What is Meditation? What is the importance of this?
There’s an expression widely used today: “guided meditation.” My view on this is that there’s nothing more important in life than discovering the art of Meditation. Meditation is what puts you in direct contact with the Reality of your own Being, your own Divine Nature, your own real Divine Truth.
Meditation is the art of Being; Being is Consciousness, and Consciousness is Happiness. There’s no Love in our lives. If there is no Love, Happiness is absent. The sign of the absence of Love is the sign of the absence of Happiness, and there’s no Happiness if there’s no Consciousness; and if there’s no Consciousness, there’s no Presence of Being.
Humans live in their psychological world, the entire notion they have of life is the notion they have of themselves, and the notion they have of themselves are the aspects of their psychological story, their psychological complexity.
And what is Meditation? And here I mean the True Meditation, Real Meditation, the one and unique Real Truth of Meditation. Meditation is this contact with yourself. This is not possible when you are involved in an unconscious, mechanical, routine, habitual, and addicted way in this model of egoic consciousness, which is when you are psychologically involved in this complexity, something so common to all. The gravity of this is that there’s no Love – as I’ve just said – there’s no Happiness, no Consciousness – that is the gravity –, there’s no Presence of Being. All you have is psychological conditioning and that psychological conditioning shows itself in a very obvious and world-renowned way as signs of human unhappiness, the disease of the century – until another one comes along. Then we say: “It’s the disease of the century” always referring to aspects of psychological unhappiness: anxiety, depression, fear, anguish, the pain of loneliness, all the different problems we assume as being the reality of our lives, within our living for thirty, forty, fifty, seventy years.
There’s basically no vision of your Being because there’s no True Meditation. We don't learn this in the first years of our lives. We go to school, the teacher teaches us math, Portuguese, or the language of the country where we were born, and we learn other languages as well. So, we know the language, the spoken, written language, we learn to write, to read, we learn mathematics, biology, we learn everything. We just don't learn the Truth about who is this one sitting there, listening to the teacher. We don't know who we are.
The greatest teaching – the most important of all teachings – that we could receive in life, we could have in life, the greatest possible education for us is to be educated in the art of Being-Consciousness-Bliss. Being-Consciousness-Bliss is possible when you discover what Meditation is; not what we introduced into our world, here in the West, which we now see spread across all Western countries, this thing borrowed from the East – from the Far East, the Middle East, the Far East, India, China, Japan – that borrowed thing called “meditation.” We borrowed, we tampered with, and made a format for this thing we here call “meditation.” And then there are different techniques, practices, or formulas for meditation, something very modern, very Western, a kind of colored pill whose color we like, we take it and that, in fact, we do not know the effect of it.
We have a dull, mechanical, self-centered mind, too involved in its psychological stories, in its complexes, fears, desires, and various afflictions, and then they give us a pill called “meditation” in the Western way.
You go to a search engine like Google or YouTube and there you write “meditation to prosper,” “meditation to sleep,” “meditation to fulfill desires,” “meditation to…” just put “meditation to...” and the YouTube autocomplete serves the dish you're ordering, the menu you've read, what you start writing here and YouTube’s own autocomplete completes it for you. It’s not that, Meditation is not that. It’s definitely not that. It’s not this colorful pill for that internal affliction of boredom, loneliness, depression, fear, insomnia, even lack of appetite, or fulfilling desires. Taking this pill, it will alleviate – not solve, but rather alleviate – or will bring, as a palliative, a temporary solution to a psychological affliction. It’s not that.
Here, I want to talk to you about the True Meditation and say that these palliatives can be of great help – yes, of great temporary help. If you take an anxiolytic drug or a pill of some kind it’s wonderful because at first, you can get relief; the brain is as if anesthetized, it goes through a chemical process of adjustment due to the drug, and you, mistaking yourself for the body, in this experience of being “someone,” can temporarily relax from that affliction. But notice what we are saying: this psychological unhappiness, this psychological pain, this affliction of seeing yourself as “someone” amid these complexities, amidst all this, has no solution unless the sense of an egoic identity disappears.
You can put the ego to sleep depending on the color of the pill you take – and now you know – so the ego can temporarily sleep, it can relax, de-stress, but here we are talking to you about something entirely different. We are talking about Meditation as the door that opens for you to realize your Being, which is Presence, Consciousness, and Happiness. This is only possible when the Truth of your Being, which is the Truth of God, the Divine Truth, reveals itself.
You were born to realize What you Are. In fact, this dream of birth, growth, adulthood, marriage, children, grandchildren, this dream we call “life,” is a dream, waking up is the purpose. And you only wake up from this dream when you Awaken, literally, to the Truth of your Being, which is Presence, Consciousness, and Happiness.
I want to talk to you a little bit about guided meditation, what is our understanding of it. The only Reality that can lead you and guide you to Meditation is Consciousness itself. In general, we also have this means, this resource, we have this mechanism, a song, a voice leading us to a psychophysical relaxation. We sit cross-legged repeating certain words in a certain way, for example, or breathing in a certain way like we have been taught, with regular intervals and relaxing, concentrating on the toes, on certain parts of the body and so on; and when we do that there is relaxation. This is what is known as “guided meditation” – and there is the guided meditation, the yellow one, the blue one, the red one, and the green one.
