Creating Stillness in the Churning of Life
often, actually, only means sitting it out in the eye of the storm.
Better than getting your knickers (dirty or clean) in a twist, but is this the point of meditation?Mindfulness in the west has become a popular second-best to the more classical via contemplativa of the Medieval monk or the practitioner of Eastern Buddhism seeking enlightenment. But does it achieve the same results? Is it even trying to attain the same (elusive) goals?
The (lay) Christian west has always been more into prayer. When this is not taken as a supply on demand system, it can approximate meditation, but the pious churchgoer - which was the mass of pre-WW war society - seldom grew much the wiser, more equinaminous, nor developed a more compassionate soul for all the Hail Mary's said. But let us distinguish, straight away, the difference between prayer and mantra. In fact, the Hail Mary's work exactly on the same priniciple as the Buddhist/Vedic mantras, on the basis of repetition which calms the nervous system, and thereby refreshes the mind, allowing for clearer thinking and new solutions to problems to spontaneously arise.
- Or so the technical explanation goes - and it is not untrue.; but what about the holy words chosen carefully to be chanted precisely? To understand this would mean to enter the more "magical" or "harmonic" side of the mystery that is spirit - and this would mean a different post.
The Protestants, emerging out of a period in which independent thinking gained momentum, protested this "automatic" modus of wiping the slate clean and felt this to be lacking in self-rule and that it diminished a sense of individual responsibility. The more pensive idea behind this soon grew into a vice-like dogma with free blue-stockings handed out with every contemplative instructive sermon; until the freer Protestants soon developed themselves into philosophers of consciousness and that was the end of mass, organised religion for the North-West.
Clearly, foggy minds need to be swept clean. Gale force winds can do the trick, but they can also devestate beyond repair (think of trauma). It is safer and sounder to invite gentle breezes. Bring spring into your drab or bleak mind; clear out the old stores and supplies of the hoarding autumnal months. This is what meditation can achieve on a daily basis.
Coming out of the naturally, deeply introverted and meditative state of sleep, the winter of our day, we wake up, potentially, to a tabula rasa. The chattering (working) mind, the desk-top of our life, is momentarily cleared. Usually, no sooner have we opened our eyes and the to-do-lists rapidly reassemble themselves, and gone is the quiet from which we could have known best what to do first and last. The hour of rising from your bed, then, makes for THE preferred time to meditate, provided it is also an early one in the day. Something is better than nothing, but aligning yourself to nature's biorhythm is helpful.
But what does meditation entail?
Once you've arrived by your preferrred route and means of transport in Rome, a place where we all agree that there is a spiritual reality beneath the physically manifest, many more roads promise to lead into the kind of meditation that will bring you into closer alignment with that reality. For what's the point in having a spirit if you don't visit eachother? This long-lost aunt may be loads of fun to travel with. Just check out Graham Greene to know how much fun an aunt can be ("Travels With My Aunt").
Does every meditation elevate you to the desired heights?
Are they all going to give you the same outlook, attitude and success in daily life? Will there come a day I won't have to meditate because I will have arrived, have become assumed with my spirit self like the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin?
What is a meditative state of mind? Basically, it's the brain slowing down (from a Beta) to a Theta frequency, or at least into a more peaceful Alpha zone. Trillions of videos, tapes, self-help books and even more specific Herz frequency meditations out there. Eat your heart out and see what happens. That's the short of it. And what will you have at the end of it? A perfected Self? An improved self even? A healed and happier self? A more rested self, probably, but any more of a self, at all, than the one you started with?
Quite a few New Age adventurers who plunged into meditation in the nineties, ended up forlorn and frustrated - just married with 2.3 kids and a 9-5 job - because they were expecting something impossible. Most of what meditation pretends to be it is not.
There is no point in all of us moving to a mountain side and perching ourselves on a ledge overlooking life, where we might come to a perfect understanding of it all.
Good modern esoteric meditation techniques come with warnings (especially for the more youthful) against going "all out" and jumping in at the deep end of meditative practice. There simply is very little point in extracting yourself that dramatically from society and very little health to be gained from extenuous practices lasting hours. You'll only end up kidding yourself and find yourself farther away from your life-goals, more alienated and more confused. Life is meant to be lived, after all, and generally so "out there", amongst the others, with the others, and for the others. Meditation is (generally for the non-pro/non-appointed?) a very private affair and utterly self-serving. So be it, and also necessarily so.
- It will make for a different post to understand what group meditations do. Effective in Zen, and small communities, but somewhat less effective on a large scale when it comes to creating true and lasting global awareness. Collective consciousness is a huge topic which links into private development, but also must not crowd out individual efforts concentrated around the single I. I notice youth-culture is quite confused about where to lay the emphasis and what to prioritise, resulting frequently in either inertia or hysteria. The exception, by contrast, seem already to be born on a platform the hippies meditated heavily on to reach (barely succeeding).
