Prisms and Filters

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Recently I came across the concepts of prisms and filters in daily practice. The concept comes from the Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri. He talked about how in our practice of zazen meditation we have to pass through a sort of filter, but what we really want to do is pass through a sort of prism, which is much more interesting and fun, and therefore addictive, but ultimately take us away from reality as it is in itself. This comes from a Buddhist perspective, and personally I feel it has a lot of merit, but I would like to think about it in terms of A\A\ practice.

Within the A\A\there are ultimately two main paths recognised, that of the magician and that of the mystic. The magician is one who analyses, takes apart, extracts information, goes on astral journeys through the practices of rising on the planes and so on. This to me is like using the mind as a prism. Learning the correspondences of the tarot and the tree of life is a way of breaking the whole into manageable parts, we can then isolate these and explore them separately, and this is a great thing to do. It is particularly important in the early grades, especially up to Practicus, where this analysis is brought to high degree. By passing through this prism of the mind we need to learn not just to break things apart and extract meaning, but to understand the whole, and how the integrity of the whole depends on the integrity of the parts. If I am running a scientific enquiry, I have to make certain assumptions, I have to theorize, and the accuracy of my results and the conclusions I make about them will be affected by the accuracy of my assumptions. We might see this process as one of “making a difference between things”. Useful, but not the final goal. In daily life, most of us spend a good pat of our time life this, in our interactions with others, endless talking about this or that concept whether or not it is relevant to our lives, making fine shades of distinction, categorising, and criticizing. Truth be told, it’s a lot of fun.

So, we have to pass through this prism, which is the mind, but it is not enough to simply separate out all of the colours and enjoy the rainbow effect. The process should teach us something about the mind, about the prism itself. It is easy and all too common to get caught up with one or another colour, lost in a maze of circular logic or obsessed with a particular thought pattern, and failing to understand that it's just a prism. I mean here more than just intellectual assent; this is not enough. What is needed is real understanding, properly digested. Only in this way can the understanding of the prism be integrated into our lives. Until then it remains just a theory.

As for filters. This is much more difficult. Katagiri says that when we sit in zazen, the aim is to just be a filter. What does this mean? In the practice of zazen, yoga, meditation, we just sit. If one’s meditation brings visions and interesting ideas, then it's really just a sort of prism, so we need to be careful. Anyone who has meditated for a while will understand that sometimes meditation is very boring. This is because we are used to the prism, we want distraction, conversation, the excitement of passing through the prism, the medley of colour and form. However, this filter of meditation is very important. By using the mind as a filter, we filter out all that is not essential to us. Sit quietly, count the breath, let the thoughts come and go, this is the filtering process. Sometimes when we sit in meditation, we may have the idea that we should sit in some ancient temple, or by a waterfall, or that by assuming this posture we are becoming more holy. This is all just prism, separating one thing from other things, it is not real meditation. This is ok, the filtering process includes these things. When you filter water, some tiny particles that you didn't notice before can get stuck in the filter itself, making it clog up. This is ok, we can just clean the filter out and continue to filter water. When the eyes are closed, thoughts come up, this morning I noticed my filter caught images of a film I saw last night. It could easily be other things, I just return to the breath, open my eyes, realise where I am, continue to filter.

Although it might seem that way, I would not say that filter is more important than the prism. Both are necessary, yet they serve different ends, and in terms of practice they fulfil different roles that within our system play complimentary parts. I feel that passing through the filter is more direct but more difficult, more austere, while the prism is more interesting, more practically useful, but more prone to distraction and deviation. In A\A\we practice both, some aspirants focus more on one or another, others are more balanced between the two. This is ok, we all follow our predilections in the path, sometimes analyzing and exploring, sometimes reflecting and filtering. The same goes for daily life as well as our practice, we take active and passive roles at different times. The thing I think, is to recognise the difference, to be aware of it and not to worry about it, then our whole lives become like a big filter and it becomes apparent that even those times when we seem to be involved in the prism, this too is a sort of filtering.  

Love is the law, love under will.