Contemplation: It Should Feel Good
Long had the islanders wondered what—in the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—Big Mike was doing at night, alone in his grandfathers ill-omened currach, out beyond the headlands, with his nets left behind. He wasn’t fishing—everyone had seen him some weeks past when he took the nets from his boat and carried them over his back up to the old cottage. And in the weeks that followed, the more curious and daring had ventured up to confirm—yes, there the nets were, in perfect shape, but dry, hanging in the outhouse.
At last one night in a deep fog Ned and his crew encounter Big Mike upon the deep, and dare to ask: Big Mike, how is the fishing?
Big Mike replies with the following contemplative koan: The Fishing is good, Ned. The fishing is very good. The fishing, not fishing at all, is blessedness, is bliss.”
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The Big Mike story, and Mike’s utterance that “the fishing, not fishing at all, is blessedness, is bliss,” got me going on the essay below, called Contemplation: It Should Feel Good. Perhaps encouraged by Big Mike, I let the sails of this piece far out to the wind on this one, and so I’m posting it own my on Substack, with an excerpted version below.
And, might I also recommend two telling of the Big Mike tale:
The first by Martin Shaw—though I’m afraid a subscription is necessary (best five dollars a month you ever spent if you like storytelling, Wild Saints, and audio content from the bard himself): see House of Beasts and Vines.
The second is free on YouTube, from the mouth of the great Irish bard, philosopher and mystic, John Moriarty. You can here that one here.
Now, row out with me a bit, safe out from the breakers, to the deep waters: the descending fog can hide us there, disorient us and hold us, wrap us in the tranquility that always lies beneath the disturbance. Let’s let the net of our minds down, and the net of our heats, and the sensing net of our body’s. Let’s not hope for a catch! But for an encounter no net can hold.
Contemplation: It Should Feel Good
[These are the last sections from longer piece the entirety of which I meant to be light hearted, a friendly encouragement.]
I’d meant to say simple things like, notice what happens when in Centering Prayer we say the sacred word not as a gentle flyswatter of the mind, but utter it with care from the cave of the heart?—as Rev. Matthew Wright shares (advice offered to him by a Sufi Sheik). There is pleasure in such an utterance. And likely because there is sensation in it, feeling in it: we hear and feel its vibration in the heart region, are attracted, allured.
Similarly, Jeanne De Salzmann, Gurdjieff lineage bearer and Fourthway stalwart, offers that we could arrange our posture in such a way—in a way full of sensing and curiosity—that there comes to be a pleasure in the experience of arranging and inhabiting our body which attracts us, invites us to linger there. Usually we pass over this work, assuming a meditative posture with cursory adjustments, leaving an important door unopened, a room of presence shut off.
Incredibly, opening the body’s door of sensation and feeling attracts our intellect. So used to its roving independence, so hard to bend to our meditative will, in the presence of this well arranged, fully sensing body, the intellect comes like a coat to the hanger. As if it recognizes something trustworthy—at last!—it may quit its roving and restlessness, hang itself upon a sensing being, and relax.
How counter an approach this is to that of struggle with our mind's wandering ways...
To this point, one of John Bennett’s last encounters with Gurdjieff was a harsh, but pivotal one for him: Gurdjieff had been acting cold towards him, disappointed it seemed; and when Bennett approached him in the Paris cafe where Gurdjieff held office hours, he was harshly scolded, his teacher saying, “You never work on yourself, you only work on your cheap animal!”
How much, and how tiring is our work on these cheap animals of ours! And how sad, how habituated we are to calling them by our own names…
And then there is Rumi. With his intoxicant’s love song, how he always calls us to beauty, to give up the marketplace of the mind’s rumination, and enter the tavern of love …
Why do we argue with the possibility of a path of goodness, full of sensation and feeling that naturally engages us, feels wholesome to us?
So often, we bottle up the precious fragrance of our contemplative work only to smash the vessel on the breakers of the outer world we judge as injustice, criminal, in need of reform. But can’t we remember Mary Magdalen with her precious oil, and how she used it: beauty returned to Beauty.