I want to investigate this here with you and I want to repeat what I’ve just said: there is only one Reality capable of leading you to Meditation, and that Reality is the own Consciousness, Presence itself, the own Being and Divine Grace, and not a voice, not a technique, not a practice – that goes for meditation and guided meditation.
So, what is this contact with guided meditation? We've been talking a lot about Meditation and we're going to keep talking about it, because it’s the only thing you really need to discover, you need to learn. The paradox of this is that this “learning,” or the paradox of this expression here, is that this “learning” is not something like an achievement that “someone” can make, but rather a discovery, an acknowledgment of your Being in touch with that Reality – your Being, which is in touch with It here and now. So, it’s not something that someone can teach you, but it’s what you can – and yes, you need to – learn, and here, to learn is to discover that What is already present reveals itself when you give yourself adequate attention to this discovery. This attention I call Self-awareness – Self-awareness also in a new sense for this word here, not the one that will offer you personal development, success, and fulfillment, because now you know yourself.
The mind is this complexity, everything it can know or learn from itself, with itself, in that mode of introspection, self-evaluation, or self-analysis is a circle – it will be inside a circle. Then, this so-called model of “self-knowledge,” we discard. No technique, no practice, no system, no book, we discard it all.
Here, Self-awareness is discovering how you see yourself, how to look at yourself; not introspection, not self-analysis, not self-assessment – no, no – but rather learning the art of looking at what is going on here and now – thought, feeling, emotion, sensation, your gestures, what you say, what you don’t say, how you speak, how you feel, what you feel. Looking, just looking, not putting “someone” in that look to judge, compare, reject, deny, to try to escape, run away, but just looking at every physical and psychological reaction of this “I” that I believe I am. By looking at it without this evaluation, this criticism, this comparison, without this judgment, you begin to have access to this Self-awareness. This Self-awareness is already the unfolding of the art of Meditation.
We were not taught, as children, to observe our reactions, our feelings, thoughts, sensations, our way of talking to someone, of addressing a certain person; we have no Consciousness in this process, and here I show you that Meditation is about getting closer to yourself. This is not a pill; this is the art of understanding yourself in the context of living, moment by moment. Notice, it’s not sitting down to do something, but we invite you to look at it moment by moment.
Here, we are before the attention of Presence, of Consciousness, something entirely new. Not a mechanical thing, not something you get by force of habit. This requires Presence, watching every reaction, every thought, feeling, and emotion, every sensation arising; just watching and noticing that sense of “someone” which is this background of conditioning coming up. Looking at it without separating – and you separate yourself when you judge, when you reject, when you don't want that thought, don't want that feeling, don't want what you perceive in a relationship as a desire or a specific positive or negative will in contact with another – look at it within yourself.
What is guided Meditation? We have already seen: it’s not “someone,” a voice, a song, a practice, a system, or something external inducing you to a psychological mental state of stillness. No! That stillness, which is so necessary for the perception of the Reality of your Being, which is a quiet, silent brain, really needs to happen, but through Self-awareness and this Meditation, as I’ve been talking to you. What about guided Meditation? In the same way. There’s nothing, I repeat, more powerful to lead you to Meditation than the own Presence and Consciousness.
There is an expression in the Bible that says: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim the works of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.” That’s right there in Psalm 19. What is the Bible saying? The Bible is saying that the Divine Presence, the very Presence of Consciousness, is This all. You don't need a human voice, a song, or a mantra. Contact with existence with open eyes, with contemplative eyes, can show you the absence of the sense of “I.” The skies do that, but so does the sea. When you arrive in front of the sea, you hear the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks, and the movement of the foam that comes towards the sand, if your eyes stop at that moment – just the look – at that moment the office is gone, the doctor’s office is gone, as well your patients, and people who deal with you, and all the worries, because, at that moment, the sense of “I” [disappears].
So, Divine Truth is in everything; everything is an unfolding of that unique Truth. You are not sitting in a certain position, breathing in a certain way. You are just looking at the vastness of the sky, the eyes of a baby, something that moves you on a new level when all sense of an “I” is gone; in that simple act of looking, you are touched by Beauty. I'm not talking about desire, about wanting. I'm talking about contemplating the beautiful, the Truth, when the sense of “I” is not there. Then, there is a complete emptying of all that psychological content; and at that moment, this is Guided Meditation.
When you go to Satsang... let me tell you a little bit about this: what is Satsang? Satsang is the encounter with the Truth. And what is the encounter with the Truth? It’s an encounter with Being, Consciousness, and Happiness in a form. The word Satsang, if you look it up, is “contact with Truth.” In an encounter with the Realized Being, you are in Satsang; right now, you are before the Nameless, the Presence, before Grace, contact with the Divine in a form – you are all forms of the Divine, not only does the sky proclaim the Glory of God, your eyes also proclaim the Glory of God, we’ve just seen that.
You are a beautiful woman, a beautiful man; your eyes proclaim the Glory of God. The Reality of God is all That, there is only God. In Satsang, when you come across the speech, the look, the Silence of a Realized Being, that’s Satsang. You come across Meditation; you do nothing, actually, Meditation is exactly the absence of “you” doing something.
When there is True Meditation, when there is True Guided Meditation, “you” are not there; Truth is, and “you” are not. Do you get that?
In front of existence, in front of nature, in front of a baby’s eyes, you are in front of Grace, if you discover what it is to be in Meditation and when Meditation is – and Meditation is the absence of the sense of a present “I.” Ok?
That’s the subject, that’s the encounter for you!
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