Meditation and the Luxury of Divine Indifference

When we meditate we have the opportunity to discover the miracle of just sitting.

That means resting in a sense of divine indifference in relation to whatever your experience happens to be. We find an incredible sense of joy when we sit and remain completely unconcerned with what we happen to be experiencing.

In the most important sense, spiritual liberation means the freedom from being obsessively concerned with the experience we happen to be having. We have all been conditioned by the pain of life and the norms of our culture to assume that happiness can only be found by controlling how we feel. This leaves us constantly chasing after positive experiences.

I don’t mean to minimize the value of positive inner experiences, but I do want to point out that chasing after them is itself a source of anxiety and suffering. It is important to realize that our constant hunt for pleasure leaves us with a feeling of lack. Afterall, we wouldn’t be hunting for something else if there wasn’t something missing in the first place. The sense that there is something missing is a primary source of unhappiness. 

There will always be better times and worst times in our lives. There is no way to feel emotionally happy all the time. Our emotional experience is constantly fluctuating within a fairly narrow band of possibilities. Here is the deeper point, by being obsessively concerned with that narrow domain of emotional potential we become unavailable to experience beyond it.

Self-inflicted sufferings

There is a classic teaching metaphor about a monkey trap that was used by Robert Pirsing in his famous and brilliant novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The monkey trap is simply a box chained to the ground with a hole in it. The hole is big enough for the monkey to fit its hand through, but not if it is in a fist. Inside the box is a banana. The monkey reaches in and grabs the banana, but can’t remove its hand without letting go. Hours later, the monkey is still trapped when the hunters come to collect him. 

I don’t know that any such trap was ever used anywhere, but the metaphor is a powerful one offering tremendous insight about our habitual state of consciousness. We obsessively fixate our attention on our current experience and especially everything we are concerned about. The more we fixate on those negative aspects of our experience the worse we feel. 

There is a more modern version of this metaphor that describes a person walking into a psychologist's office with his hands around his neck saying, “Can you help me, I’m suffocating?” Both metaphors imply the same thing — that our suffering is self-inflicted. While I would never claim that all suffering is self-inflicted, it certainly is not, but the harshness of life inevitably causes enough suffering for any of us, so why not learn not to add more. 

Conscious contentment

The miracle of meditation is discovered when we rest in the divine indifference of just sitting. The goal is to let go of all concern about the experience we happen to have while we are practicing. If you can do this, you will learn to trust life. It doesn't matter if you are frustrated, bored, challenged or happy. You just rest fully at peace with it all. You are practicing having no problem no matter what is happening. Your meditation is truly just sitting. 

When you do this, you discover that it is an incredible relief. Once the meditation ends we just move on and go about our day, but if we do this for thirty minutes everyday, we will soon discover that the things that happen during the day don’t bother us as much as they used to. Uncomfortable and unpleasant things keep happening, but we are more content in spite of them. Allowing ourselves a little time each day to enjoy the luxury of divine indifference can have a dramatically positive impact on your relationship to life.

Meditating in this way can be thought of as the art of conscious contentment because while we sit we allow ourselves to be content no matter what is happening. When we just sit in this way we become available to experience something extraordinary — it is possible to be content with the entire experience of being human, including those aspects that we don’t like. We can be content even if we don’t feel content because we have discovered the joy of being alive.