Our Glass of Muddy Water

As I wrote in Up the Mountain, practice is a pattern of progression and regression. Each of us will at some time wake up one day to the realization that we have seriously regressed. Regressing is the bad news. But the good news is that we have realized it. Before we began to seriously practice, we probably weren’t even aware of how we were doing.

Why?

Our minds were filled with so many wandering thoughts we couldn't tell whether we were doing better or not. Now that we have been trying to calm those wandering thoughts, we are more attuned to them. But as we learned in The Merest Shimmer of a Thought, we have a few trillion thoughts in the time it takes to snap our fingers. The ones we are aware of are the largest, the grossest of these. Trying to visualize calming all these thoughts is challenging to say the least. An analogy might help.

Visualize a glass of water filled with muddy water. The water is so dirty we can't see a thing. Since opaque water is what we have become used to, it seems normal. But if we leave the glass alone and allow the water to begin to settle, we see that the water is very slowly beginning to clear. As this happens, we realize that the water is not solid mud, but rather millions of microscopic bits of mud in the water.

Instead of being depressed by thinking “wow there must be a lot of mud in that glass,” think “wow, before I didn’t even realize what the mud was.”

So yes, there has been regression. But at least now, your mind is calm enough to realize it. So you’re still father ahead of where you were when you started.