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The First Reason We Meditate – To Get In Touch With Reality
The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality. The reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality, because they confuse the world as it is with the world as they think about it, and talk about it, and describe it. For, on the one hand, there is the real world and on the other a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages and the principal disadvantage is that we can confuse them with reality. Just as we confuse money with actual wealth. And our names about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, our images of ourselves, with ourselves. Now of course reality from a philosopher's point of view is a dangerous word. A philosopher will ask me, “What do I mean by reality? Am I talking about the physical world of nature? Or am I talking about a spiritual world? Or what?” And to that I have a very simple answer - when we talk about the material world, that is actually a philosophical concept. So in the same way if I say reality is spiritual, that’s also a philosophical concept, and reality itself is not a concept.
Reality is …(a gong resonates)… and we won’t give it a name.
Now it’s amazing what doesn’t exist in the real world. For example, in the real world there aren’t any things, nor are there any events. That doesn’t mean to say that the real world is a perfectly featureless blank. It means that it is a marvellous system of wiggles, in which we describe things and events in the same way as we would project images on a Rorschach blot or pick out particular groups of stars in the sky and call them constellations as if they were separate groups of stars. Well, they’re groups of stars in the mind's’ eye, in our systems of concepts, they are not out there as constellations already grouped in the sky.
So in the same way the difference between myself and all the rest of the universe is nothing more than an idea, it is not a real difference. And meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe. And what that requires is that we ‘shut up…’ That is to say that we become interiorly silent, and cease from the interminable chatter that goes on inside our skulls. Because, you see, most of us think compulsively all the time - that is to say we talk to ourselves. Now I remember when I was a boy we had a common saying, “talking to yourself is the first sign of madness”. Now obviously if I talk all the time I don’t hear what anyone else has to say, and so in exactly the same way if I think all the time - that is to say if I talk to myself all the time - I don’t have anything to think about except thoughts. And therefore I’m living entirely in the world of symbols and I’m never in relationship with reality. Alright now that’s the first basic reason for meditation.
But there is another sense and this is going to be a little bit more difficult to understand why we could say that meditation doesn’t have a reason, or doesn’t have a purpose. And in this respect, it’s unlike almost all other things that we do, except perhaps making music and dancing. Because, when we make music, we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music, to get to the end of the piece, then obviously the fastest players would be the best. And so likewise, when we are dancing, we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor, as we would be if we were taking a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point. When we play music, the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation.
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. And, therefore, if you meditate for an ulterior motive – that is to say, to improve your mind, to improve your character, to be more efficient in life – you’ve got your eye on the future and you are not meditating. Because, the future is a concept; it doesn’t exist. As the proverb says, “Tomorrow never comes.” There is no such thing as tomorrow; there never will be, because time is always now. And that’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking; we find there is only a present – only an eternal now.
So it’s funny then, isn’t it, that one meditates for no reason at all. Except we could say, ‘for the enjoyment of it,’ and here I would interpose the essential principle that meditation is supposed to be fun. It’s not something you do as a grim duty. The trouble with religion as we know it, is that it is so mixed up with grim duties, ‘we do it because it’s good for you, it’s a kind of self-punishment’. Well, meditation when correctly done has nothing to do with all that. It’s a kind of digging the present; it’s a kind of grooving with the eternal now. And brings us into a state of peace where we can understand that the point of life, the place where it’s at, is simply here and now.
