MEDITATION: More Than Relaxation - A Path to the Divine
Explore meditation’s original purpose as a direct route to the Divinity within
Meditation was discovered and developed in the East to obtain the Ultimate Reality of union with the Godhead, not as a tool for relaxation or visualizing the reception of one’s egoic needs.
The idea of creating more illusionary self-fulfilling thoughts to fill one’s mind would turn Patanjali, the father of Yoga, in his grave!
In every culture where meditation appeared and was refined, it was for one purpose only—to bring the self to transparency and dissolve into the ultimate reality or Godhead.
Modifications of meditation in the West come from Westerners’ continued emphasis on intellectual development as the supreme apex of achievement; the accumulation of knowledge is more important than intuition, wisdom, or even intelligence. Going so far as to elevate the intellect as the do-all-be-all faculty that sets humans apart.
This has created an imbalance in the West, where intellect is prioritized over all other qualities and capabilities of self.
Our already overloaded minds are filled daily with even more emotionally charged information from our work, life situations, and devices. All this information increases the volume of beliefs, emotions, fear, and dread. Day by day, people are suffering in their minds through emotionally charged beliefs and becoming increasingly intellectually isolated.
This is why many experts and mystics warn the next pandemic will be one of mental illness. Unfortunately, we are already seeing this develop in our societies, beginning with the most fragile age group—teens.
Many people believe they need time to relax and clear their minds to counter this, but they don’t think about disengaging the mind. Instead, they play a visualization “meditation” or listen to beautiful music while breathing slowly and relaxing. Although this can help to a great degree to reduce stress, this is not truly in the spirit of meditation since the focus is not on clearing the mind of thoughts but on thinking more, using the imagination, and visualizing what one thinks one needs. Ultimately, imagination and visualization are potent tools for awakening, but only first understanding the importance of awareness.
Meditation clears the clouds
Meditation is not about sitting in a particular pose or breathing in a specific way; it is all about one super simple thing and the activity around that super simple thing—your awareness.
To understand meditation’s purpose, let’s simplify the field.
Imagine the sky. The mindscape is like a cloudy sky, clouded by thoughts drifting into daydreams, fantasies, needs and wants, to-dos, and desires— constantly circling and repeating. Most of us think between forty and fifty thousand thoughts daily, and ninety percent are repetitive.
Behind this cloudscape of thoughts is a deep, solid blue sky; this is your ever-present awareness. The blue sky is also a veil of sorts. The sky is what the self is becoming. Behind this ever-constant blue sky is the absolute empty blackness of space—the limitless, boundless emptiness. It is not anything that is not manifest; it is all potential. This is the Tao—the Atman and Brahman, the Godhead, and, most importantly, our foundation.
The mind-self cannot become the sky-blue sky if it is cloudy; it only becomes the sky-blue sky when it becomes transparent by dissolving the clouds. The clouds are made of thoughts and beliefs, and then the self, to become the sky-blue sky, must become free of clouds. One must dissolve the clouds of thoughts and beliefs. This self is then an undifferentiated being, not doing (acting out). A pure witness to the manifestation of being, as J. Krishnamurti and the non-dualists refer to, as a frictionless being.
As the self becomes more and more like the sky-blue sky, thoughts sink far below the observer, and as they have so little emotional energy, they vanish. The soul can become so transparent in this state that even the blue sky is transcended. It then becomes one with the emptiness of nothing. The self ceases to exist at this moment, merging with the Ultimate.
Yes, what I just described is possible with meditation. This is what meditation was designed for.
Where does delusion come from?
Since the no-thing is the underlying reality behind the mindscape, the intellectual mind often hides or veils this truth from the pure awareness of the self. The mind-self is no more than a transient cloud energized by emotions.
Since the intellect unconsciously comprehends that it is an accumulation of experience and does not exist outside the energy the self provides, the fundamental energy in the form of emotion must continue to inflate this mindscape for it to continue. What base emotion is this? What is the one emotion that comes up when danger is perceived? That emotion is fear— fear of perishing. This emotion is the driver of the intellect, and when identified in the self, the fear of death, change, adversity, and all the rest results.
Beliefs identified by the self as being involved in fear and emotions as “real” result in low self-worth. Truthfully, the self is indeed rooted in the no-thing.
Or the personality overachieves and competes excessively, expounding how worthy and “real” the egoic self is. However, as J. Krishnamurti often exclaimed, this is a most dangerous projection of the self.
Meditation is a tool by which awareness can, with time, loosen the emotional charge in the mind-self as the charge diminishes the egoic self slowly and gently dissolves.
The dark night of the soul and painful awakenings are resistance in the egoic self, which can be seen from the non-dualistic view of the pumping of charged emotion into beliefs in the mind-scape to stop the self from becoming free of the ego.
Can you see the humor in this? Our intellect acts as our protector, yet it is the only part of the self that causes harm! As everything is genuinely interconnected, the ego often manifests a threat in one’s environment to emerge as the hero, saving you from the situation it manifested in the first place.
It must engage deep interconnections between the inner and outer self (the world), showing how connected the self is to everything. Synchronicity, anyone?
Constructive, through the exact mechanisms, the Universal self calls to you and directs a path of reconciliation and ultimate union with the Universal consciousness, the Godhead, Brahman.
When the soul is one with the Ultimate, the combined or Whole Self transcends the experience of time, space, body, and mind. It’s a state of non-being.
Only when the mind stirs anew will the experience of the Ultimate fill the self with ecstasy. The overwhelming flood of devotion with touching of the Godhead fills the soul with such emotion that tears stream down your face, not of sadness or joy, but of something entirely different.
This state is called Samadhi, a trance-like state in which, when experienced, time will stand still; the self is in a state of non-existence. Even this state, which appears as the ultimate union, is still but a step to another, even more profound state, eventually resulting in the Enlightenment stage.
My approach to Meditation is not tied to any cultural or religious movement. It is based on thirty years of participating in numerous Zen, Buddhist, and Yogic retreats and daily practice. Over time, I found that information can make beliefs and dogma into barriers to progress, not clearing a path to liberation. Only by understanding the nature of the mind did I find my way through fear of the dark and empty places into the light where I was received by the Divine Presence of illumination, love, and union.