The Peace that Passeth Understanding

I spent a couple of decades as a meditator, attempting to keep attention focused, trying to get my mind to become stabilized. However, the more I investigated the reality of my experience, the more apparent it became that there was no stability. The closer I looked, the clearer it became that experience (which of course includes attention) is changing from one flash instant to the next. Experience drifts, it undulates. After all, it’s alive! Life doesn’t hold still; it dances around. The flow of experiencing is just that, a flow; it never actually becomes anything solid or fixed. Reality is forever on the move, here for less than a nanosecond. And then gone. Swept away. 

Now, because of the non-durational nature of things, I not surprisingly kept failing miserably at my meditative efforts to find stability. I longed for things to settle down and become still. But reality would have no part of it. Nope, any apparent stability, any seeming arrival at something substantial or fixed would be swept away no sooner than it arrived. There was no stability. That is what was revealed. 

And yet this relentless instability, this ceaseless dance of transformation, this radically unstable dynamism turns out to be its own kind of stability. How so? Well, it is what’s real. In that sense, the inherent instability is what we can count on. We can count on the fact that experience does not endure but is forever on the move. We could call it the “stability of instability.”

But the deepest truth is that how this is, cannot actually be said. We can’t really say whether reality is stable or unstable, restless or calm, still or moving. Nope. What this is cannot be said for any description implies that experience actually resolves as being some “thing,” something definite and definable. But it doesn’t. And so the only true thing we can ever really say about what this is, is that it is simply un-sayable. 

This is the peace that passeth all understanding…