Copper Pot

What is Meditation, Really?

“Nothing’s happening! I must be doing it wrong?”

It’s your first day in a meditation class. You carefully open one eye to see if anyone has started levitating without you. Everyone is firmly rooted to the gym floor but there’s something ‘otherworldly’ about them – they look ‘absorbed’. You feel alone and a little jealous, as if you’ve been left behind.Meditation Class

Don’t worry if this sounds familiar, most people who try meditation quickly give up. For the people who don’t give up but continue sitting year after year, decade after decade, it rarely makes any difference to their real life. I know because I was one of them! Most people who try meditation give up!

Before I can explain why, for so many people, meditation is just a waste of time, I’m going to have to let you into a secret!

Meditation is a lot like my mother’s saucepan. Honestly! Let me explain!

When I was a little boy, I used to wear my mum’s saucepan on my head and pretend that I was a knight in shining armour. It took me years to learn that just because you can wear a saucepan on your head it doesn’t make it a hat. The saucepan failed to make me a knight and on my head it was not a lot of use for cooking.

Before we can discuss what meditation really is we have to understand what it was designed to do!

When my mother died, I couldn’t live with the grief so I buried myself in a Zen Buddhist monastery. Like most people, I was trying to find a solution to the problem of ‘me’. I wanted the pain to go away! At that time, I had been using meditation daily for decades but it had not prepared me for this, I felt like a bag of salt left out in the rain.

None of us like to suffer and it’s natural that we look for ways to avoid uncomfortable thoughts and emotions. In fact, most of us assume that we ARE our thoughts and emotions.

“That’s just me! If you don’t like it, tough!”

If, like me, you’ve often been hurt by the people you love the most, you may well have had this emotional drop kick levelled at you when you least expect it. It’s not easy to forget. Unfortunately, many people identify their ‘self’ with their thoughts and feelings.

Meditation was traditionally taught as a way to transcend our minds by finding the ‘self’ that exists beneath those thoughts and emotions. It was designed as a way to connect to reality. Indeed, meditation was born out of an instinctive awareness, one that many of us share, that the world we experience with our senses is not all there is to life.

So how does meditation help us to transcend our minds? Here’s how!

Car ControlsDo you remember learning to drive?

It’s normal for our senses to be overloaded by a new experience. At first, there is just too much going on for us to make any sense of all the information. Similarly, for most people, life is just as confusing. People believe that they are their thoughts and feelings because that is all that they are aware of but this is the mistake that is at the heart of human suffering.

Bubbles

Like a bottle of fizzy pop as you take the top off, our thoughts bubble up out of the dark sweet sea of our emotions. True Meditation teaches you how to become so familiar with the process of thought that you start to notice some very odd things going on beneath all that froth — you start to see reality.

Just as my mum’s saucepan was designed to cook food, so TRUE Meditation is a tool that helps to reveal the real ‘you’ that exists beneath your thoughts and emotions, beneath your ‘idea’ of you.

As a child I was in love with knights in shining armour. What was, in my eyes, a hero’s helmet, was a saucepan to everyone else. In just the same way, people of today are attracted to those things that have an echo of meaning in their heart. People long for life to be different, to have some significance. They embrace guided meditation, incense, candles and all things eastern mysticism simply because they represent something inside of themselves.

As understandable as this approach obviously is, this is for them just a way of wearing meditation on their head. It goes nowhere.

Meditation only really works for any of us, when we take it off our head and start cooking with it!

 

If you enjoyed this Blog, then you might like: What is Spirituality and can it be found in a book?

Watch: What is Meditation, Really?

Watch: Meditate to find your true Self

Read the Book – “Quantum Mechanics For Your Soul: How to Repair Yourself and Save the World at the Same Time

Quantum Mechanics For Your Soul

Books

What is Spirituality and can it be found in a book?

All religions are based, more or less, on the same premise that only the spirit is real.

Since the dawn of time, there has always been a man in a twenty-thousand dollar suit waiting to take advantage of your need to find meaning in your life.

He might be a prophet or a priest. He might look like a millionaire or a tramp but whatever shape these shysters take, they all have the same answer:

“There’s something wrong with you and only I have the cure!”

 All religions and self-improvement systems demand that you add whatever it is they’re selling to your ‘idea’ of you. Just like materialism, religions offer us the same formula with a different twist:

 You + something else = salvation

Keys

Inevitably, the guru or prophet has the secret, the power or the keys to the kingdom and they will give it to you in return for your faith and your money.

