The Pillow and the Chair

Learning to hold a wider perspective

(for audio version, click above)

As I sit bleary-eyed on the couch each morning with my tea and journal, the chair across from me looks patiently back, waiting for the game we sometimes play. Once awake-ish, I start by focusing my attention on the yellow-knit pillow nestled in its corner, and before long, the chair fades almost completely into a blurry-green background.

Then I switch, concentrating now solely on the chair. And just as easily, the pillow almost disappears from my awareness.

Then the hard part…I readjust my gaze, and by not completely committing to either, I can keep some attention on both, at the same time.

What, you don’t start your day this way? Well, stay with me a minute, because this simple illustration, I believe, gets at something really profound.

Think of the pillow as what spiritual-types call the “manifest” world, which means basically everything you see around you. And let the chair represent the Unmanifest or spiritual world; that which gives rise to, and sustains, everything you see around you.

(I know, I jumped right into the deep end of the pool today.)

Most of us are focused almost exclusively on the pillow. We go about our days completely absorbed by the beauties, bewilderings, dramas and decisions of everyday life. So much so, that we hardly give a thought to whether there’s a chair there in the background. But what if there is?

I believe (joining countless generations of mystics, poets, priests, priestesses, and ordinary folks) what seems impossible to our rational minds…that our everyday reality is held by an even deeper reality; by a big, beautiful, green chair that we have lots of names for like God, the Universe, Spirit…or what I recently saw someone refer to simply as GUS.

I believe there’s something ‘More’ going on here (in the William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, sense). Something that feels both intimate and completely unknowable. Something undefinable, ineffable, and yet as natural and close as the air we breathe. Something intelligent, but also more than what we think of as intelligence. Something loving, but also greater than what we think of as love.

But if this GUS is really there, why don’t we experience it more often? Well, when we’re totally absorbed in day-to-day life, rushing from here to there, constantly lost in a stream of inner dialogue about what’s next on the list, we don’t give ourselves much chance, do we?

Which is why every religious tradition ever has told us we need to step back from the pillow now and then, find a quiet room, tune out the busy world, and focus for a while on the chair. This, we call meditation. And it does two important things.

First, it gives us a much needed break from our lives. As this magnet someone once gave me puts it:

Meditation, if nothing else, is a chance for a few minutes of respite…from the world, from our worries, from our selves. It’s like nap time in kindergarten - you didn’t always want it, but you needed it (and so did your teacher).

But more importantly, meditation gives us perspective. When the pillow is all we see, when we’re too close to our own problems, and too convinced of the stories we’ve told ourselves, things can start to feel too heavy, too serious, and life really can start to feel like a shitshow. Much of our world is caught in this right now. And it feeds on itself, making things feel even worse than they are.

Meditation resets our nervous system within a larger context. Even if we don’t experience GUS while we meditate, by turning our gaze toward the Unmanifest, we see the manifest more clearly.

We see that this world is not a shitshow. Far from it.

Life is incredible, miraculous, mysterious. And even when things are really hard, our lives are still full of small wonders like dragonflies, dogs, dark chocolate and Douglas-firs…and that’s just off the top of my head from the ‘d’ list.

That’s the gift of meditation. It’s a reality check.

But the real point is to then step back in the drama, holding some attention on both the manifest and the Unmanifest, at the same time. This, we call mindfulness. Which is about the closest thing I know to the secret to life.

With all that’s going on these days, I know it can feel almost irresponsible to step back from the issues of the day, even for a moment. But it’s precisely because the world feels so intense that we must learn to hold both the forest and the trees, the chair and the pillow, the manifest and the Unmanifest, at the same time.

Only then can we bring the wisdom that comes with being in the world, but not (completely) of it. And the awareness, while we go about our ordinary days, that this world is anything but ordinary.