The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
I love coming across the Dharma in unexpected places. This quote, describing a physicist’s startling vision into a theory he had spent his entire career chasing, made me pause and reflect on my own experiences with meditative insight.
It is so easy (and so understandable, if one has been practicing hard with a goal in mind) to cling to insight after it arises: to try to make it part of one’s identity or recreate the conditions that led to the moment. It is, in fact, second nature to me, who has been conditioned from an early age to equate achievements with self-worth, and self-worth with my chances for belonging and safety.
Of course, being a Dharma student, one knows rationally that one should let insights be – “The insight has done its work,” my teacher once advised me. One also rationally knows that the Path is about letting things go, not grabbing for gold stars along the way. But the habit of clinging, fostered by the delusion of a self and the desire for love and safety for this self, will remain until one can fully uproot its causes. Part of my practice has been learning to be patient: to see the impersonal nature of my habits and not pile on judgment whenever I notice myself grasping onto things. My habits are doing their best to protect me in the only ways they know how; the more wisdom grows to illuminate things as they are, the more clinging will naturally soften its grip.
The protagonist in Le Guin’s novel does not share my problem, though. He has enough trust to let the moment pass, perhaps thanks to his upbringing in a society that actively discourages “egoizing” and has no concept of property ownership 🙂 Le Guin’s simple, even-keeled description of the once-in-a-lifetime insight impresses a powerful reminder on me: that there is inherent safety and belonging one can touch by, paradoxically, not holding on.
How comforting it is to be in the “keeping” of each moment, not a separate identity all alone against the world. It is not that this solid entity, “I”, once owned a solid entity, “insight”, that is to be let go of. At the moment of arising, “insight” and “I” are inseparable from each other and from everything else, a culmination of all the conditions in the universe. I already belong; I don’t have to anxiously pin every gold star to my chest to prove myself worthy.
If there is just change – each instant vanishing in a blink to give way to the next – who is it that needs validation?
