12-minute trigger is a daily writing project: 1) set the timer for 12 minutes and write soon after waking up; 2) see what happens; 3) continue or don’t (but wrap it up fairly quickly, regardless, as one must get on with one’s day); and 4) lightly edit and post here (or don’t: sometimes it’s too personal or too messy, sometimes the writing is too weak, sometimes I’m too busy).
Where to start amidst endless forking paths, within a matrix of portals and jumps and connections that can be triggered, opened, closed, skipped, revealed as traps? Where to start with the mind?
This is the “point” to meditation – yet the point is not a point at all, at least in the popular sense of a single clear and comprehensible end or claim or opinion, as in get to the point. The point, then, is (as has been said to the point of cliché) the “process,” in which one is aware less and less of that which one desires or wishes to be and more and more of what appears to be happening where and when one finds oneself.
“To find oneself”: another idiom that risks cliché. There’s the useful everyday sense of “I found myself doing x” as the result of a sequence of events (a sequence that may remain opaque, as in “how in the world did you find yourself doing x?”). But then there’s the cliché sense – originating in the sixties’ pop-spiritualities, I imagine – of “finding oneself” that rests upon a (likely) fundamental misassumption. The assumption is that there is a stable and enduring (eternally, even, in the form of a soul of a particular kind) self-to-be-found; one counter to that is that there is, let’s say, a particular arrangement of or expression of forces – energy-matter unfolding in space-time – that takes particular transitional shapes and moves in shifting directions into and out of various modes or states, and that consciousness is one shape and direction and mode or state of the arrangement and expression of those forces among many (infinitely many, or might as well be).
Meditation – in my exceedingly limited experience – may provide some means to some partial “observation” of this, with observation being not-quite-the-right word given that the subject-object relation becomes (and this is the point) unstable and liable to momentary collapse when one arrives at (or rather very briefly passes through or into) a particular state of mind, one in which the question of “where to start” may momentarily [lost in transcription ] to have stable or meaningful point.
Old glass and window screen