Spiritual Forums - Meditation help?

Hi Radiant Pearl!

The richness and variety of knowledge and willingness to help you will find on this forum would indicate the pointers to the inward direction you seek.

One perspective is this: Imagine two lovers reuniting... their faces lit up in ineffable joy, mindless of who is watching, they see only each other and embrace!

This is meditation!

No calculation, no effort, no fragmented thought, no gross energy, just the being, the moments in which our awareness entwines, giving of ourselves completely.

Here is short article on meditation, which I hope helps:

Meditation: a debriefing

The incessant turbid flow of thoughts racing through our brain causes anxiety and stress. Rooted mostly in fears and desires, these thoughts cause havoc in our lives.

The bad news is that this Frankenstein monster has been created by ourselves. The good news is that we may rein in the runaway wild horses of thought whenever we choose to do so. Easily. Through meditation, not medication!

Let us first explore the well-trodden path and understand the basic method of meditation documented, which are more less on the following lines or variants thereof:

“Concentrate on either the breath or a candle flame. The thoughts that interfere with the mode of concentration should be allowed to pass by. After a while, only the object of concentration, the breath or the candle flame will be in focus. Then, in this peaked concentration mode, let go of the object of concentration as well.”

This exercise is somewhat akin to the concentration of chess player calculating the moves or a scientist at work or an artist or musician fully engrossed in their activity. The differentiating factor is that in meditation, even the object of concentration is to be let go of; a thought free state with concentration peaked. It is said that this is meditation and inevitably results would follow.

Let us throw down the gauntlet and say it like it is! This stated method does not work. It has a fundamental flaw. The flaw is that what actually enables us to attain a meditational mode is an effortless shift in attention inwards and not concentration. At best the purported method employing concentration may be taken as a pre-meditation exercise to gain some measure of thought control.

To understand why, we must dig a little deeper.

Concentration implies effort of the brain and requires a doer. However, meditation requires a thought free stage. We have a contradiction. Of course, we recognise that perhaps what was meant by the word ‘concentration’ was actually ‘attention’ as employed in various books on the subject. While the idea is not to play on words, yet clarity is essential.

Next, meditation is a state of awareness in the continuum of now-moments. Thought is always a step behind the present moment. This is another contradiction.

Third, meditation in its true essence requires that there be no doer, no ego, no body consciousness even though the inner experience of meditation is felt within the body. The body is merely a temporary vehicle of our soul consciousness to enable us to operate in earth life.

So what we need to do or rather not do in order to meditate is simply to shift our attention in a egoless peaked manner, inwards. Effortlessly. We presuppose nothing and expect nothing because the ‘I’ has disappeared. And with it all desires. We just are and experience the now-moments silently within.

Meditation then, requires an inner transformation. It is not an exercise to be performed at a certain time and in a sequential ritual based manner. It is an orientation of alert observer like detached watchfulness, unexpectant and yet ready! Looking inwards. Simply tuning in. Anytime, anywhere.

In books about meditation we may have read, we are asked to imagine a light of this or that colour in a region corresponding to our heart or a many petaled lotus of white light aglow on our head and so forth. Ignore it. The moment we imagine something, we are using thought. We don’t want any thought!

Meditation is simply allowing the manifestation of the omnipresent divine energy which already is, within our body and which we may experience as ecstatic sensations across untapped nerve centres within our body. Thereafter, where we go from the new state of awareness is a journey each must take alone. With divine assistance.

Inner cleansing is essential if we wish to make progress. We must replace the gross fears and desires of the body consciousness with the subtle energies corresponding with our true self; the souls consciousness. In fact, we would do well to be constantly aware that we are the soul in occupation of the body and hence the gross body indulgences should be rationed and controlled. If the subtle divine energy is to manifest within, we must cleanse ourselves of the gross body desires first to welcome and make room for the God energy. This is called ‘emptying the cup’ in zen philosophy.

We need to get to a point where the meditation mode is our primary and natural state and the external world secondary, a diversion. We then operate in the world, as needed or ordained, from a higher vantage point.

That’s about it. Be to become. Now. With divine assistance.