Meditation Guide

Meditation Guide

Note: Read this guide only as far as you feel you need to read it. 

Meditation is generally considered a solo exercise to be performed in an arranged setting. True meditation, however, is not (only) sitting with one’s eyes closed and back straight, but rather constantly living and functioning in a state of awareness. In this way, it is an engaged exercise — i.e. the practitioner is engaged with the world — and yet it is anchored in the Self. That said, because situations arise where the external world is not in perfect harmony with the rhythms of life (more on this later), it is useful to take oneself aside for a while, daily, and let one’s attention rest just like a falling feather finally pendulums down to rest. Attention is that delicate. Letting it stay rested on an object — and then no object — is the art and the end.

Life is an act of waking up.
~Ramla

What Meditation Is Not

Perhaps it’s useful to understand what meditation is by knowing what meditation is not.

Meditation is not a struggle with the mind, or an attempt to humiliate or praise the self. It is not a condemnation of the world that you are in, or an escape from what you are seeing in front of you. It is not a trip to fantastic inner places (though that may occur as a result of exercise). It is not an attempt to discover some kind of alternative spiritual plane which is somehow more ‘real’ than ‘this life’. Once again, you may find yourself in such places. Allow yourself to reach there naturally — which is to say if they come, they come. Let them be when they come to you, and let them go when they begin to move away.

Meditation is not an enchantment or a search for the extraordinary. It is not about gaining super-power or control over the others. It is not about manifesting strange things or events. It is not about becoming a new being — nor is it not about becoming a new being. Meditation is not premised on escaping from your world, or to consider it a lesser, somehow more stupid or unworthy reality.

Meditation is not about arriving at some kind of fixed place or destination — there is none in this business. If you stay sincere, that is actually what you’ll discover: there was nothing to be discovered.

All that said — meditation for you may be exactly that. Simply by reading these words, you can’t know what they mean, just like you cannot know what a volcano or the Arctic freeze is simply be reading up on them. When you get there, you’ll know — and you’ll know more than words can ever tell. In fact, you’re most likely to say, “What the ****! I wasn’t told this! This is more wonderful/ terrible than I was told.” Exactly the point. You are to discover for yourself, this is merely a guide, not the path.

Part of the process of meditation is to go through all the fallacies (also called ‘conditioning’ or ‘beliefs’) that you may have associated with it knowingly or unknowingly. Discovering those, too, is part of meditation. It should be seen as a joy, a discovery. “Wow, that thing that I believed in? It was totally false!” Or: “I knew that was true — and guess what? It is!” Perhaps the greatest challenge associated with this whole business of meditation is how serious and other-than-life is it made out to be. Most would discover meditation through the text or words of others. Text and words are always time- and situation-specific, and a responsible teacher would cut out the fun part so that immature minds are not distracted. You must discover and honor your own time and situation.

That is what meditation is: becoming aware without struggle.

It is precisely like waking up from sleep: you open your eyes, and things begin to come into focus. You don’t have to put the room there, and it was never gone while you were sleeping. You just wake up to what is (and then proceed from there).

Challenges of Meditation

The notions about meditation are a challenge, but they are also part of the journey of waking up. That is the ‘fun’ part. There is a less fun part: what one has to face when they wake up.

For some, what they find when they become aware may be catastrophic, or overwhelming, or too painful, or too exciting, too distracting. The self will react by either fluctuating, or going back to sleep. Real sleep (the one where you close your eyes and snore) may actually be a good way to deal with the overwhelming sensations. The body will often automatically go to long, deep sleep. Just let it.

One of the functions of sleep is the re-wiring of brain, and the re-organization of the cells of the body. Once we have consciously seen what reality is, the mind, body’s manager, needs to communicate the new shifts to the body. It will do that through sleep. (Because staying awake is also technically a stage of sleep, some may experience the opposite: the sleep hours will reduce dramatically, and there will be a kind of super-alertness. Let it be. When this new super-long sleep or super-alertness begins to decline/ wane, let it. You’re adjusting back to ‘normal’. Which means that you’re realigning with the total reality.) Chances are that you will not be like others around you, if they are still asleep. If, however, it was you who was asleep all along, you will find yourself more at par with the world around you, which is awake.

Beware of both possibilities. Far more likely, it won’t be simply one or the other. Rather, it will be a textured awakening: you will find that you were/are more awake in some respects, and less awake in others.

Part of the process of reorganization will be achieved through dreams. Note the dreams in your journal (you must keep one, especially if you’re undertaking an arranged spiritual journey). They will tell you what you need to know.