Getting into the meditative state
Well now the easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin by listening. If you simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going on around you - just listen to the general hum and buzz of the World as if you were listening to music. Don't try to identify the sounds you're hearing, don't put names on them, simply allow them to play with your ear drums and let them go. In other words you could put it - let your ears hear whatever they want to hear. Don't judge the sounds, there are no as it were proper sounds or improper sounds and it doesn't matter if somebody coughs or sneezes or drop something it's all just sound. And if I am talking to you right now and you're doing this I want you to listen to the sound of my voice just as if it were noise .Don't try to make any sense out of what I'm saying because your brain will take care of that automatically. You don't have to try to understand anything just listen to the sounds. As you pursue that experiment you will very naturally find that you can't help naming sounds, identifying them, that you will go on thinking - that is to say talking to yourself inside your head - automatically. But it's important that you don't try to repress those thoughts by forcing them out of your mind because that will have precisely the same effect as if you were trying to smooth rough water with a flat iron. You’re just going to disturb it all the more. What you do is this…
As you hear sounds coming up in your head - thoughts - you simply listen to them as part of the general noise going on just as you would be listening to the sound of my voice, or just as you would be listening to cars going by, or to birds chattering outside the window. So look at your own thoughts as just noises and soon you will find that the so-called outside world and the so-called inside world come together. They are a happening. Your thoughts are a happening just like the sounds going on outside, and everything is simply a happening, and all you're doing is watching it. Now in this process another thing that is happening that is very important is that you're breathing. And as you start meditation you allow your breath to run just as it wills. In other words don't do at first any breathing exercise but just watch your breath breathing the way it wants to breath. And then notice a curious thing about this. You say in the ordinary way “I breathe” because you feel that breathing is something that you are doing voluntarily just in the same way as you might be walking or talking. But you will also notice that when you are not thinking about breathing your breathing goes on just the same. So the curious thing about breath is that it can be looked at both as a voluntary and an involuntary action. You can feel on the one hand I am doing it and on the other hand it is happening to me. And that is why breathing is the most important part of meditation because it is going to show you as you become aware of your breath that the hard and fast division that we make between what we do on the one hand and what happens to us on the other is arbitrary. So that as you watch your breathing you will become aware that both the voluntary and the involuntary aspects of your experience are all one happening.
Now that may at first seem a little scary, because you may think, well, am I just the puppet of a happening? The mere passive witness of something that's going on completely beyond my control? Or on the other hand, am I really doing everything that's going along? But if I were I should be God and that would be very embarrassing because I would be in charge of everything that would be a terribly responsible position. The truth of the matter as you will see it is that both things are true. You can see that everything is happening to you and on the other hand you're doing everything. For example it's your eyes that are turning the sun into light, it's the nerve ends in your skin that are turning electric vibrations in the air into heat and temperature. It's your ear drums that are turning vibrations in the air into sound and in that way you are creating the world. But when we are not talking about it, when we are not philosophising about it, then there is just this happening... this err …(a gong resonates)… and we won't give it a name.
Now then, when you breathe for a while just letting it happen and not forcing it in any way, you’ll discover a curious thing that without making any effort you can breathe more and more deeply. In other words, supposing you are simply breathing out - and breathing out is important because it's the breath of relaxation - as when we say “phew” and heave a sigh of relief. So when you are breathing out you get the sensation that your breath is falling out. Dropping, dropping, dropping out with the same sort of feeling you have as if you were settling down into an extremely comfortable bed - and you just get as heavy as possible and let yourself go, and you let your breath go out in just that way. And when it's thoroughly comfortably out and it feels like coming back again, you don't put it back in, you let it fall back in. Letting your lungs expand, expand, expand until they feel very comfortable full and you wait a moment to let it stay there and then once again you let it fall out.
And so in this way you will discover that your breath gets quite naturally easier and easier, and slower and slower, and more and more powerful. So that with these various aids listening to sound, listening to your own interior feelings and thoughts, just as if there were something going on. Not something you are doing but just happenings, and watching your breath as a happening that is neither voluntary nor involuntary. You are simply aware of these basic sensations. Then you begin to be in the state of meditation. But don't hurry anything, don't worry about the future, don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what ‘is’. Don't be terribly selective, particular say I should think of this and not of that. Just watch whatever is happening.
Now then to make this somewhat easier, to have the mind free from discursive verbal thinking, sound - or chanted sound - is extremely useful. If you for example simply listen to the gong …(a gong resonates)… and let that sound be the whole of your experience - it's quite simple, it requires no effort …(a gong resonates)… and then along with that, especially if you don't have a gong, we can use what are called in the Sanskrit language - Mantra. Mantra are chanted sounds which are used not so much for their meaning, as for the simple tone, and they go along with that easy kind of slow breath.
One of the basic Mantras is of course the sound “AUM”. That sound is used because if you spell it out “A””U””M” it runs from the back of your throat to your lips. And therefore it contains the whole range of the voice. And for that reason it represents the total energy of the universe. This word is called the Pranava. The name for the ultimate reality for the which and which there is no whicher …(a gong resonates)…”AUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM”.
And you can keep that up for quite a long time and eventually you will find as you go on chanting that the words of the chant will simply have become Pure Sound and you won't be thinking about it. You won't have any images about the sound going on in your mind. You will simply become completely absorbed in sound and therefore you will find yourself living in an eternal now. In which there is no past, and there is no future, and there is no this thing called ‘difference’ between what you are as ‘knower’ and what you are as the ‘known’ - between yourself and the world of nature outside you. It all becomes one doing, one happening.
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