Are we so sure it is spiritual bypassing to commit to a path that, from the perspective of our feeling and sensing body, we can track as being—as the Shambhala path says of itself—Good in the beginning, Good in the middle, and Good in the end?
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In New Orleans this week I allowed my cheap animal a very fine treat. Though I struggled with it—that is I struggled with ‘myself’—for sometime, trying to convince it that a fancy hotdog from the Cochon Butcher was unnecessary, lavish. Couldn’t the animal wait until the Centering Prayer gathering at St Pauls was over and we all shared humble finger sandwiches from Lakeside Grocery together? No, it could not.
So in a gap in scattered showers I walked the few blocks from the Business District…
Outside Cochon I was asked for money. And while I had some cash, I refused. Then finding that middle ground we often look for, I offered to buy the man some food. He said he would like some dessert.
He said, “I see folks coming out of these restaurants all the time, and I think, it seems to me, I bet they had some good dessert in there.”
I did not know what the butcher would have as dessert, but Lord have mercy, it was a three inch thick key lime pie!
He also agreed to having one of their very fine house made hotdogs, and a Coke-a-Cola.
I had the woman at the counter package his things up separately, to go; and ordered mine to dine in. I was still thinking to get rid of him. But a gentleness, a simplicity in his presence there beside me, attracted me, ultimately had me inviting him to table.
We did not speak much, or need to. I checked my familiar impulse to fill the space with pleasantry’s, or inquiries. His dark beard had what looked like sand caked and dry in the mustache. His left arm had a fresh, un-smeared, bright globule of blood where the sun-thinned skinned had been torn. His motions were slow, steady, as was his gaze, which was bright, and ready like his smile. It seemed to me it took an awfully long time to prepare those hot dogs…
At one point he said, not really to me, but into the room: “This life is a wonder.”
The food had not come yet, nor the drinks. It didn’t seem like his comment was particularly a response to his surrounds, or to my company.
“How do you mean?” I said.
“Beauty. All the Beauty.”
“You see this world as beautiful?”
He nodded, solemnly, still regarding the room at large.
“What do you do, to see this world as beautiful?”
Here he looked at me now with his bright eyes, their strong gaze.
“I choose.” He said. “You have to choose to.”
He said, “People talk all kinds of talk about New Orleans. I don’t know what they’re talking about. Complaining… Oh but I know what they say. What I don’t know is, why they choose that. Why they want to live in that world? All nasty. They stop seeing the beauty. Say it is not there, never was. Forget it was. This life is a choice! There’s plenty of beauty here to choose from, and when you choose—it increases.”
I was impressed. And yet I had some reservation I couldn’t name. Thankfully he did:
“Choosing,” he said, “is not make-believing. Make-believing is forgetting there’s a choice.”
He did not of course strike me as a man who lived in a make-believe world.
We were mostly silent the rest of the meal, both enjoying the beauty in its abundance.
— — —
It continues to strike me that Jason, my companion at Cochon Butchery, poses a very interesting question for us contemplatives, for us who possess that most precious and rare gift in these fast paced, materialist and divisive times: little moments of perspective, of remove. Little moments of “I am not my thoughts.”
My wife and I were on a study call this month with Kabir Helmenski. Durning the time for questions at the end, someone responded to one of the quotes Kabir had shared form a Sufi mystic. I’m afraid I do not have the quote, but the petitioner said, “Dede, now I am all in trouble! Here I have been thinking with great relieve that “I am not my thoughts,” but now I am being told I must take responsibility for all my thoughts!”
Kabir smiled. “Yes,” he responded, “I am not my thoughts is first. First we have to find who “I” truly am. But then yes, we become responsible. We must then choose what we think.”
We are all of us, of course, at different places, in different moments of our day and life, on this sliding scale of realization and responsibility. What seems worth underlining, and exploring with our practice, with curiosity, is that what is being realized is more than ourselves: but the world itself, which we form with our thoughts, with our practice, and with the presence with which we engage in it and its creation.
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