Mariangela Gualtieri

I approach this word through the Oriental gate, through India, well aware of how little I know and how much this little has transformed me.

I approach the form typical of one who meditates, seated, knees crossed, motionless, back straight, eyes half-closed, hands resting one on top of the other. In our part of the world, advertising has often appropriated this trope—always a young, upper-class woman, a product publicized at the end—for this image, albeit banalized, contains the promise of something whose power the West can sense. When I see this figure produced here, by others, I nearly always find it distasteful, the enacting of a comedy that cannot belong to us. And yet, I am enormously grateful to this practice, and to all the good I have received and keep on receiving.

I continue to pursue Oriental metaphysics for the joy I feel in devoting myself to certain texts—the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, Coomaraswamy, Charles Malamoud, Nisargadatta, Heinrich Zimmer, and many more—a philosophical salad that would make my masters laugh, though I dedicate myself to it with such passion that it might earn me their forgiveness. Describing the source of this joy would be a lengthy endeavor—it has the flavor of returning home and replenishes a part of me that is malnourished, shriveled up.

I find Ceronetti comforting when he tells of how he went around with the Bhagavad Gita in his pocket for a year and thanks to its support was able to have his teeth treated without anesthesia. To avoid slipping into a prissy Siddhartha-like figure—a stereotype that often appears dishonest to me, or possibly just unwitting, or stemming from an abominable spiritual ambition—I keep a copy of Giorgio Manganelli’s Esperimento con l’India close at hand. This is an eminently reawakening book that can help us humorously compromise between the incurable West that we are and the Oriental practices that we often spiritualize to a decorative excess, forgetting that, as Marina Tsvetaeva wrote, “the soul, the pinnacle of spirituality for the common man, is closer to flesh for the spiritual man.”

Illustrator Elisa Talentino

Meditating is one of the most inhuman activities one might practice. We are not made to be still: we are animated animals, a choice we made 410 million years ago when we separated from the single organism that joined us to plants, though this meant beginning by slithering like snakes—we so loved to be in motion. It would be like asking a tree to start walking, or running, even. In our moving about, faster and faster, we solve problems and desires by escaping, battling, radically changing the world around us, for we are persuaded it is other than us. We do not act like plants, who regenerate the world—they stand still and change themselves. We are animated, we are thinkers, and we prefer to change our surroundings, even at the risk of destroying them. One might say that meditating means getting closer to the tree, learning to be still, and in being so, letting this stillness change us. Learning to exist on the tip of a breath, taking up the least space possible.

Since the times of the Upanishads, this practice has pertained to cultures that, unlike others, considered knowledge in terms of a change of the self and a sharpening of one’s perceptive system.

Meditating is accessing a vast and magnificent not. This is what is required of us: inhabiting the not.

Irritating at first, so foreign is motionlessness to us. The body signals its unease with small, increasing aches; our thoughts, rather than slow down, seem to become more active; time never passes. Then, if we perform an act not of will but of abandonment, something stops happening, and something else begins. A faith in nothingness guides those who meditate. And thus, we can slip into that which is forever hidden and enjoy it, though it remains veiled. We welcome a greater nothingness, a nothingness that we breathe in, and this inhalation, this breath, this nothingness that is happening operates on us at an unknown depth, which we still don’t understand, though we grasp its effectiveness on our lives. A ceremony unfolding in our breath.

Deepest peace, extraordinary silences, boundless space in which to drown thought. Contemplation is to observe stemming from the templum, and in the beginning, templum was any spot from which one could observe the horizon, and thus a vast openness. We cast our gaze down there, into that far away. But obstructed by “the hedgerow creeping over and always hiding the distances, the horizon’s furthest reaches,” the gaze turns back, to explore one’s own chest, the indestructible inside the self: we find infinity inside ourselves.

This introversion of the gaze must have been decisive, at first. It might have had a very important role in the evolution of the species—a revolution. The ancients who renounced were molded by meditation and gave life to the peoples who privileged the invisible over the visible.

I believe there are countless ways to mediate: certain activities of the hands, with all the joy that manual endeavors can gift us, with all the weight of which they relieve us. Or the meditation of song, dance, swimming, cooking, of quietly practicing gestures and handling the matter of the world. We ourselves are matter and world, fused with the great cosmic movement, so harmoniously, in fact, that we are forgetful of the result.

It was the violent activity of my thyroid that led me to meditation over three decades ago.

To this day, this practice has ensured the slumber of the unvanquishable tiger crouched somewhere within me. I write this to offer a measure of my relief and of my debt.

