone we meet likes us and is nice to us. Or perhaps we make sure we have a pension, and surround ourselves with things who people who make us feel secure and good. 

Another way we may tackle this problem is one of turning to philosophy or religion in order to make sense of this "strange old world."  We may take on certain beliefs, maybe that there is like after death, or that this is it and when we die there is nothing. Both are beliefs and these beliefs can be a comfort to us for a while but to be utterly free we must move beyond mere beliefs into the realm of uncertainty, and this is where most of us don't want to go. However, trying to feel secure by merely  taking on beliefs will in the end make very little difference. The cause of insecurity is that our efforts go into finding security...and there is no security. THIS IS IT - THERE IS NO SECURITY AND TO REALISE THIS IS THE ONLY SECURITY (Before I go on, I am not saying that a good job a pension and taking up religion are bad, just that we don't get from them what we really want) 
We may try endlessly and ingeniously to make intellectual sense out of life. Thinking through this way, thinking it through that way, but in the end hopefully we realise that thinking is limited. It is of a dimension that cannot comprehend reality, because reality includes thought, includes the rational but cannot be contained and understood by it. It is like trying to tie down water with string, it is futile. We can tie ourselves in knots trying to figure it all out. For some of us this intellectual pursuit becomes the reason for living...but in the end leaves us vulnerable and afraid. 

Imagine a flowing river. We wake up (self-consciousness) and see that we are afloat in this river and we are terrified. All our efforts go into holding onto rocks, which in turn are torn apart and dislodged by the river. We intuitively know this but so try ever harder to hold on, because we don’t know what else to do. What we hold to are, people, careers, self-identity, being nice, or not nice, being a rebel or conforming and reputation. Our rocks may be trying to get rich or rationalising that money is dirty. It doesn't matter because all the rocks in time will be wiped away out of our grasp. 

The way out of this dilemma is the way in. In other words we need to allow ourselves to experience the uncertainty. We can start with small things. For example, when you want something to eat just ask yourself, "Am I hungry?" I have realised recently that so much of my eating has nothing to do with being hungry and more to do with insecurity. To know this in the head is one thing but to stay with it whilst it's happening is something completely different. We can also notice when we get defensive about ourselves. If someone criticises you, notice your response and be brutally honest with yourself. "Goodness, I want to punch this person right now for saying that." Hopefully we don't of course, but it's this honesty and spaciousness that allows us to experience the insecurity, the rage we feel toward life. In meditation allow yourself to feel what you feel, joy, hatred, misery, bliss, sadness. When you allow things to be, something that is not of the ordinary mind begins to flow into our lives. It is wisdom and total security, or rather it's the capacity to allow the insecurity to be there and not be dragged into the story we create around it. In other words security comes by seeing deeply that life is 100% insecure. It is by becoming friends with this truth that we become comfortable with it and becoming comfortable with it is wisdom.


So remember the reverse law. If you want to catch a deer lay down in the grass and it may come out and kiss you on the nose. If you want enlightenment don’t chase it just drop your opinions about it, and if you want security then head straight for insecurity.

To learn the wonderful art of mindfulness see my website Mindfulnesscic.co.uk