Original Love

By slowing down, by deciding that each moment is worth experiencing for itself, we can broaden our life. It’s not that life has no direction. It’s that paying attention to what happens along the way makes life richer and fuller. Even though we’re moving in a chosen direction, it actually matters more to us how it is here and now than how it might be down the road. And some even say there is a curious law of nature, by which we’ll fulfill our goals sooner and more amply if we savor the journey toward them.

How is it when no restlessness is present? What is it like to have no aversion arising? How does it feel when there is no desire asking for anything? What is it like when that part of the body where desire would register is instead open, spacious, free, and at peace?

And so on, with all the hindrances.

This can be a method for opening up to positive experience in our sitting practice. We may find a natural appreciation welling up when we notice more clearly that we are currently at peace. The ease we experience when no hindrance is present can become a cause for deep gratitude, which in turn makes us feel a love for life itself—for the bare fact of being alive.

The concept of “flow” entered mainstream culture through the work of the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term in the 1970s and wrote popular books on it in subsequent years (such as Flow and Finding Flow). The term refers to states of deep, fulfilling absorption in a task or activity. More recently, commentators such as Steve Kotler have started using an alternative term, “STER states,” to refer to the same condition. This term is an acronym for the characteristics of the state: selfless, timeless, effortless, and rich.

The same attributes could also be applied to samadhi in meditation.

Csikszentmihalyi found that flow states are linked to more general happiness, well-being, and satisfaction with life. Those who more frequently taste them in their daily lives are by and large happier. This is no surprise, considering that flow states tend to be accompanied by a sense of fulfillment, a sense that this moment, this activity, is enough—in fact, it’s more than enough. It’s giving us all we could need or want.

The four “higher” jhanas necessarily involve non-dual experiences, at least in the jhana design of the Burmese master Pa Auk Sayadaw, in which I trained under one of his successors, Stephen Snyder, who had made the jhanas the heart of his practice. Jhanas are as near as we can get to awakening without quite touching the live circuitry of the universe, as we do in kensho, or awakening itself.

The great twentieth-century Hindu sage Sri Nisargadatta puts it this way:

Love says, “I am everything.”

Wisdom says, “I am nothing.”

Between the two, my life flows.

His great two-volume collection of teachings is called I Am That.