Category: Perceptions

  • What is Meditation?

    What is Meditation?

    Origin of the English Word Meditation

    ‘Meditation’ – derived from the Latin meditatio, from a verb meditari, meaning “to think, contemplate, devise, ponder”.

    Interesting that the word’s English origins point toward more engaged mental activity than I tend to associate with meditation. To me, even contemplation involves less active thinking and more pondering or a daydreaming (floating thoughts) quality. I’ve never been interested in meditation for stress relief or feeling better about myself or life. For me, meditation is about allowing what is more subtle and real to rise more to the foreground of experience – to the point where the meditator and the meditating are one.

    In the Old Testament, hagâ means to sigh or murmur, and also, to meditate. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, hagâ became the Greek melete. The Latin Bible then translated hagâ/melete into meditatio. The use of the term meditatio as part of a formal, stepwise process of meditation goes back to the 12th-century monk Guigo II.

    Sighing and murmuring link meditation to the breath and chanting or mantras in my thinking.

    The Tibetan word for meditation “Gom” means “to become familiar with” and has the strong implication of training the mind to be familiar with states that are beneficial: concentration, compassion, correct understanding, patience, humility, perseverance, etc.

    For me, ‘to become familiar with,’ points to absorption and the nondual – knowing by being.

    ‘Meditation’ was introduced as a translation for Eastern spiritual practices, referred to as dhyana in Buddhism and in Hinduism.

    Dhyan is a state of pure consciousness, which transcends the inner and outer senses. The climax of Dhyan is samadhi. In Indian tradition, it is used for inner soul growth. Western psychologists link it with mental concentra-tion and consider it a special state of mind. But this is only the early phase of Dhyan.

    The term ’Dhyan’ comes from ’dhyai’ dhatu used in ’lat’ pratyaya. Its meaning is contemplation or the natural tendency and direction of senses. Patanjal Yogashastra links it with ekagrata or concentration. According to Sri Aurobindo, Dhyan is that state in which the inner mind tries to see the reality behind things. Ekagrata means focusing the consciousness on one point or object and keeping it steady in one state. In yoga, ekagrata is achieved when the mind is deeply engrossed in a special condition like quietude, or action or aspiration or resolve. This is called meditation.  Read more»

    History of Meditation

    Some of the earliest references to meditation are found in the Hindu Vedas (1500 BCE). Around the 6th to 5th centuries BCE, other forms of meditation developed in Taoist China and Buddhist India.

    In the west, by 20 BCE Philo of Alexandria had written on some form of “spiritual exercises” involving attention (prosoche) and concentration and by the 3rd century Plotinus had developed meditative techniques.

    Philo’s primary importance is in the development of the philosophical and theological foundations of Christianity.

    Plotinus developed a complex spiritual cosmology involving three elements: the One, the Intelligence, and the Soul. It is from the productive unity of these three Beings that all existence emanates, according to Plotinus.

    The Pali Canon, which dates to 1st century BCE considers Indian Buddhist meditation as a step towards salvation. The Vimalakirti Sutra which dates to 100 CE included a number of passages on meditation. Around 1227, D?gen wrote the instructions for Zazen.

    In his “Universally Recommended Practices for Zazen” Fukanzazengi he says, “The zazen I speak of is not meditation practice [in the traditional Buddhist sense]. It is simply the Dharma gate of peace and bliss, the practice-realization of totally culminated awakening.” Dogen’s zazen is a ritual expression and celebration of awakening already present. He repeatedly emphasizes the oneness of practice-realization, in which practice does not lead through one’s own efforts to some subsequent realization. For example, in 1241 he said, “Know that buddhas in the buddha way do not wait for awakening.” Read more»

    The Islamic practice of Dhikr had involved the repetition of the 99 Names of God since the 8th or 9th century. Between the 10th and 14th centuries, hesychasm was developed, particularly on Mount Athos in Greece, and involves the repetition of the Jesus prayer. Christian meditation progressed from the 6th century practice of Bible reading among Benedictine monks called Lectio Divina, i.e. divine reading. Its four formal steps as a “ladder” were defined by the monk Guigo II in the 12th century with the Latin terms lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio (i.e. read, ponder, pray, contemplate).

