You sit down to meditate and the first thing you do is adjust something.
The cushion is wrong. You shift it. The room is too bright. You close the blind. Your shoulders are tense. You roll them.
You have not begun yet. You are tuning the instrument.
Then you begin, and the tuning continues.
The breath is too shallow. You deepen it. The mind is too busy. You quiet it. The posture is slumping. You straighten it.
You are turning the dial.
You have been turning the dial your whole life.
Not just on the cushion. In every room. Every conversation. Every moment of being awake.
A small constant motion of the hand, adjusting what is arriving so that it arrives correctly.
The radio is not the problem.
The dial is the problem.
The radio plays whatever it plays. The reception is whatever it is. You have been treating the reception as a problem to be solved by turning, when the reception was never the point.
Take your hand off the dial for a moment.
The sound that arrives is the sound that arrives.
You did not select it. You are not improving it. It is simply what is here.
Something in you wants to grab the dial back.
It says, but the reception is bad. There is static. There is a station I would prefer. The volume is wrong.
Notice that the wanting to grab the dial is itself another sound.
It is also being received.
Receive it.
The reaching for the dial has been so constant that you mistook it for being alive.
You thought the turning was the listening. You thought the adjusting was the experience.
The experience was happening underneath the adjusting the whole time.
In Chan there is a phrase, the ordinary mind is the way.
It does not mean some special ordinary mind that you cultivate. It means the mind that is already here, before you started turning it into something better.
The mind you have been trying to fix.
That one.
You do not need to fix it.
You need to take your hand off it.
This is harder than fixing it. Fixing it was active. You knew what to do. You turned the dial.
Taking your hand off is not an action. It is the cessation of an action.
There is no instruction for how to do nothing.
The instruction would be more dial-turning.
So you sit, and the hand wants to move, and you watch the hand wanting to move.
You do not stop the hand. Stopping the hand would be another motion.
You just watch it want.
After a while it does not want as much.
Not because you trained it. Because the wanting was not getting fed. The dial was no longer producing the result it was promising. The hand got tired.
What is left when the hand is tired.
The radio. Playing what it plays. The room. Being what it is. The body. Sitting where it sits.
None of it being adjusted by anyone.
This is what the teachers meant by the natural state.
Not a special state you reach. The state that is here when no one is turning the dial.
You have probably touched this for seconds at a time, your whole life.
The moment you sat down after a long day and did not check anything. The pause between two thoughts when you did not pursue either one. The long exhale at the end of something that was over.
These were not lapses in your attention.
These were the moments when the attention was not being managed.
The management was the obstruction.
Sengcan wrote in the sixth century:
The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.
A preference is a hand on the dial.
You can have opinions. You can have taste. You can want the soup salty and the night quiet.
A preference, in his sense, is the small constant adjustment of what is arriving so that it matches what you wanted.
That is the dial.
Take your hand off it.
Not forever. You will turn it again in five minutes. The dial-turning is too old a habit to drop in one sitting.
But for now, take your hand off it.
Notice what plays when you are not tuning.
The static is also music.
The wrong station is also a station.
The volume you did not choose is the volume that was always going to be there.
You are not the listener.
You are the listening.
The dial was a small story the listener invented to feel like it was doing something.
The listening does not need a dial.
It has been receiving everything the whole time.
You stand up from the cushion and your hand goes back to the dial.
It is fine. It will go back. That is what hands do.
What has changed is that you now know there is a dial, and there is a hand, and there is a listening underneath both of them that does not require either.
The next time you reach for the dial, you will notice you are reaching.
The noticing is enough.
Sources: Sengcan, Xinxin Ming (Verses on the Faith Mind), 6th century. Mazu Daoyi, on "ordinary mind is the way," 8th century Chan.