Hiking into the Source

What happens when a meditator searches for the Unmoved or the Source of All of It? It is more than likely that in the hours of silent meditation, within our inner world, we have traced many thoughts, feelings, stories we tell ourselves to their source. You’d think that the search for an Unmoved Mover would be a cakewalk.

We were sitting sesshin up along the Klamath River in a small cluster of vacation cabins. For one of our afternoon meditations Jon Joseph asked a long time practitioner to lead us up into a cavern where he had done some photography. He was a spry old bird, perhaps had a decade on me but moved with the grace of a man years younger.

That afternoon we were to follow one of the several small gushing mountain streams that fed the Klamath. The walls of the ravine were steep. Though the rains were not torrential, it was very wet. We were to climb in silence, maintaining as best we could the practice of walking meditation, kinhin. It was a difficult climb up a very narrow path, the small fast moving stream dropping off sharply to the north. I needed a stick to stay balanced. I had to put more concentration on where I was stepping than my exhalation. The thick green moss covering the stones that were the only toehold was slippery. They were laid out by nature's architect who’d thrown out the handbook for a comfortable and safe ratio for step and tread. It was proving much more difficult than originally advertised. Our spry photographer probably thought it was a stroll in the park. I did not.

Perhaps after a half-hour’s climb we reached a pool. The combination of boulders tumbling down the ravine plus either beavers or storms felling the tree trunks that closed the remaining gaps and formed an expanse of perhaps 10 meters of still mirror-like water. Perhaps the stream was too narrow for the salmon run, but I still knew there was life hiding under the mirror that reflected the tall pines with the bright blue that provided them an almost technicolor background  I could also hear the soft sounds of what were probably small rivulets feeding my source, but had reached some kind of source. It was not the Big Bang beginning; it was not ex nihilo, but it was a beginning.

Buddhists are trained to look for change. We call it impermanence. Even more than karma, it seems to be the one immutable law in the Buddhist Universe.  When I asked my first Buddhist teacher what “Impermanence” meant he said, “You’re going to die and along the way the world is always changing.” When we look for change, for the moment of change, that observation itself changes our world. When I finally got to that still pool high above the Klamath that might have been the beginning of something, feeling my racing heart and the quickness of my breath, I became aware of small, almost imperceptible drips between the rocks higher up. This makes pinpointing or even imagining a first mover very hard if not impossible. It also makes positing an Unmoved Mover such a vague idea as to be meaningless.