Day before yesterday I went to the gym and did a leg workout. My workouts have evolved a lot over the years, and currently my routine is this: on the first set, I start with a weight that I can do 15 reps with, so that by the 15th rep I have a pretty good burn. On the second set I increase the weight till all I can do is 14 or 15 reps, and on the third set I increase the weight till I can only do 8 to 10 reps max. Then without resting, I drop the weight to something that I can do 4 or 5 reps max, then I drop the weight again until the max I can do is 7 or 8. By then I’ve had all the burning I can take with my pain threshold. It takes an hour and 15 minutes or so to do the whole routine with different exercises, and when I’m done it’s a struggle to walk home. This kind of workout seems to minimize my tendencies toward tendonitis, and I only have to go to the gym a couple of times a week to cover the whole body and keep improving slightly.
On the day after a workout, my legs are still pretty tired, but yesterday I had an event in the evening: a free music mixing seminar in downtown Berkeley. The BART station (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is a mile from my apartment, but by strolling along, I managed it without great discomfort. The walk home at 9:30 PM was a different story. My legs were really tired, and I was unhappy with how often my attention returned to their discomfort, decreasing my enjoyment of the scenery. My preference circuits would no sooner divert attention to the surroundings then they would be overwritten by the pain circuits that were drawing attention back to the legs.
Then the realization occurred that I was looking at the environment in the ordinary way: with primary attention on vision, but without the kind of total attention that overrides all other inputs. I smiled, remembering that option, and suddenly, the visual world became totally dominant. There was no attention left for labeling the objects I was seeing, and the word “tired” was as distant as all other linguistic concepts.
Then a memory emerged: I remembered how, at one point in my evolution—lasting for several years, actually—achieving that level of focus had been very important: I had understood it as the key to “enlightenment.” That, too, has evolved. I used to believe that enlightenment was a life-altering experience that would result in a constant state of awareness of the larger reality. I have come to think more like the sixth patriarch of Zen, who said something like: one thought can be an enlightened thought and the next thought can be an unenlightened thought.
It does seem that consciousness of the larger perspective—in which each thought and experience is seen in the context of the universe as a whole—is more frequent than it used to be, and it may be that this increased frequency is the result of continuing to try to pay attention from moment to moment to everything that arises. But I’ve stopped yearning for some overwhelming, life-altering experience. Everything evolves, and having non-linguistic thinking as an option iswhat makes monitoring thought possible, perhaps. It’s a wonderful option to have, and I’m richer for it, but it’s impossible to function socially in that state. Language is what this writing is, for one thing, and I have to know what day it is to get the bills paid on time.
Perhaps Enlightenment is something that hovers just over one’s shoulder in the way that Don Juan said Death does. Perhaps it hovers more closely as time goes on, commenting and offering advice from that perspective more often as we learn to pay attention.
Stay tuned.
Sun/No Sun