Earlier this week, I watched a talk given by Shinzen Young at Google. He said something that hit me as a writer. Insight when you have a scattered mind tends to be superficial, personal, and psychological. With a focused mind insight has more depth and spiritual weight.
I've never really considered how important the quality of the mind is to get insight to stay. That sounds crazy now, because it's so obvious. But I've tended to think of meditation as something I do for me, not something I do to make my insight more transmittable to the world.
Of course, because my mind is so scattered, I haven't been able to focus on the problem of focus, so it's a kind of a recursive problem.
Add to this the problem that I grew up in a family of scatter brains and suddenly I feel like I'm in "mid-mountain" with this meditation project.
Mid-mountain is a term I learned yesterday reading Malcom Gladwell. It refers to a famous transportation project in nineteenth century Massachusetts that ended up in massive cost overrun because they thought that it would be a lot easier to blast through a mountain than it was. they known how much it was going to cost, they never would have gone ahead. But had they not gone ahead, Massachusetts would not have been able to ship its goods so easily to the expanding West, and would never have become as wealthy as it it.
If I'd known how long it would take to get my mind in shape, I'm not sure I would have started this meditation project. If I'd known what I was eventually going to realize about myself, how truly out of control my mind really is, I wouldn't have had the courage.
But I'm here now with this meditation practice that I've been cultivating for years. And I know there is a lot of insight there ready to be shipped out.
One day I will look back and know that the cost was worth it.