    Secular forms of meditation started appearing in India in the 1950s and migrated to the United States in the 1960s.

    Reading about the etymology and history of ‘meditation’ gives me some insight into how the meaning of a word evolves through time and cultures, but also how the mind reifies concepts. It’s also interesting to note, my opinion, that as meditation became more secular, it seems to have lost much of its spiritual, transcendent and transformational power. A daily sitting practice can be one of the simplest, yet challenging forms of meditation.

     Simply sitting and meditating is not necessarily practice. Practice requires true intention, true motivation, true devotion to the truth. Otherwise, we are not practicing or engaging the work.  A. H. Almaas – Runaway Realization

  • Do We Really Want to Know Ourselves?

    Do We Really Want to Know Ourselves?

    How little personality really wants to know


    “….don’t worry if, at the end of any day, you suddenly realize that you can’t remember a word I’ve said. That doesn’t matter. It’s the journey itself that’s going to change you.”
     Ishmael – by Daniel Quinn (A gorilla comments on the current state of affairs)

    It seems obvious – our attention is skewed by our enneagram fixation AND it functions in a manner to reinforce and perpetuate the fixation. When we are blind to so much, how can we ever hope to see? Our personality, ego structure, and false self always function with an agenda.

    This agenda, whether positive or negative, and the underlying motivation for it is habitual, unconscious, and insidious. But, we are addicted and though we protest otherwise – refuse to let go of the pain and suffering and story associated with it. The pain, the suffering and the story are inseparable from it – they are part and parcel of one manifest phenomenon– who we take ourselves to be.

     ….”I know of no such story,” I told him at last.
    “You mean you’ve never heard of it?”
    “That’s right.”
    …”That’s because there’s no need to hear of it. …Every one of you knows it by heart by the time you are six or seven. …And you hear it incessantly, because every medium of propaganda, every medium of education pours it out incessantly. And hearing it incessantly, you don’t listen to it. There’s no need to listen to it. It’s always there humming away in the background, so there’s no need to attend to it at all. In fact, you’ll find – at least initially – that it’s hard to attend to it.”   
            Ishmael

    The desire to actualize our potential; the longing for freedom and peace; the hunger for love and contentment arise from within the soul as an optimizing force which is quickly co-opted by the ego – incorporated into its agenda and activity for self-improvement. Improving the self is self-defeating – a point of appreciation I owe to Claudio Naranjo’s presentation of the enneagram.

    cOur understanding of self is a Gordian knot – the more we struggle with it, the tighter it gets. So, how does one unravel this knot? How can we help to align our exploration with the optimizing force and relax ego-activity? How can we avail ourselves of the wisdom of the enneagram without perpetuating the fixation?

    We need to get below the surface of the self – surface that includes all of those great characteristics and traits so wonderfully articulated in the enneagram of personality types. We need a crack or two in the shell of the self – for we have been existing for a long, long time as a bounded entity. When a bounded entity turns inward – that movement of attention is, at first, also a movement away from the true self – another conundrum on the path of self-improvement.

    What we need is to NOT do. Allowing our self to see the truth – our situation as it actually is – invites the optimizing force into our experience. Developing the capacity to be in full contact with our experience while not acting out the ego’s agenda – our story – is being in the service of the soul. (Appreciation for the work of A. H. Almaas)

    Our intent is not to do but to be. Our motivation is not self-improvement but freedom and authenticity. Our desire is not to define and explain our self, but to clarify the transparency of the soul. And – believe it or not – knowing your fixation can help – but, as usual, one must take the road less traveled.

    Wanting
    To be, to become, to know
    Is torture
    Sitting in the Night
    Being revealed
    Is the sweetest
    Satisfaction 
                              jh

    The Obvious

    The enneagram is a treasure-trove of insight and information for a self-improvement campaign. I mean, my God, we have your strengths and weaknesses, our high side and low side, our movements toward integration and disintegration. We have our existential issues, our chief feature, our passion, our delusion, our…well, you get the point – no need to write another book.

    personality-defenseBut how do we work with that information in a real way? Go where we don’t want to go – meaning let our attention go there – feel it fully and immediately. When the mind tells us – that makes no sense, when anxiety rises, when we notice places we avoid – we need to get a clue! The personality (ego), according to Freud, is basically a defense – the whole enchilada. It’s a collection of semi-successful ways in which we have learned to cope with life, to survive, to manage our affairs while increasing our pleasure and avoiding pain.

