I’ve been meditating for a little over a year now. I try to do it twice a day, although I admit sometimes I miss a session or two. But my meditations aren’t limited to those periods that I sit for twenty minutes with my eyes closed. Lately, I’ve been concentrating my attention on this image of a great white. I’ve posted it before. I don’t know what exactly sets it apart from countless other terrifying images of white sharks with tooth-ringed-death-tunnel-cavern-mouths, but in this particular photo, the shark not looks as if it has ambushed its prey (the viewer?) but is itself, startled, surprised.

In my anthropomorphic projection, I read a sense of wonder in the black eyes and open mouth.

As I study this picture,  I remember something from the meditation lecture I went to a month or so ago in which Thom Knoles paraphrased the words of Guru Dev:

Transcend where you are

Go Beyond the field of thinking

Master non-thinking

Then Transcend that

After that my lecture notes are garbled, excited. Words like “simultaneous,” “integrate,” and  “alternate” fill the margins.

When I go beyond thought (thoughts largely involving “terror” and “death”), what is there besides the creature itself?  If I go beyond thought, am I then allowed to take in the silence of the shark, its essence, which feels a little like cold sea water seeping in under my skin?

Yesterday, I had students respond to E. O. Wilson’s famous line, “In a deeply tribal sense we love our monsters.” Why do we love them? I asked the class, scrawling their ideas on the board. “Because they are free,” someone shouted. “We want their freedom.”

Maybe this solitary project should become a group meditation.