None of these paradigms present a coherent model of reality that can be verified by you, through observation of the world around you; that’s why religions tend to kill people who ask questions.

But just because they are not totally right, that doesn’t mean that they’re totally wrong.

UNIVERSAL AWARENESS OF INNER REALITY

At this point, you may sniff and say that spirituality is just for the weak minded and, indeed, that is the dogma of the materialist. You may argue, the opposite view, and insist that ‘god’ can only be found in a book and that is the position of most religions.

The strange truth is that both of these, often argued, positions entirely ignore the possibility that we are already subconsciously plugged into a universal sub-atomic reality.

Maybe that sub-atomic reality is something like gravity, easy to ignore until you fall over.

Maybe truth is already written on our very essence and books are only a distraction.

It would seem that independent scientific evidence is pointing, very strongly, in that direction.

Roadside Memorial

As an example, you may have noticed that over the last twenty years a strange urban phenomenon has sprung up on our roads.

Today, in most Western countries, you can’t seem to drive more than a few miles without seeing a sad and orphaned shrine of dying flowers and rotting cuddly toys left by the side of the road. These shrines seem to appear overnight, at the site of each car crash, as if by magic.

It is obvious that these bereaved and tormented people are expressing a connection to an inner reality that our strictly material society gives them no way to express or explore. It’s almost as though they are ashamed of their own inner reality.

ElephantMaybe we are like the three blind men cleaning an elephant. Asked to describe the elephant, the man who cleaned the tail would say that an elephant was something like a snake. The man who cleaned the leg would say that an elephant was like a tree and the man who cleaned the sides would say an elephant was like a wall.

None of them would be entirely wrong but neither would they be entirely right. From Islam to Communism, Christianity to Atheism, underneath it all, what is it that we’re looking for?

What inner vision is it that each of us seeks to validate?

For the first time in two thousand years, it might be time to talk about what connects us instead of what divides us. We’ve all been so busy fighting over our particular piece of the elephant that we refuse to talk about the elephant in the room: an inner reality that connects us all.

Maybe we are all connected to the same thing but we’ve just not cleaned enough parts to have an accurate picture yet?

Taken from the Book – “Quantum Mechanics For Your Soul: How to Repair Yourself and Save the World at the Same Time

Quantum Mechanics For Your Soul

Read the Blog – “Holy Frauds

Mooji

The Myth of Spiritual Enlightenment

In India it is quite normal to see people defecate in the street. In fact, fifty percent of the people in India defecate in the open. Despite having a space program, in India you can wait for a train and watch people pooping on the tracks (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-27775327). In India pooping in the open is quite normal, most people are not offended by it. Westerners on the other hand find pooping in the open offensive they don’t understand it.

Westerners

Another idea from India that Westerners have failed to understand, that has proved far worse for the world as a whole, is the concept of ‘Enlightenment’. This cross-cultural contamination has been made even worse by the spiritual constipation of our materialistic culture: we only have one word for an idea that would take a book to describe.

Buddhism

If the Buddha said that he was ‘Moksha’ he may have meant that he was released from the cycle of birth and death. Obviously his celebrations might have been a little premature. He may have said, ‘Bodhi’ or ‘Prahna’ depending on which school of Buddhism you study. In Zen, to achieve ‘Kensho’ is to see into the heart of one’s true nature.

Each of these terms are predefined by the nature of their cultural and historical presuppositions and as such cannot really, by definition, describe the living experience.

Enlightenment

MoojiUnfortunately, in the West we only have one word for ‘Enlightenment’ and it’s gotten as contaminated as an Indian train track. Teachers like Mooji, Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts have packaged the appearance of enlightenment and have learned to be sufficiently vague enough that it satisfies a hunger in our empty culture. The success of these teachers is in inverse proportion to the level of ignorance of their followers.

Enlightenment isn’t something that you achieve, or realise. It’s not like something that you become and then you’re out. Rather it is something that you already are but the very moment that you think you have it you really don’t!

If you feel an overwhelming urge to change your name, have your feet kissed and fix other people’s problems, realise that it’s just the universe telling you that you are going in the wrong direction.

Conversely, if you find yourself in a crowd looking adoringly up at a man sitting on chair carefully placed higher than you, realise that what you think you see in him is a reflection of what is already in you.

Taken from the book: ‘Quantum Mechanics For Your Soul: How to Repair Yourself and Save the World at the Same Time’

Quantum Mechanics For Your Soul