Completely Letting Go of Control

The process of giving up control began in my brother’s basement. I was staring at his beige carpet, meditating. I was bored. “This meditation isn’t doing anything for me, it’s useless,” I thought. Then I tried to relax into this sense of uselessness. (Make the difficulty the object of your meditation: advice that almost always works.) What that meant was: giving up on the idea of my mind being any other way than it was, giving up on the idea of “meditating well,” giving up on determining what was important—surrendering to a completely boring moment. It was an act of dropping my identity, concerns, and personal will. My sense of time dropped away. The carpet I was looking at suddenly seemed like eternal carpet, a manifestation of all that had ever been. With no expectation that it should be important, suddenly it shone forth, supersaturated with reality. It was shockingly beautiful, even though it was, equally, unspectacular beige carpet. I knew how silly this was. And yet.

For one thing, there was no perceived center of my consciousness. Certainly, I didn’t have a sense that I was located in my head, that there was “a little man behind the controls.” There was nothing controlling anything.

The Zen tradition is full of annoying paradoxical statements and concepts. Like the idea of the Gateless Gate: the place you go in the moment you truly abandon the intention to go anywhere. Such paradoxical ideas now seem like utterly straightforward descriptions of my experience.

I softened my gaze and tried to be comfortable, and let go of all intention. In about an hour’s time, my mind was given back to me, in improved form, similar to what it had been after glimpsing The Eternal Carpet. All was luminous, centerless, borderless, fluid. Stepping out into the evening, the bleakness of the United Kingdom refreshed my skin. It was an unspoiled Eden, full of fish and chip shops, all primordially exceptional. I couldn’t remember sadness.

It was hilarious and also quite humbling that the most intense experiences of my contemplative life were caused by simply abandoning effort. Previously, I’d assumed that there was a thing called “meditation,” that I was “good at,” that was being done by “Sasha.” But this was apparently an impoverished view. I didn’t understand what was going on, and who it was happening to, and who was doing it. Nothing required my understanding, though. In fact, my attempts at understanding limited the depth of my practice—better not to even try.

The biggest effect, I think, is that I no longer have the sense that my life contains some fundamental inadequacy that requires fixing, some unfillable gap. It simply is this way, including all of the griping and indigestion, the sunbursts and cloudbursts. I can’t escape it, and I don’t want to.