They say a picture’s worth a thousand words and I’d have to
agree. I’ve had two images that have
stuck with me from summer backpacking trips (well, there are probably more than
two, but these seem to have something to say to me).
The first is my friend standing in a shallow lake pumping
water into our water bottles. It’s the
morning and the lake is glassy still except for the rings of ripples moving out
from where she is standing. Now a lake
is commonly used as a metaphor for the mind.
The way I have often heard and used it is focused on how when there is a
lot of activity in the lake, the water becomes cloudy, but when the lake is
quiet, the sediment settles down and we can see clearly. What struck me that morning watching my
friend is that it’s not just that we can see the bottom of the lake more
clearly when it is calm (or see a certain object more clearly when the mind is
calm), but that we can see cause and effect more clearly. It makes me think of what I was talking about
in the last post—true feedback. We can
see the impact of our actions, we have a better sense of what’s going on, where
something starts and what direction it is going. We can see the relationship of things, of
ourselves to our surroundings.
The second image is a wide-open view of Mt. Rainier as we
were driving home. I always love a great
big view of Mt. Rainier. What was
especially noteworthy about this one was that we didn’t see it on the way
there. We passed a viewpoint and saw all
these cars parked there with people standing and taking pictures and we wondered
what they were looking at. It was a nice
view of a mountainside full of evergreens, but kind of a weird place to make an
official viewpoint. On the way home, we
caught the magnificent Rainier and said, “Oh, that’s what they were looking
at.” So, it’s good to have a clear mind
and be able to see things clearly, but you also need to be looking in the right
direction!
This makes me think of satya, usually translated as
truthfulness, that I think of as reality, being in reality. I associate it with the phrase “clear
seeing.” For clear seeing, we have to
calm the mind (which is a lot of what yoga is all about)—this doesn’t mean
everything is totally quiet and still, but that it is quiet enough that we can
see what’s going on. But just calming
the mind is not enough if we are not looking in the right direction. That may sound obvious, but I wonder how
often we are trying to see or understand something and we are not looking in
the right place.
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