    Take one of your type’s favorite or dominant characteristics or traits and explore its opposite. Love strength? Give some attention to helplessness. Prefer being in control? Explore powerlessness.

    Here’s a way to explore this:

    Get a pen and paper. For 30 minutes answer this question with whatever comes to mind.

    “What’s right about not being ___________?”

    (Fill in this blank with something you avoid, something your personality has learned to compensate for – weak, needy, wrong, stupid, and etc.)

    Right now, some personalities have already rejected this exercise or are in the process of modifying it – say ten minutes instead of thirty. Well, there you have it – just how little it really wants to know about itself.

    In the process answering (be sure to write it all down), make the answers short. Be sincere, get the ego’s position paper on this issue. Anything over a few words is just more story that helps to avoid the full power of the exercise.

    To continue the exercise after answering the question for thirty minutes, explore your family history with what’s in the blank. See how family attitudes and values influenced you on this issue; how they supported you to be a certain way or coerced you to be another. Then, specifically examine your judgments around what is in the blank. Do this by feeling or observing how the judgment affects your level of energy or vitality.

    To complete the exercise: now that you have all of this insight and information, do nothing with it. Oh, and don’t do ‘nothing’ with it also. Observe how you react – your thoughts, feelings and actions. Don’t reject or stop anything – unless it is totally inappropriate, illegal, or dangerous to yourself or others. Remember, do not use this information to improve yourself or as a hammer to beat yourself up.

    The Unfamiliar

    The enneagram talks a lot about the three centers (head, heart, belly) and most people are dominant in one. Explore your least developed center. Observe how it is to function from this center. How does it affect you? What comes up in you – thoughts, feelings, motivations for action? Allow yourself to be a total klutz or ignoramus– no judgments needed here. Take this center out for a test drive.

    Explore your history with this center. Explore the judgments. Explore the personality’s position – How do you explain your position to others?

     “….you assembled this explanation like a mosaic from a million bits of information presented to you in various ways by others who share that explanation. You assembled it from the table talk of your parents, from cartoons you watched on television, from Sunday School lessons, from your textbooks and teachers, from news broadcasts, from movies, novels, sermons, plays newspapers and all the rest.” Ishmael

    Again, for the time being, avoid acting on the desire to become “a whole person” by integrating your three centers. Intrigue yourself for a while with how it has been for you to run on one or two cylinders instead of the three you came equipped with.

    The Unspoken

    This is more subtle and difficult. This is in the realm of pre-verbal experience and deals with knowing our personality at a very deep and uncomfortable level.

    Did you know that the foundation for who we take ourselves to be is mostly in place by age three – way before the capacity for abstract thought develops? This foundation exists in us as an energetic charge – a pattern of tensions and a comfort range of energies. When we start poking the light of attention into this area, we are very likely to get a rapid response along the lines of: “Well, this is just who I am. This is what I prefer. I like myself this way. And, etc.”

    An easy ways to gently rattle this cage to see just how sensitive you are to being outside of our energetic comfort zone (habit) is to change your driving habit. For a whole week slow down ten miles an hour or, depending on our personality type, speed up. If we’re not sure, experiment with both. It will be obvious within a day or so. Do it all day, every day and just observe yourself. Watch how you will attempt to create other situations and venues in your life to bring your energetic sense of self back into the comfort zone. Observe how irritable, antsy, and uncomfortable you can be over something so simple.

    (See Chapter 20 – The Pearl Beyond Price by A.H. Almaas for more insight into this)

    So there you go, a way to explore personality to see just how little it really wants to know about itself, but how it always has grand designs on how to improve itself – like that is really possible when it is so blind to reality.

    An important point to keep in mind when poking around into this personality and ego is to be gentle with yourself. Be kind, but steadfast – appreciate the fact that this bounded entity has been working its little heart out as best it can for survival and well-being. Treat it like the sensitive three-year old it is.