Whatever you may think the Higher Self is, you probably won't really know her until you've met him.
In my personal, humble experience,
this is easier said than done. This sets up a Catch 22 which causes most of us to bail out before we even begin. WHAT Higher Self!!? I have heard many a good and bright soul snort indignantly. For these then the following is not going to be of any interest. They haven't found our Rome, yet. Perfectly fine ... sort of. I always feel my fighting spirit burgeon when I am faced with neglect and ignorance... but I am growing old and have sowed most of my wild fighting oats. Make no mistake, however, even on the subject of meditation there is a battle going on. Even a pacifist has taken up a position on this battle field! There is simply no esacping it.... Except in meditation. So here we go.
Meditation is best begun,
I found, after several years of trying sundry techniques, in tiny doses of actual sitting. For the more fidgety ones, I would even recommend preceding any meditation with yoga or moderate exercise (walking) which means to integrate you but not over stimulate the body, let alone the mind. Joining an online yoga site with classes that are sometimes followed with mindful meditations (specific teachers excell at this) is a very realistic way to develop a daily or very regular practice with the support of another soul, without having to move to an Ashram. From my other posts you will have learned which site I prefer, but I don't want to specifically promote anyone, so today, I'll give mentioning them a miss. I would, however, like to warn against void promises and stern guidelines. I find one has to keep one's sense of humour and remain elegant in meditation and give only 75% of your maximum effort.
Of course, if you specifically want to work with what came in on your dreams, you must slide out of bed onto your meditation cushion without any further preparation. If it is to be called meditation, however, do not mistake it with recollecting your dreams, with a pad in hand, taking down jots - this is dream-work of a more psychological nature (and very valid as such) - but this is not allowing the perspective of your higher self to speak directly into the morning. It is to recollect the past (already!). This is actually part of a set of prepratory exercises to a LIFE of MEDITATION, exercises for moral, soul, hygiene. These exercises teach you to discern lower self from higher and prevents the accidental interference of other (uninvited) voices (mainly your own mental projections, but who knows what/who else....).
Pure meditation is different to any suchlike exercise regime, but in my view impossible without it. Most people are able to follow the 8-fold path, and use meditation to reflect on how well that is going. This technically would be a mindfulness moment or a recharging, regenerative (pranayama) exercise. This is, technically, yoga, and not meditation, if we want to preserve the word for a more bridging puropose, channeling spirit into the unbiased heart.
The objective of the short meditation
is to be constant (daily) and to become trusting of it without creating a(nother!) dependency. When a meditation practice, or any spiritual effort starts to obsess you, you are barking up the wrong tree. At any rate, you will have lost the ease and goal of becoming effortless.
You cannot eat yourself to heaven (with a perfect diet) nor think yourself there (by reading holy scriptures the live-long day), nor initiate yourself by means of austerities into the mystery of God. None of this makes any sense to the modern I and would detract from our own free will and creative resources. It would seriously compromise your unique indviduality and soul-potential that is meant to expand (any) God Force.
Meditation can never be the ticket to a pre-Adamic state of divine bliss. It is a way to increase your sensitivity, it is a way to charge or cleanse your chakras (organs of higher perception, or perceivers of subtle energy); it is a way to realign yourself to your morality, to remind you of your spiritual self, and set you up on the daily walk of the 8-fold path, which begins with right view, which is a state of wisdom.
Plato said, opinion is the defect of memory.
It is my favorite quote ever. It reminds me we can only begin to have any right attitude to life if we are wise. Another Catch 22??! Not really, but it does beg you to separate morality and action that comes from the soul from that which resides in the spirit. I feel the meditation we tend to think of as meditation, actually serves the soul and is to be found in right speech, right livelihood, generally "doing the right thing", or acting with consideration, compassion, or general awareness. The precepts of mindfulness, concentration and effort are to be found in the doing, and not really on the pouff with your eyes turned inwards, direction navel. This is super valuable and we should be doing more of it - maybe even more so than trying to learn to meditate!
What if we made meditation more about tuning in than turning off?
Yes, it's about stopping the noise, the background music, the milling and the tripping. It is a kind of purification - but we will always remain a bag of bones with trillions of bacteria crawling all over us. Tuning into what if we don't know the spirit but want to meditate in order to know the spirit.... You hear often: clear the mind, zone out. Into what? Are you sure you aren't really sleeping? To meditate is actually to take a leap of faith and surrender to the spirit. Go figure. Not so easy to compute.
