Are Wolf Spiders Practicing Buddhists?

Did I lose you there? Of course, I realize suggesting that a mere spider may be a Buddhist could easily get lost in the translation., and I will not be making the case that they are. I’m merely using the suggestion as a starting point for another matter I want to address. The key word here, as I’ll get to shortly, is the implication they may be “practicing” Buddhists.

When I first sat down to write this, it felt a bit odd to be writing an essay extolling the wisdom gleamed from a Spider, but then I recalled a recent essay expounding the spiritual depths of “becoming a Frog”, so perhaps my aim for respectability here may already be on shaky ground. But even at the risk of sounding foolish, I need to cover this, for Wolf Spiders do indeed have a poignant lesson to lend. It was the Irish poet, John O’Donohue, who supplied this inspiration, which I found so prescient at this point in my life that the decision to spill a few words about it was a foregone conclusion.

As I have mentioned in other essays, O’Donohue’s book, “Anam Cara”, which is Gaelic and translates to English as “soul friend”, is a lucid digression on the virtues of Celtic spiritual wisdom. And by spiritual, I do not mean to imply religious, which by my lights is a different species of thought. It is from this book that I stumbled across the quote below. I have read several of his books now and can easily attest to the man’s depth and authenticity, but for me, the real charm of his mind is his deeply aesthetic appreciation of nature, which in his imagination, is anthropomorphic to its core. The Irish coastline and mountains, for example, all hold the history and memories of the Irish people, and the landscape itself embodies a certain persona, and even personality.

But in order to step into the real purpose here, I want to focus on his quote. As you’ll see, it captures the essence of repose and equilibrium that the Stoic philosophers were teaching two millennia ago.

“There is a lovely story of the Wolf Spider, who never builds their web between two hard objects, like two stones, because when the wind comes it’ll blow the web away completely. What it does is builds the web between two blades of grass so that when the wind comes, the web lowers with the grass until the wind has passed and then it comes back up to find its original repose. That has always struck me as a beautiful image for a mind which is in rhythm with itself.”

With those poignant words, O’Donohue has provided me with a powerful piece of armor to weld into the fray of my daily battles. But even more pertinent for this discussion is that it also aligns seamlessly with the purpose and utility of meditation, which I began recently after years of obstinate evasions. As an example, one of the more immediate benefits has been the simple recognition that thoughts are transitory and carry no inherent weight to my conduct. When I refuse to surrender my attention them, they will simply pass by like a breeze, just as the Wolf Spider’s web will bend with the wind.

But the difficulty in that seemingly simple task is precisely why it is referred to as a “practice”. Experiencing it first-hand takes only a few quick minutes if you wish to see for yourself. Simply focus all of your attention on a single point of focus, such as your breath, concentrating all of your focus on the sensations of inhaling and exhaling, and nothing else. Tighten your focus as much as you can, and once you find that point of attention, following each breath with all of your concentration, experiencing every sensation and you will soon notice random thoughts rising up like air bubbles in a glass of soda. Before you know it, a digression will be underway in the mind that you did not invite. A thought may appear about whether you’re doing it correctly or think of how your friends would react if they could see you “meditating”, or a disagreeable conversation you had earlier in the day, or even a random experience from childhood may sneak in. Random thoughts will simply appear without any prompting.

For myself, the first shock that greeted me came when realizing that I had no choice as to what thoughts arose. None. Their appearance and content arrived randomly and without my input. During the casual flow of the day, the chatter coursing through our mind feels like we are actively generating it all, that we are their author, but under the microscope of a concentrated meditation practice, the curtain is pulled back and we can witness them the moment they appear on stage. When I’m paying close attention, I can clearly see that I have no control over their arrival.

The payoff then is that once we learn to see them as objects rather than imperatives, we can set them aside as easily as a glass of wine on the kitchen counter. Once ignored, thoughts of anger, frustration, pride or envy, will vanish.

And that is the key insight here. With this knowledge, we can gain some level of control simply by recognizing them for what they are, and it is this simple mind-hack that fits seamlessly with O’Donohue’s spider web analogy. By allowing ourselves to ‘bend’ with the rush of negative thoughts, for example, they will pass harmlessly by, and we will return to our natural repose no worse for wear. And this mental dexterity isn’t restricted to negative thoughts, it can be aimed just as effectively to the other side of the aisle. The ego is well equipped to fuel all our innate needs for self-aggrandizement, self-importance, and all the other self-promoting thoughts that often roam around unattended in our inner sanitarium, but they are also just thoughts, no different from all the others and are therefore subject to the same laws of action or inaction. So, whether we are struggling with thoughts of self-depreciation or lured by those of self-veneration, recognizing them for what they are, ephemeral and transitory, assigns them no weight to our balance sheet.