I sit every day, a frail epigone of the figure of the Sannyasin—the first to absorb a ritual that no longer required victims or fire for it took place in their minds, in every breath of their abstention. Breath—the stem that binds us to life, so closely connected to thought—is at the heart of it: we act upon the one thing to silence the other. First, the ill-processed facts emerge, especially the bloody records of the present. Atrocious events, perhaps gulped down in a hurry, shifted a little further away, shoved far far down. Yesterday, for example, it was the tortured body of a young woman: I had put it away, I hadn’t read the whole article providing the information, I just couldn’t. And there it was, that body, surfacing. There were the rightful tears streaming from my eyes of their own accord, without my exploring that image, that fact. The pain was pristine and I welcome it—a way of celebrating this massacred life, perhaps: letting it brush against the hard crust of my own life. Hard, cynical, like the person who violated this body. The same, in the beginning.

“There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.” This is Kafka in The Zürau Aphorisms. There it is, the world revealed. Then everything ceases: in my mind/heart, a manifold present makes way for unity; as in Hindu temples, the teeming, often colored, sensual figures of the exterior make way for an interior shade, “to be reborn in its dark womb.”

Trust in the omnipotence of the visible crumbles. Here we inhabit the invisible, the immense not knowing of which we are composed. “The wonders of being at peace / when mental ants / don’t breed other ants / and we are light as goats on the cliff / of happiness.” I wrote these verses years ago, in a time of joyful meditation, and I sometimes recite them at the end of my public appearances as parting wish to all present. To be goats on the cliff of happiness.

Possibly the earth itself meditates, engaged in its revolution and rotation, and who knows what other cosmic gyrations. This cracked flying ball, this celestial body that we consider an inert, non-sentient, non-intelligent, non-breathing mass, has welcomed life and develops it in countless ingenious forms and manners and varieties. Today we bomb it from different angles, grief-stricken—at best and not always—upon counting the losses of a single species, the ruins of the houses of a single species; and we say my Earth and we divvy it up and call it with the names of nations, building walls and boundaries and bastions, gates, fences, doors, customhouses, insisting with countless tautologies that it is ours, it belongs to us, we buy and we sell it. The Native Americans say that we belong to it. India repeats tat tvam asi, “thou art that.”

In Africa I beheld such beauty in the spot where they say you have the vastest view on the planet—miles and miles of space and sky opening before your eyes—and my eyes experienced a visual giddiness I had never felt before—a succession of hills, one after the other, and clouds, in a sky that remains open at the horizon, a wide-open infinity.

And below this, countless astonishing animals, the birds so motionless they appear to be in silent conversation with the powers that grant them flight.

I don’t know whether those magnificently pink birds I gazed upon for so long—I don’t know whether their being all turned in the same direction, nearly motionless on the African lakeside—I don’t know whether they were meditating, too, enraptured or deep in prayer.

During those months of African wonders, I felt the pain of annihilation—Paul Celan’s words, “Nowhere are you asked after.” The Earth can do without me, without humanity as a whole. Everything has already been done, there is no need to add anything. Possibly this is why Europe “invented the finite”: to overcome the dismay experienced by the narcissism of our species when faced with unforeseen beauty. A disease all our own, this, while the Orient, holding everything together—horror and splendor—and repeating “thou art that”—whatever “that” may be—appears to be immune to this brand of anguish.

I do not know whether the silence of flowers, their charm, whether even this is ecstatic, meditative bewilderment. On flowers, Amelia Rosselli wrote, “a pointed surveillance silences them / never tire of the gifts.” This “pointed surveillance” might be the right metaphor for our theme, for beyond that sort of alert state between sleep and wakefulness that we attempt to inhabit, plenary attention is one of the possible awakenings induced by the nothingness that molds one who meditates. The primary feature of Hindu deities is that they are awake.

Many animals appear to be immersed in meditative practices. Cat owners know this. Plants meditate. To achieve the hardness of their trunks, trees have to have loved stillness far longer than the first yogin, they must know the profound ecstasy of meditation. Minerals are like Shiva who sits atop the mountain and meditates for millions of years. And water—what can we say of intelligent humble chaste water?

The dying meditate. Those lucky enough to accompany a dear one to the end know that when the pain is gone and the breath is about to leave the body, the dying appear to enter an elevated state of meditation, as if skilled in a silence unknown to us, surrendering, focused, enveloped in a serene solitude, augmented by an unknown knowledge that enfolds them entirely.

The same do newborn babies, “their eyes still on the origin, their hands clasping the air.”

Both appear to inhabit the abhaya, the absence of fear, the only form of peace, another gift bestowed upon those who meditate.

How does one meditate? Because it is a radical act of abandonment—and at the same time of full attention—it is best to wait. The greatest gifts require us to wait.