The Heart Sutra

A couple nights ago I went to a meditation class led by my new psychiatrist, something he calls psycho-dharma.  It was pretty awesome, in retrospect, although at the time, I was a little at a loss.  Sitting Indian-style, eyes closed, legs falling asleep and lower back increasingly aching in a room with twenty other strangers for forty-five minutes is really weird at first.

I’ve had several meager attempts at meditating in the past — consulted with a Japanese-Zen master (told me to start out staring at a white wall for an hour a day), been to a meditation class at a Thai Buddhist monastery (incomprehensible chanting, prayer, incense, and trance-like “walking meditation”), spoke with a yogi in India (gave me some books on role of yoga and meditation in love, family life, and everything up to world peace) — but nothing specific ever clicked. As interesting as it was, I found the process quite frustrating and with various people thrusting more religious beliefs on me, often intolerable.

But seriously, what’s the point of meditation?  Every religion, spiritual path, faith, etc, seems to advocate reaching some higher plain of consciousness. There have been these medical  studies on the power of prayer, and they’ve proven that the brains of a Buddhist monk and a Catholic nun (in the program I watched) have significantly altered brain waves and blood pressure when they are meditating or praying.

So…if this process, some process, alters our brain function for the better, puts us in a healthier more peaceful place, yeah, attempting to get there can only be good.  Right? Right.

Especially for people with chronic psychiatric issues?  Hopefully.

After we meditated (after I tried to focus, fidgeted, panicked, became overwhelmed with emotion, and then tried to focus again), we spoke about the experience (a too-long discussion comparing human meditation to our pet cats’ and dogs’ here-and-now existence and what the difference is), and then read a text.  The Heart Sutra (full text; Wikipedia page).  It’s supposedly a very important Buddhist text, as well as one of the shortest.  And it’s far out.  Here’s an excerpt:

“See first all five heaps—all five parts to a person—as being empty of any essence of their own. Your body is empty; emptiness is your body. Emptiness is nothing but your body, and your body is nothing but emptiness. The same is true of your feelings, and your ability to discriminate between things, and the other factors that make you up, and all the different kinds of awareness that you possess: all of them are empty. And thus we can say that every existing thing is emptiness.”

It’s my homework to contemplate this text this week.  You know, it never ceases to amaze me how advanced and (if I can even say) ahead-of-its-time ancient Eastern thought was.  While most of us were still illiterate pagans, living in mud huts, eating muddy roots, and just getting by, all of this was happening in India.  Everything that exists is emptiness.  Well, golly gee.

Whether this works or not, it’s nice to be putting together a schedule.  Meditation on Sundays, Scrabble Club on Mondays, Yoga on Tuesdays (or Wed or Thurs, haven’t figured that out yet).

Have a great day folks!  I’m trying…

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