It's also about non-doing which can't be done by not-doing something (which is stopping or avoiding, which is to brake or to go around, which is to do something). One can only non-do as a spirit being, in the ISNESS of everything. In meditation we can touch upon what the spirit thinks and sees. In anthroposophical terms we call this developing our intuition. For this though you need to have some appropriate language to hand, or you will never be able to translate what you see into what you know.
That is why there are esoteric handbooks - not to teach you how to see, but to help you recognise what you already know.
How to begin, then?
Challenge yourself to sit for FIVE minutes and concentrate on one inanimate object. Or a flower, but you need a quiet sitter to pose for you. You hear of the flame-exercise a lot, but a pencil will do (and may be kinder to some eyes). Observe this object without opinion. What can the spirit part of you, in his castle in the sky, his hut in heaven, swinging on a star, know about a pencil? Has he seen you use one? Wah-wah-wah... wrong! You're not observing but imagining yourself writing with it. Back to the pencil. I am the pencil. Wah-wah-wah...wrong! I again! Just the pencil! ..... Trust me after 5 mins you'll be pooped. But you've got years to keep on trying and then move on to 6 minutes...
In the meantime,
I feel like having a bath! And that's actually the place where great meditations have taken place. Thanks to my guru-friends: the books. I can't pretend I can sit still for very long. Especially not in my twenties/thirties. It wouldn't surprise me if they could stick ADHD on me! But I can meditate on a piece of text - which is no way the same as reading to acquire knowledge or stock up on information. Reading-meditation. It might be a dying art!
My way
to meditate is to use a text. If to meditate is to observe what is, to get to know yourself beyond your brain, and to take in spiritual force it means you need a special degree of intensity to bore a channel for your spirit to use your senses. Normally speaking, the senses are used by your soul (astral body input/output) and give information to your life-force system.
I find that using books is a great way not to fall prey to autosuggestion. If you find the right type of text, it offers a training up of the faculties of right seeing and thinking, excluding the trite second-hand news (manipulation, indoctrination) of socio-cultural pressures. This is no less to see purely with the Higher Self, than humming Om Mani Padme Hum for an hour. Only, again, in the beginning it is hard to do for more than 5-10 minutes at that level of concentration that equates meditation. A modified technique, therefor is to take the terser (purer) texts which do not aim to educate but more or less state it as it is (presumably as perceived with intuition), and to read these without judgment and commentary and see what happens. Beware not to believe in what is stated, but keep reading to allow for a steady carving out of channels for your spirit. Some books will turn out to be duds or not in a frequency suited to where you are right now. Most (effective) works will have to be read seven times before your spirit lens can share its focus with you.
There is a lot of distance to cover in the difference.
... There, meditate on that!
I suppose this approaches the technique of the koan in Za-Zen Buddhism. Maybe that is why I have had some amazing Aha! moments in my bath (which, alas, I can't take often, due to the price of water! Don't worry, nose-pegs not needed: I have a shower!) especially to the reading of Seung Sahn. In the mornings, upon waking up, especially if my son needs his breakfast at 5.30 am, I milk out my nightly work with the help of Alan Watts. Both don't mince words but both keep a smile upon their face and are not shy of a chuckle.
Books, books, books
I have balanced stacks of books around my text in the hope one or two of them fall on your foot and help you farther.
There are some wonderful personal stories out there already on meditation-experiences, sharing a bit of everything, and honestly conveying the troubles we meet with when it comes to meditation; for example,
https://steemit.com/life/@skypal/three-pros-and-cons-of-group-meditation
https://steemit.com/story/@gebifirm/my-meditation-experience-story
https://steemit.com/yoga/@serratus/yoga-and-sound
https://steemit.com/spirituality/@nadinemenezes/looking-for-peace-and-calm
More stories coming from infinity, please!
It would be fun to hear more about what difference meditation has made to your life, and especially whether it has given you pure intution that can be called spiritually inspired. Perhaps, we could post these stories up under the tag #infinite-insight
Look forward to reading them!
While reading your text, something was shaking through my spine, and I feel meditated while reading.
Right speech, right livelihood, generally "doing the right thing", or acting with consideration, compassion, or general awareness. These things are more valuable than Meditation Techniques.
I agree that reading can be meditation in other ways. I personally like the books of Sungsan monk who is Korean.
Actually, It is not easy to find calm in the enormous competition and complexity of reality, but I am lucky to be able to see you. I'll keep reading this article. Thanks,
I am glad to read this comment: I also feel meditation and inner wholeness can be obtained on multiple manners: I for instance play guitar & write songs to express what I feel for someone or situation.
I mountain bike to detach myself from society and para-glide to feel Gaia's force lift me up what alters my reality completely and remembers me how beautiful our world really is.
Namasté & Love
Nama & Robin
You and me both love this Korean wise one! Feel very supported to hear you got the meditative vibe which I meant to support in you.