We mentioned arranged spiritual journey (as contrasted with spontaneous spiritual awakening, which is fundamentally what the everyday life is). Know that life itself is the best spiritual journey that was chosen for you by a collusion of circumstances beyond your mind’s control. Your life is your journey. Within that journey, you may need to take time out to take part in an arranged spiritual program. Many, many confuse that spiritual program as a reality that must be sought, and ditch their own lives in favor of it. Just be aware that this happens.

Don’t make it your business if you or someone else is/was engaged with an arranged spiritual program: sometimes, this is exactly what some people, groups, or entire clans or nations may need. Once you wake up from even the program, you can leave that behind. Others may need to continue with it. When one baby on the planet learns to walk, others may still be stumbling about. We aren’t all to be the same at the same time.

At any given time, in the world around you, you will find people on the various stages of the spectrum of meditation/awareness: from ‘struggling’ to ‘arrived’. In truth, it is all relative. Don’t worry about them, concern yourself with you.

Do We Need Arranged Meditation?

Q: If simply watching a bird is meditation, or being aware of the egg you’ve put on boil is meditation, then what use is the use of more arranged or stylized meditation?
A: Good question. The world evolves, and it evolves in what can be called imperfect ways. (It is perfect if we can acknowledge that this is how things happen, and in no other way. We can say that the world is wholly imperfect.) Which means it grows on the go, it learns, it reiterates, it makes a mistake, it fixes that mistake — and so on and so forth. All species and things on this active planet are engaged in this iterative (going back & forth) evolution. Our evolution is made very interesting: we don’t just robotically choose the perfect thing and stick with it. We do it as though we’re trying on dresses. When we like one after trying on several, we send it for fitting. We do several fittings and trials. We then settle into it, but not for too long. Soon, it’s worn and torn, and we set on the lookout for another (hopefully right before we’re stripped naked).

But what is ‘fitting and trial’ for one person is an error or problem or lack or waiting period for the other. The adjustment process of this world creates offsets, pollution, costs. Hence every now and then — several times a day, in fact — a sentient specie has to pause and take stock and readjust. Sleep is one way of doing this. Arranged meditation and prayers are another way: they both help one take out the systemic costs/ pollution of this giant adjustment, and they help us re-attune, refresh, realign. Because presumably the Planet will keep on evolving just this same way, we will continue to need this deliberate re-connection even though we are, by virtue of being the Planet ourselves, ‘connected’. There was never a separation. We are it, but our minds forget, because they are programs, and programs need to be refreshed to keep up with the hardware (reality, in this case).

Updated: Monday, 31 October 2011
Explore more: Methods of Meditation. 

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Growth Is Not Just One Thing

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How do we resolve this dilemma: the human spirit is tremendously expansive, potentially vast, greatly powerful–and yet the chorus of environmental consciousness these days is that growth is not good. That the concern with prosperity is flawed. That riches are bad.

Well, then, what must we do with this immense power and capacity and the imagination to dream that is a part of being human? What is the evolutionary purpose of our capacity? Certainly, it’s not laying waste, being idle, and singing songs of good times. These amusements have their purpose, time, and place, but these are certainly not the sole tasks we as a specie are charged with.

So what is the matter? Why have we become, despite ourselves, such a terrifying source of violence and destruction? Or of creativity that is often inevitably tied with economic capacity and all the evil that come on the heels of this concern with economic growth, such as the need to build and wield and thereafter sustain military power?

These may be simple questions, but these are not reductionist questions. Rather, this is a simple questioning of the construct we are dealing with, and the ways in which it has skewed and failed. Simple questions may lead to simple insights, and simple insights may be seeds for powerful ideas and actions.

It occurred to me one day that growth, which is held as such a concern an metric of well-being that we cannot even imagine considering an alternative, may be redefined. Why is growth only economic growth or monetary prosperity? Why are the capacities, contribution, and the work of people not considered in other-than-economic terms? Why is the definition of Growth a portfolio with its investment in only one metric–why are there not more dimensions such that growth is not a linear, mono-metric thing, but rather a lively, complex, and organic virtual entity that can shift its shape around the well-being of humans (and of societies) at any given time? Why is growth only MORE and FORWARD and BIGGER? Why is growth not, sometimes, defined as pausing and taking breath? As holding hands and playing (literally or metaphorically)? As exhaling a sigh of relief after a great accomplishment? As giving someone or something else an opportunity to be active while one takes time out?

