What is the meaning of Meditation? What is this “why” of Meditation? I wouldn't say why meditating, but rather the why of Meditation.
The idea is you in meditation. You all here know the meaning of the word “meditation.” Some employ this term to meditate on something or for a purpose, to receive something, gain or get rid of something, and there is meditation in the sense, still, of gaining, reaching, or getting there to obtain peace, silence, and quietness. So we all, in general, already know the meaning of the word “meditate” – at least we have a sense for it.
I want to work with you on what I consider to be the Real Meaning of Meditation. It is not you meditating to achieve something, but rather the understanding that True Meditation, Real Meditation, the meaning of Meditation – I refer to the Truth about Meditation – is not you meditating; it is Meditation without you. Let us work on that a bit here.
What is Meditation? What is the real meaning? What is the “why” of Meditation? Where does the entire problem arise for us? We see Meditation as a mechanism or a tool to get something and, in a positive way, accomplish something, and in a negative way, get rid of something. So, people live their meditation practices to have experiences. What are these experiences? You never say: “I'm going to experience being here,” you always say: “I lived this, I went through this, I felt this, this happened” when referring to experience. Thus, where are all experiences always? In the past. Okay?
So, for us, the search for experience is to undergo something, and once that has taken place, it is in the past. We always talk about it as an experience. Then, I would like to draw your attention to one point here. Whatever you experience is part of an experience for “someone” who can report it here and now. Every experience, at whatever level it occurs in your life, however profound, expressive, meaningful, mystical, esoteric, spiritual, or religious, every experience was, and what you have here and now is the memory.
What is Meditation? What is the real meaning of Meditation? First of all, it does not occur to you, which would represent an experience you could then relate to. Now, understand where we want to get to – human beings live boring, distressed, afflicted, frightened, fearful lives; their actions are driven by desire, envy, and fear, and, tired of that, they want new experiences to see if they can find meaning to their lives, and so go in search of this so-called “experience” because for them the purpose of the experience is fulfillment, satisfaction, the achievement of something new since they are tired of this ancient, old condition of theirs. Now, would that be the purpose of Meditation?
So, people meditate to fulfill desires, de-stress, sleep better, and find silence; they even meditate to find God. What human beings are looking for is a new experience. That experience is what they go through and then report back. It is very curious the expressions we hear within spirituality, “My Kundalini has awakened,” and then comes the report: “I meditated, and Christ appeared to me.” All these expressions and formulations only reflect an experience that happened to “someone” who is now reporting it here.
Notice, what is Meditation? What is the meaning behind Meditation? I have already said something here: that when there is Real Meditation, no “someone” is left to report what they saw, felt, and perceived. We are together to discover something that when This arrives, you disappear. So, it is a discovery that is beyond your own understanding, and you cannot claim it as your own. Therefore, it cannot be considered an experience. This constant search or quest for experience on some level – on the spiritual, religious, mystical, or esoteric level – is just an experience. That experience is “someone” appropriating it to talk about it, report on it, write about it, tell about it, but it has gone. Every experience, at any level in your life, whether a positive experience, like a great insight or a great revelation, has no reality here and now. An experience will always occur to “someone” within it. You have to be there to be able to live the experience and then report on it.
When we talk about Meditation here, and Meditation is this encounter with Reality, free from the “I,” not “someone” meditating, experiencing, trying out; it is the Reality of the Truth of Being in this contact with the Totality of life, without the “I.” People use expressions like “trauma.” Trauma is an experience. Trauma is a painful experience we seek treatment for to get rid of this so-called “trauma,” but we don't consider it a mystical experience of being a trauma. We don't want to get rid of an esoteric occurrence. But who is this one who wants to sustain a mystical experience and get rid of trauma as an unpleasant and painful experience? It is always the sense of “I.”
So, our emphasis here is to show you that the Freedom present is the absence of this “me,” this “I,” this ego. It represents the end of the positive and the negative, of the spiritual “I” or the “I” in conflicts, suffering, dilemmas, and traumas, all based on the unfinished experience. If an experience ends, no “someone” is left there; then we do not have the experience. Notice where we want to go with you in this speech: Life is what happens now; there is no experience. We do not allow ourselves to live free from the experience because we always put “someone” inside it to deal with what happens here and now. Are you with me?
That is our only problem. It is not how to get rid of the trauma because everyone wants to get rid of traumas and some aspect of suffering, of psychological unhappiness. Everyone wants to get rid of psychological suffering and various forms of internal unhappiness; however, people do not want to get rid of a constant search or quest for fulfillment in new experiences, especially if these are to spiritualize them, make them better people, special people, and all of this is a game of the ego itself, of the very sense of an “I,” in its dissatisfaction, looking for something to be. To be is not to become. You cannot understand the Reality of Being by wanting, seeking, searching, and wanting to be. You can only understand the Reality of Being by being. And you are what you ARE when experience is no longer relevant. Thus, this search or quest for new experiences is always about sustaining “someone” in a constant search for new sensations. Get that.
