The narrow gate

I go to hear Tim Parks at the London Review Bookshop, talking about his latest book, ‘Teach Us To Sit Still’. It describes, in brilliant and entertaining detail, how he eventually found relief from years of intense pain by learning to meditate at an Italian vipasana. Later in the question and answer session he is asked how he coped with what the questioner describes as the ‘mumbo jumbo’ of Buddhist belief (in re-incarnation for example). With a dodgy microphone I am a bit hazy about Park’s reply: it is something like, ‘given the relief which this form of meditation has afforded me, who am I to worry about the wrapping it comes in?’

The audience’s level of ignorance about meditation surprises me. I am used to the assumption that only Buddhists or Hindus meditate - not Christians – but apparently no one in this well read and intelligent group of people knows about the manifold forms (wrappings!) in which we Europeans now practice the art.

I say ‘art’: ‘discipline’ is an equally appropriate word. The wrapping, the religious and cultural assumptions surrounding forms of meditation, are secondary. What matters: matters profoundly, is that we practice the discipline. Another questioner begins by saying, “I tried meditation a few years ago but.....”

William Leith, reviewing Parks’ book in The Observer, writes,

“About now, Parks has his spiritual breakthrough. He realises that, as a writer, he hardly ever lives in the moment – up to now, he's spent the vast majority of his time thinking about how to translate his experiences into words. He's been living in the past, and in the future, but never quite in the present.”

Precisely. Without the discipline of a meditative practice we are always going to be seduced, sucked away, into the past or the future. That’s why Jesus said, “Enter by the narrow gate....” Sometimes only severe pain gives us the motivation to persist in the search for that gate into the present, the Now.