    The superego, the inner critic, the internal judge is another story all together. Learn how to kick its ass out of your experience. Otherwise, life will always remain a prison and we will always be confined to a type.

    personality types enneagramWhy resist
    The unraveling
    Of the great ruin
    Your life
    Has made of you
    God has sent His
    Wrecking-crew of angels
    To renovate
    The dog house you call home
    Into an exquisite palace
    Crystal fountains
    Jeweled domes
    Diamond spires
    And walls of Divine Transparency

    Why resist?
    This Architect’s Plan
    Always includes
    The razing of
    Existing structures
                                               jh

  • Meditation – Running on Empty

    Meditation – Running on Empty

    Mindfulness of an Empty Mind on Auto-Run

    meditation awareness mindfullnessThis one is for Janice and Kathy.

    I remember when external noises were a nuisance and distraction during meditation. Like many(?) or most(?), I used to think I was supposed to block out noise. What a hoot! Nothing leads to deepening meditation like effort and contraction. At some point, I realized that I can’t stop my ears and brain from doing what they do – registering sound and other convenient processes.

    All (most?) of us have had experiences where we were so engrossed in something that all other activity seemed to cease. So the exercise seems to be one of increasing our absorption into ??? eventually awareness of awareness?

    It’s interesting how curiosity does not have to involve thinking. We don’t have to engage the content of the mind with our minds(?). I noticed that for many years my meditation seemed to be linked to my eyeballs – always looking for something inside because I seemed to be located right behind those eyeballs in my head. What a relief to discover that those eyeballs, head and body do not contain, nor confine, me.

    Imagine my pleasant surprise, one day, to discover that my mind could keep on thinking and planning without me having to be present and overseeing the process. This increased my curiosity about what was meditating – and that seems to be key – a real interest in meditation. Of course, this interest is not so much about understanding meditation with the mind, nor observing the process to improve it. The interest is deeper, subtler – more like our soul has an interest or the meditation has an interest.

    All(?) spiritual teachings say that God, the Divine, Allah, True Nature, WHATEVER you name IT –  is right HERE , right NOW. Most, also assert, that the Divine is always in a process of revealing itself to us. That being the case why would I need eyes to go looking for it. Why should I need to work so hard. Perhaps I should relax, you know – rest and abide in attentive awareness with no thought of getting anywhere or finding anything – just hang loose in a relaxed way as traffic goes by and dogs bark.

    It’s more pleasant now that meditation is not goal oriented. I meditate not for the pleasure of it or for gain, but for… hmm, my mind has no rational reason it can offer. The impulse seems to be coming from elsewhere – perhaps that other end of the candle where the Divine is burning through my veils.

    Awareness of mindfulness – a mind with or without content.

    The beauty of meditation is that all of life, even our thinking mind, can keep on keeping on while we tend to something much more significant.

     

     

  • The Paradox of Paradise

    The Paradox of Paradise

    The Dance Between Heart, Mind, Reality and the World

    paradise paradox loveWe’re in love and life is grand, majestic, full of light and… we often worry about the loss of love.

    We’re in love, getting to know each other and STUFF comes up – and joy and pain are dancing in an intimate embrace.

    We’re working through some deep wound from the past. It’s challenging, agonizing and yet, we continue – often with joy

    Bliss & Joy are NOT Dependent Upon Circumstances

    The heart dances to a different drum than our normal mind and conditioning imagine. In the world of separate entities, love is often dependent and tied to the past – unconscious needs and demands muddying the waters of current experience. Love becomes a shadow of its true nature patterned with blemishes, dark spots and holes.

    Love cannot be learned or taught; love comes as grace. ~Rumi

    When we begin the work, the return to the true nature of the heart – the heart rejoices in every step regardless of pain and suffering. The heart loves to be free, to be naked to its nature – transparent to reality.