This all lends itself seamlessly to a wonderful parable I came across recently in which a Buddhist Monk is walking with his student along a trail and after asking his novice a number of casual questions, apparently to lure him into relaxing, so as to expose his true level of understanding. After several minutes of this casual dialog, the teacher points out a large rock nearby and asked the student if he thought it would be heavy. The student, with his guard relaxed, immediately replied, “of course, it is large, so yes, it would be quite heavy”. The teacher then released his arrow……”it’s not if you don’t pick it up”. And thereby echoing the same lesson from our Wolf Spider analogy, which is the ability to maintain the mental dexterity to reframe whatever actions our thoughts are requesting of us, and to remain independent of them, because noticing their presence does not obliged us to ‘pick them up.’

In light of all these surprising nuggets of wisdom…. I need to confess that I had little understanding of any of this for many years. To put it bluntly, I was the victim of my own failure to simply follow the plot. I mistakenly believed the goal of Buddhism generally, and meditation specifically, was to obtain some sort of ‘bliss state’, and in my ignorance concluded that it made no sense to pursue in any serious manner. From my limited understanding I thought the more intense the pursuit, the more detached from reality one would become. My reasoning was simple, no modern mortal can live a productive life while ‘blissed out’. Perhaps it’s possible living in the isolation of a Monastery, but not at all while engaging with a career and family. The idea of spending my time cross-legged and chanting mantras attempting to reach “nirvana” just seemed absurd.……but yet, I could never shake a deep desire to reach some level of enlightenment. In fact, the only time that I have ever written about Buddhism was in 2009, in a journal entry titled, “The Road Less Traveled”. In it, I wrote the following paragraph.

“For a number of reasons Buddhism seems a more eloquent response to the questions I have regarding spirituality. From studying Christianity, it dawned on me fairly quickly that it wasn’t a path that I was well suited for. For one thing, there is something about “worship” that has never felt entirely sane to me. Then there is the concept of salvation, which is an concept that never found any traction in my reasoning. I never understood what I was being saved from, my wickedness? Seriously?  Besides, it’s not salvation that I’m after……. I want enlightenment.”

But sadly, there it laid for nearly a decade, not quite dead, but quietly buried beneath all my other interests. I would collect cute parables, like the one above, and quotes for their momentary rush of insight, but there it all remained as I moved on without anything of real substance hitting home.

Fortunately, I was turned onto Sam Harris a few years ago and a whole new chapter in my life opened up before me. Putting aside his intellectual and ethical influence, which has been formable, it was while reading his book, “Waking Up” that I discovered the error of my ways regarding meditation. There he patiently exposed the neurological and psychological underpinnings to much of our mental disfunction, the potholes, in other words, that we continually experience along the road to happiness. So, when he officially kicked off his meditation practice last year, called “Waking Up”, I didn’t hesitate and signed up without reservation, and from there, through dozens of hours of meditation, led by his clarity of thought, I finally began to find my footing. Here is a brief paragraph, extrapolated from an introductory lesson where he describes the benefits of meditation.

“If you’re lucky you’ll discover that you can live more or less the way you want, but even if you’re lucky, you’ll find that it’s possible to want the wrong things, to be lured into squandering your time and attention, to be bewitched in a way, by things that don’t really matter. Even if you’re lucky, happiness can be surprisingly elusive. So, why meditate? The basic logic is quite simple, the quality of your mind determines the quality of your life. Happiness and suffering, no matter how extreme, are mental events. The mind depends upon the body, of course, and the body upon the world, but everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter. This fact offers ample opportunity to make the best of bad situations, because changing how you respond to the world is often as good as changing the world.”

So, with that simple premise in view, I jumped in…..only to quickly discover a Cherubim guarding the gate to my enlightenment. That Cherubim wasn’t a malevolent, sword welding demon, of course, but was rather the personal attachment I have for my thoughts, my narrative, my story, the conversation coursing through my mind. Each time I attempted to meditate and silence that inner monolog, the gatekeeper would hurl comments, judgments, ruminations, frustrations, ambitions, biases’, and all the other vulgarities of self-regard. My first few sessions were illuminating precisely due to discovering just how little control I had. With a humbling admission, I discovered that my mind was a thicket of overgrown brush in a wilderness of thought.

However, the promise suggested in the brochure soon began paying off and before long I was able to experience a few clarifying moments. I recall one early in the practice, while focusing exclusively on the breath, that my concentration grew so sharp that I briefly detached from any sense of self and felt that I was the actual air entering my lungs instead. I could feel myself as part of the air, entering my nostrils and down into my chest, then back out again. In and out I went, and was able to remain there for perhaps a half a dozen breaths, a mere few seconds, before random thoughts interrupted the flow once again. Yet in that brief experience, I felt a peace that has stayed with me since.

As you may recall from an earlier comment, that experience only reintroduced my initial reservation……what is the actual goal of meditation? Is it to reach a state of bliss, like I had just experienced, to be used as a mute button against the chaos of the world, or does the thing have some practical import to my everyday life?