Your ego, this “me,” is strengthened by experiences. When you cling to a thought model and achieve that, or believe you have accomplished it as you expected, you feel fulfilled again; psychologically, your ego is reinforced since it is a false idea that you have done it. It wasn't life happening; it was you making it happen. So, what is the Real meaning of Meditation? It is Being. It is not being, becoming, getting rid of “someone;” it is Being, and there is no “someone.” If I want to free myself from trauma, I want to free myself from “someone” who has been traumatized. If I want to find happiness, I have to falsify, to form “someone” to be happy in what I project as happiness. Then, it is neither getting rid of “someone” nor is it bringing “someone” to achieve, accomplish something, or become fulfilled in something. We are looking to get rid of that “someone,” that “me” that makes us suffer, but never that “someone” that makes us enjoy pleasure, living in this constant search for more and more fulfillment. To see this is to go beyond experience. Being beyond it is not “someone” outside and beyond it, but it is life showing itself as it is, in its Beauty, Grace, Silence, and Truth, remaining outside of time, and it is outside of time that you, as Absolute, Divine, Real Consciousness, are Life, and not the particular life of “someone,” it is the Life of God.
In these meetings, within this work, we are discovering the Divine Truth of our Essential Nature, which is not “someone” present living experiences, but moment-by-moment experiencing of what resides outside the “I,” outside the “me,” the ego. In our meetings, we are working on this with you. This Reality of Being is Kundalini. It is not the Kundalini of “someone” who has Awakened; it is the Presence of Consciousness. The word Kundalini is Consciousness, and not “someone” who awakens. Kundalini Awakening is the Awakening to the end of that “someone” who lives, seeks, and needs experiences. As the illusion of “someone” remains, there is no Truth of Absolute Consciousness. What you call “consciousness” as we know it, is being conscious. And you are only conscious of the experience. You are always conscious of an experience. A simple example: when you see a chair, you are conscious; this is an experience. And as the experience, psychologically in this consciousness, which I call mental consciousness, is only memory. That is what we call consciousness. If I ask you: Are you conscious? You say: “Yes.” But you are always conscious of something in which you are the subject, and that something is your experience. So, the experience always takes place in this being conscious.
You wake up in the morning and tell me about a dream; in that you are conscious, there is you and the world, you and your experiences, like here and now, there is the “I” and its experiences. So, where there are thoughts, memory, recollection, and an “I” that isolates itself from what it observes, what is present is this consciousness – I call it mental consciousness, the consciousness of the “I” or egoic consciousness. All our experiences occur at this level. That is the level of inattention. When there is Real Attention – and here I mean full attention of such absolute quality that the sense of “I” does not come in to appropriate an experience and turn it into a memory, into something from the past – this is that Real Consciousness, as I have been calling it, or the Truth of Being here and now. Without memory, without this “I” in the experience, the psychological time loses its relevance, and then there is the experiencing without the “I” experiencing.
Understanding the Truth of your Being, which is pure Consciousness, for living life moment by moment in experiencing. Then spiritual, esoteric, mystical, and religious experiences lose their importance when there is Real Meditation, which is Being Consciousness, Real Consciousness, which is your True Nature. So, neither getting rid of, achieving, or searching for something to have a fulfillment that supplants all these pains, sorrows, afflictions, and boredom that are our routine life. There is no more of that because life is happening now without the sense of “someone” who then has to get rid of something or who always wants to achieve something. Meditation is not about having peace, silence, or an unusual experience to relieve you of the stress, anxiety, routine, monotony, and confusion that your life is. Meditation has no such purpose. The real meaning of Meditation is the end of this “someone,” the recognition, the verification of the end of this mental consciousness, which is constantly transforming any experience into something personal and private and then remembering it.
Life is what is happening now and not for you. Life is an experiment without the “I” because only the experiment without the “I” is free from an experiencer. When there is no experiencer, experiencing is present. When there is no thinker, thought is free to be present very naturally without producing suffering, afflictions, desires, fears, and complications. What is the secret of thinking free from this “I” that is the thinker? Thinking is an existential phenomenon, like breathing. Living is a phenomenon; when the sense of an “I” is not present, it is just a phenomenon, an appearance. In life, there is living as a phenomenon; in life, thinking is a phenomenon, feeling is a phenomenon, dealing with work, or whatever is arising in your experience is no longer your experience; it is the experiencing of life because you are life as Pure Consciousness, as Real Consciousness. That’s the real meaning of why meditate, not the reason for meditating.
No comments:
Post a Comment