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.