Well, answering that could invite a fair amount of confusion, because there are many different ways to approach it. The mindfulness practice taught by Harris is called “Vipassana” and centers on living more in the present moment, and offers a set of skills for recognizing when our minds wander off down some rabbit-hole of thought and to bring us back to the present. As mentioned earlier, the key is to recognize the various thoughts being served to us, and to view them as transitory objects, and therefore subject to scrutiny, not obedience. I’ve found this to be a key step in the practice, because it allows a near immediate return on my investment, which is to come back to my natural repose, a return to an inner rhythm and equilibrium…..of bending with the wind.

But once again, we must define our goals, because all of this is wonderfully helpful, but doesn’t necessarily address the larger goal of living an enlightened life. Even as I began to reap the early benefits of Harris’ practice, I continued to feel there was something missing that I couldn’t quite pin down but I didn’t have the necessary vocabulary to define. It was at this point that I stumbled across Sam’s interview with Stephen Batchelor, a Buddhist theologian and Philosopher. In their discussion, Batchelor lucidly described an engaging approach to the questions that were swirling around in my confusion. In the following excerpt, Batchelor described a key aspect, as he sees it, to the purpose of the whole enterprise, which dovetails seamlessly into our Wolf Spider motif.

“……. it’s this capacity to be able to sort of stop and say yes to whatever is coming up (bending with the wind), and that is the act of mindfulness, that is the choice to be aware, rather than to just let events sweep you along. The next thing is to see how you’re reacting to the situations and to notice all of your inner voices and your fears and your anxieties and your neurosis, just being aware of that too. That’s embraced as well, that’s part of life and there is nothing wrong with it, it’s just what’s happening, so to include that within the sphere of mindfulness, and in that way, we can free ourselves from the grip of those reactive thoughts, patterns, and habits, and allow ourselves to come to rest in a repose that is non-reactive…..It’s from there that we seek to respond to the world.”

I want to pause here and take note of that last line, because it points beyond Harris’ more conceptual focus that mindfulness is a tool used for wellbeing by suggesting that mindfulness is only a starting point. While Sam’s practice promotes the psychological benefits, Bachelor places the target further downstream, toward something far more encompassing, which he defines as the “hinge.”

“…..it’s this letting go of reactivity, of transcending reactive patterning’s of thought that are constantly jumping up, and of course the way you (to Sam) describe mindfulness is exactly how you deal with this stuff, but that’s not the goal of the path (Dharma), the goal of the path is to live from that space and to realize a way of life in the world.…….I would see it as part of the structure that enables us to live radically differently in this world, it (mindfulness) is the hinge of the path.”

It is that last phrase that I want to draw attention to here, because it is this distinction that I had been missing for all these years. Mindfulness practice has been incredibly useful in recognizing how the mind works and has provided clear methods to mitigate mental anxieties, but this additional idea from Batchelor represents the final piece to the puzzle for me.

But what exactly is this “hinge” he is referring to?

His reference to the path, or the “Dharma” is a Buddhist ideal and directs the goal of meditation towards the “Four Noble Truths”, taught by the Buddha. A crude definition of those truths would be to first, recognize the suffering of being a sentient being. Second, to identify the cause of our suffering, which is our craving, desiring and attachment to things. Third, to release ourselves from their grip by releasing their hold on us. And fourth, the path we walk after releasing their hold.

Therefore, as Batchelor describes it, the goal is to create a space in the mind where we become indifferent to the self-inflicted impulses that cause our suffering, where we no longer “crave” the new car, nor “attach” our self-worth to our appearance, or job title or bank account, nor blindly react to the minds every whim, but instead live content in the present moment. THIS is the hinge Batchelor is speaking of; the door that swings open once mindfulness is achieved. Once we can bend along with the shifting winds of our emotional whims, and all the social anxieties we experience in daily lives, we will allow ourselves a freedom to enjoy the simplicity of just being alive and experiencing all the marvels on offer, and in the process craft a new melody coursing through our lives. In other words, the goal is to cultivate a mind…..and a life that is “in rhythm with itself”, as O’Donohue suggested earlier.

I want to end with a wonderful thought from the poet, David Whyte, who was a close friend of O’Donohue, because it precisely captures the theme I originally intended here.

“…..how do you shape a beautiful mind? Well, that’s a wonderful question to consider. You can practice the violin, you can practice baseball, you can practice any artistry, but you can also practice shaping a mind which constantly enlarges the context (of life) and constantly makes you more generous, more on a frontier with the unknown.”

Whyte’s encouragement to “practice shaping a mind” is the sweet spot for me and answers the nagging question that I couldn’t define for all those years. Meditation is a key element, to be sure, but is only an aspect of it. There is also literature, poetry, and the arts. And ethically speaking, it involves the cultivation of principle, character, honesty, and tolerance. It all works as a beautiful melody to “enlarge the context” of our lives by giving the mind a more spacious arena to play in.