One summer in the 1990's, I joined friends for a 100 mile trip down Ontario's Spanish River. I was new to canoeing, but my Canadian friends were experienced, providing good canoes, maps, enough food, and proper equipment.
We set off from Toronto for the two hundred mile drive to Duke Lake, vehicles heavily laden, and failed to arrive at our launch site until dusk. We had to get on the water despite the gloom because drivers were already waiting to take the vehicles down to our eventual landing site at Agnew Lake. By the time we had unloaded and prepared the canoes, it was dark, but there was nowhere nearby to make camp. We had to set off on the river. As a novice, I found this quite scary.
I'm telling the story as an analogy. Meditation can be like this: difficult and anxiety-provoking at the beginning. Many, however, comfortably learn its techniques in the company of others who become spiritual friends and companions. It is possible to make progress alone, but it can be slow and more limited without proper guidance and friendship, like heading against the current, for example, taking a wrong turn or expecting too much too soon. To help avoid mistakes and discouragement, it is best to find good meditation teachers.
Sometimes you also need good luck. Fortunately, by torchlight that night, we eventually found an adequate landing and campsite on the opposite bank. Getting there and setting up proved to be a pretty fraught business. We were hungry, and had somehow to prepare food. I am not sure how we managed; nevertheless, in the morning we had all slept and were ready to paddle downstream. There were eleven of us in four canoes.
The weather was fair during the next four days. With guidance, I was soon able to master sufficiently the necessary skills and techniques. We worked hard and kept moving, sometimes paddling for ten hours. We had repeatedly to empty water from the canoes. Frustratingly, we occasionally found ourselves running aground or capsizing. Exhilaratingly, we would shoot the safer rapids, but laboriously have to carry canoes, tents, equipment and supplies around the more hazardous.
Meditation can be like this. You may start barely prepared and more or less in the dark. There are obstacles and difficulties at the beginning, interspersed with exhilarating high points and breakthroughs, followed by further setbacks.
On the final day, on schedule, we reached the section designated on the map as a ‘royal ride' for canoeists. It is where the water runs swift and smooth through a long, straight, rock-sided channel. It did indeed prove to be a royal ride. On this final stretch we effortlessly doubled our previous speed, covering twenty miles in a couple of hours, reaching our destination and the vehicles soon after.
Continuing with the meditation analogy, as your technique and skills improve, what seemed adverse now turns in your favour. The struggle abates. The flow is smooth and, for a time, you can enjoy a royal ride. This is why perseverance is recommended. Often when things seem problematic, you are actually making good progress. There is no easy way of judging one's development as a meditator. You have to accept that sometimes the flow dwindles or backs up, just like water in a river. All you need is to stay afloat and persevere.
The comparison can be extended further. The water in the Spanish River has fallen as rain on some of the oldest rocks of the Earth's crust, beautiful, glacier-sculptured pink granite. It flows in streams through a beautiful wilderness of dense spruce and pine forest alive with moose, bears, wolves, deer, eagles, chipmunks and butterflies, before joining beaver and trout on the banks and in the river. First nation peoples have left their signs on the rocks.
Several timescales are represented here: those of the rocks, of the early people, of the trees, of the animals, of me and my friends (the canoeists), of me now (the writer) bringing together into the present, using mind and imagination, these different aspects of the past. Now you, the reader - at a different time - are doing the same, building up a picture of that place and the events I have been describing. This kind of seamless and interdependent continuity reflects a powerful truth about existence. It is not fragmented. It is whole.
The Spanish River flows on still. It flows beyond where we left it at the end of the royal ride section into a sequence of lakes, eventually through a dam, from which it provides power and electricity for the far-off city of Toronto. The water continues from Lake Huron over Niagara Falls into Lake Ontario then the St Lawrence River, and so to the Atlantic Ocean from where it evaporates, falling as rain again: an endless cycle.
When proficient, meditation helps us be aware that the activity of our minds is continuous and seamless too. In meditation, we gradually discover that there is no ‘external' and ‘internal', only mind and mindfulness. Everyday experience is not like this. During wakefulness, our minds are dynamically engaged. Our emotions are active. Our thoughts chatter away in our heads. Our bodies are frequently restless. The motor is running. The gears are engaged and we are in motion.
In meditation, it is different. There are various techniques with the same aim: to leave the motor of conscious awareness running gently, while disengaging the drive. We are wide awake, but still... and usually silent. The mind grows calm. Equanimity is restored. It feels like coming home.
Copyright Larry Culliford