    Don’t worry about mending

    A broken heart

    Or wearing it

    On a shirt sleeve

    That heart

    Is only on loan

    When the Owner

    Wants it back

    He’s going to

    Reclaim it

    Regardless

    Of the shape

    It’s in

  • Mind Tripping in the Mental Maze

    Mind Tripping in the Mental Maze

    Adventures in neuroscience mental coding – mindfulness

    In my last post, I gave a very brief introduction to our mind’s use of object relations as a way of storing and processing information. The mind is very useful, but as they say – the mind is a good servant, but a lousy master. The mind is perfect for what it does – record, recall, compare and extrapolate data, but there are a few flies in our mental ointment:

    1. Buddha's BrainThe brain body/mind starts receiving and recording impressions long before we take our first breath. For months after that first breath, our nervous system, physical body and psyche are still an undifferentiated system.
    2. We are born into this world as extremely sensitive and impressionable beings., which results in very powerful imprinting on the body/mind/soul. From about 5 years of age on, our sensitivity wanes and new impressions carry less and less of emotional/body charge which lessens the creation of deep, lasting impressions (except in the case of trauma).
    3. As an organism, we are hardwired for survival. The brain’s evolution is skewed to give instantaneous attention to negative perceptions to support our fight or flight response. This helps to establish veils of perception that are skewed more toward the “negative” than the positive and sets in motion inertia of constant mental activity – chatter, chatter, chatter.
    4. Our parents and holding environment bombard us with a constant stream of thoughts, sensations and emotions that had little connection to or alignment with our sublime spiritual nature – we are objectified long before we are born and are seen as just another thing, albeit a living entity thing.

    So, we wind up with a voice in our head that chatters all the time, which might not be so bad if we were constantly chanting the sacred. But, even this would suffer from our early conditioning because by the time we start seeking the real, we are an entity identity operating system with bloated, outdated, suboptimal, looping code that makes Windows look lean, mean and full of dazzling light.

    A few excerpts from Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson:

    • buddha mind brain neuroscienceThe bias of the brain tilts implicit memories in a negative direction, even when most of your experiences are actually positive.
    • The brain is designed to change through experiences, especially negative ones; we learn from our experiences, particularly those that happened during childhood, and it is natural for that learning to stick with us.
    • A toddler has about three times as many synapses as an adult; on the way to adulthood, adolescents can lose up to 10,000 synapses per second in the prefrontal cortex.
    • Emotional arousal facilitates learning by increasing neural excitation and consolidating synaptic change.
    • Given the negativity bias of the brain, it takes an active effort to internalize positive experiences and heal negative ones.
    • Because of all the ways your brain changes its structure, your experience matters beyond its momentary, subjective impact. It makes enduring changes in the physical tissues of your brain which affect your well-being, functioning, and relationships. Based on science, this is a fundamental reason for being kind to yourself, cultivating wholesome experiences, and taking them in.
    • Focus on your emotions and body sensations, since these are the essence of implicit memory. Let the experience fill your body and be as intense as possible.
    • …most of the shaping of your mind remains forever unconscious. This is called implicit memory, and it includes your expectations, models of relationships, emotional tendencies, and general outlook. Implicit memory establishes the interior landscape of your mind— what it feels like to be you— based on the slowly accumulating residues of lived experience.
    • Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present. We get frustrated when we can’t have what we want, and disappointed when what we like ends. We suffer that we suffer. We get upset about being in pain, angry about dying, sad about waking up sad yet another day. This kind of suffering— which encompasses most of our unhappiness and dissatisfaction— is constructed by the brain. It is made up.
    The discoveries being made in neuroscience are bringing new insights into ancient spiritual practices and psychodynamics. This knowledge can be supportive and assist us in deepening our spiritual practice and movement toward realization and enlightenment. Understanding the mechanics of how the brain filters and assimilates perception  into our subjective reality of self and the world affords us with more opportunity for precise and powerful practice that is more being and less doing.

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  • Ego Self and Object Relations

    Ego Self and Object Relations

    How the mind’s simple operating system distorts the world and traps us in the past

    object relation self-imageHow the Mind Relates to the World and Others…

    There is you/me

    There is the other

    There is an energetic/emotional/mental relationship between the two that connects to the past and the present is seen and interpreted through this lens.

    Our experiences before and after birth impress upon our mind and nervous system as memory traces – mostly unconscious. These impressions form the building blocks for all future interactions with the world and others as the mind tries to learn from experiences by interpreting events and comparing what’s happening now to the past (projecting the past onto the present) and anticipating the future. These internal mental relationships are called object relations. (more…)

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