Inner Work

For the week of: August 6, 2007

Coarse and Fine

Plants grow from soil. Animals grow from plants. The human soul grows from body and psyche. Each of these processes raises the fine from the coarse, the wheat from the chaff.

When we remember to practice presence or sit down to meditate, we start from our ordinary life state: unknowingly and fitfully drifting in a jumble of sensory impressions, thoughts, and emotions, under a shattered and scattered attention, driven by self-centered motivations. This is the coarse soil from which our presence, meditation and being can grow. With patience we begin to notice our thoughts, instead of just being lost in them. We begin to notice our senses bringing bodily sensations and sounds, instead of just being lost in them. We begin to notice the emotional tenor of our state, instead of just being under it. This noticing is the first step in raising the fine from the coarse in our inner world.

Continuing, our attention begins to coalesce and gain power thereby: the fineness of collected attention from the coarseness of dispersion. Our sensory energies of body, thought, and emotion begin to settle. As they do so, their coarseness sinks revealing the fineness of pure consciousness in the upper layers of our being. From this place of consciousness we can notice our motivations. That noticing awakens our conscience, purifying our motivations by letting go of those emanating from self-centered egoism.

With (at least temporarily) pure intentions, our heart spontaneously turns toward the sacred and we may enter the finer realms of contemplative prayer, moving toward the Light of the Divine, beyond the relative coarseness of pure consciousness. In further contemplation of the Divine Itself, we open toward the finest of all.

So our inner world contains a vast hierarchy of coarse and fine, with each higher level more refined than the lower. This is the business of the spiritual path, to raise our inner life upward, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Yet we recall that Seng T’san, the Third Patriarch of Zen, cautions against discriminating between coarse and fine, so as to maintain our freedom by not being ensnared by distinctions. So we honor and respect all the levels within us. We do not denigrate the coarseness of our human condition, just as we do not denigrate the soil from which our food grows. Indeed, we take good care of the soil if we want good food from it.

For this week raise the fine from the coarse within you, while honoring both.

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