Autopilot

I drove home last week and couldn’t tell you how I got there. It was a kind of autopilot.

Not in an alarming way. I stopped at the lights; I made the turns. I must have done it because I got home safely. Somewhere in the last mile it occurred to me that I had no memory of any of it — which intersections, which cars, whether I’d passed the place I always notice.

The strange part isn’t that I wasn’t paying attention. It’s that I was. Enough to drive. I saw the road. My hands did the right things at the right times. Something was tracking the whole route with reasonable competence. I just wasn’t really present.

It’s the same thing that happens at the stove. You get down the block and can’t say whether you turned it off. And usually you did — you go back and it’s off. You did it. You weren’t present while you did it.

I think about this because it’s important to meditation, especially as you begin to get better at it.

When the mind wanders and you get fully distracted, you know. There’s a moment of coming back, and the coming back tells you where you’d gone. This other thing leaves nothing behind. The object was there. I was observing it. And afterward there’s the same blank the drive home leaves — I couldn’t tell you what happened, and I can’t point to a moment where anything went wrong.

In training concentration meditation, we call this experience laxity, and it takes some care to separate it from ordinary distraction. In distraction, the object is gone. Here the object is present and steady, and something else is missing — the force of the holding, the vividness of it. That sounds like a technicality until you’ve had a session like that, tried to describe it afterward, and found there was nothing to describe.

What stays with me is that it isn’t a failure of effort. I wasn’t slacking on the drive home. I was doing it. There’s a way of doing something completely and not being in it, and I don’t think meditation is where most of us first do that. I think it’s where we first notice we do it.

Which may be a good part of what meditation is for. Not another place to be competent. A place quiet enough that the difference between doing something and being present for it finally becomes audible — and then, slowly, something you start catching out in the rest of the day. On the drive. At the stove.

We practice calm abiding meditation in Chattanooga, in person and online, in the Gelug tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. If any of this sounds familiar, I’d love for you to join us.