Why are nations, for instance, afraid to put a pause on their space missions and geographic expansion, and take time out to care for their own people, while letting another nation take up the task of imagining and inventing? Why are we afraid to make a necessary life shift, and humiliated with the prospect of doing the right thing at the right moment in our life just because it is not the thing that we have done for the past few years? Why do people get insane with fear and anger if their leaders determine, for instance, that for the next four or five years they will shift the focus from creating economic-military franchises around the globe, and simply take care of the household? Why do we suddenly have nothing to do when a project for building and construction has completed–why do we instantly feel the urge to do and make more, rather than realize that the natural and most simple human thing to do is to relax at the end of such accomplishment, and that in the age of nations and groups, this rest may take years or even a century?

Why, in short, are we holding on to one construct, a single construct, that happens to have only one dimension, too? Can we, for a start, rethink this very construct?

There is a deeper thing to be concerned with than just Growth. However, while we are on this terrain, can we at least re-imagine this?

I think we can. I propose that we should. Here is a poem that I was inspired with while I first wrangled with this question. Your thoughts are welcome (though as a poet who’s usually inspired, I cannot defend or explain what I write). Presented as is.


Growth Is Not Just One Thing
a poem ~

 

Growth is not just one thing.
It is not merely
chopping down whatever apple tree
occurs on your path
and turning it into jam and firewood.
Growth is also to plant the seed,
and to have the patience to cultivate it,
to watch it grow.

Growth is not merely
turning your life into dollars
and then attempt to turn the dollars back into
semblances and mere ghosts of life.
Growth is also to step beyond this idea
of necessarily putting the jingle of coins and pennies
into each and every rhythm of your life.
Growth is a kiss.
It is impregnation with the first child you’ll ever have,
it is to kindle the fire in the house,
and put a loving pot of soup to boil.
Staying quietly with it.
Inhaling its wafting smells and spice.

Growth is not just rushing onwards from your youth
and staying forever repelled from the old age that creeps upon you
when you are too busy to notice it,
submerged in your paper and red black ink.
Growth is to notice the hair you begin to grow in interesting places
and the fine wrinkles that shall begin to grace
your face one transitional winter morning.
Growth is that too.

Growth is not merely to constantly vie with your friend and neighbor,
or fear that they vie with you.
Growth is loyalty, too. It is to be with the weak in their sickness
and their wretchedness. It is to allow the heart to expand
and pour out as much love–as much love–as it always wanted to give.
Growth is to allow your heart the freedom it always wished
before it became trapped in the preconditions to joy
that you learned from dead books and sad people.
Growth is that. It is that expansion.

Growth is not — absolutely not! — your increasing ability
to quash your dreams so that you may
continue to feed the illusions of growth.
Growth is the ability to gently or firmly
put away the tendrils of pestilent ideas
that come to reside upon your soul.
Growth is that.

Growth is not simply your ability to walk and walk and walk
the earth. Growth is also your ability to stand firm,
hold your place, take roots, and grow branches. To touch the sky.
Growth is vertical. It is horizontal. It is diagonal, too.
It is more than you imagine, and less than you imprint.

Growth is not plainly
your relentless ability to conquer the Earth.
And its species and people and molecules.
Growth is also your ability to be fascinated.
Quiet, simply, fascinated.
It is your ability to wonder, to marvel, to rest.
To give the earth and its inhabitants –
your fellows souls and molecules –
their due. As they have, for eons and eons,
given you yours. More than.
Growth is that acknowledgement.

Growth is not your pomposity. Your ability to
bellow so frighteningly, your temptation to
walk with such arrogance and fury,
as if the earth will split open under your hands and feet.
Growth is your ability to heal the wound. To stitch together
that which is rended apart
from your countless centuries of plundering.

Growth is your ability to withhold, to be in peace,
to watch, reflect, know, and be in awe.
To open your mind such that
you will understand that growth is
beyond — far beyond — the limits
of your
hungry needs.

Growth is that understanding
that you are no longer that hungry, frightened, cold,
thunder-struck, hollering ape that you once were.
Growth is your awareness that you have travelled hundreds of thousands of miles
for millennia and millennia
to overcome your penury
only to know that you are, ever, confined in a relationship –
a loving, nurturing relationship, the love of existence for you –
that you cannot ever escape from.

Growth is not just to leave home, O human!
It is to come home too. It is to come home, too.

~ramla akhtar

(You may share the poem with attribution to the poet’s name, and a link to the website http://ramlaakhtar.com. Thank you.)

~

A note on the image: Trees are what have inspired me to reconsider what growth means. I think even the tree gets to travel: it stands in one place on earth, and from that, it looks up into entire constellations towards which its branches ever reach out. It maintains a relationship of love and awe with the cosmos, ever conversing with the Sun and the stars while we humans, apparently smarter beings, frantically search for love and real peace.

Note: Post first published here at the Matador Network. 

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