P. Foundation to Meditation

We are living a moment in our life times where we are forced to stop and pay attention to events which are pervasive and affecting humanity rarely recognized on such a scale,

It is therefore no surprise that at the time when we can not escape in other distraction, our fundamental liberties are removed arbitrarily, more people are turning  to “meditation than ever.

Whether it is to find lost peace, pacify fear, seek answers beyond the realm of visible happenings, wherever you turn, there is this surge in interest that older practitioners can seldom remember witnessing in such intensity . Conventional solutions are clearly failing and meditation becomes an acceptable path to investigate , no longer a luxury nor a quackery

Uncertainty is rife at all levels of our spheres of awareness, social life, political life, financial life, health, survival, existence itself. Everything is in the balance in a time in which we suddenly come to realize what we hitherto hid to ourselves and that is that no future can be planned.

We come to realize that despite our blindness, really nothing is known: and for the first time in a long time, we are coming close to the realization of impermanence . Through compulsion and other designs we have been stopped dead in our tracks of BAU. Trying to turn one type of transaction with Life in another is, careful people, will realize not a viable alternative.

Yet so many of us have no anchor , no inner solution to turn to and ride this wave sufficiently to realize that we are missing basic fondations, basic knowledge, basic know how to investigate what and who we really are, We are also increasingly aware that we need to quieten the monkey mind that makes up prey to campaigns of terror and endless battle fields of confusion carefully orchestrated.  And whilst we bobble along the storms of destruction , meditation comes back to our minds and we begin to feel the need to get to know more about it, to try to experience it and benefit from its long recognized benefits.

Here we come to a series of crossroads.

There is not ONE meditation and certainly a lot of practices have little if anything to do with the kind of practice that will not fetter your mind to another train reck in the near future.

So perhaps the first thing to do is to get back to a definition everyone can start with

Meditation is a set of practices which we can learn about and experience , step by step to gain higher focus of awareness .

Different meditation practices are taught in authentic eastern philosophies probably inherited from times immemorial.

So meditation first aim is to allow one to create space around one’s busy mind to be able to observe it, observe how it works, become aware of its interdependency with what we call “reality” . It is further the development of the ability to recognize inner phenomena , what we commonly refer to as “self” so that we can come to a conclusion on the nature of this very “self”

Meditation thus, clarifies the observation and ever deeper understanding and realization of what phenomena truly are and what is the manifestation of what we call “self”

one need also to realize that the purpose of meditation is to finally uncover  one of 2 goals

The first one is mastery in what is described as the mundane

what is the “mundane’? To give it a simple context that can be refined later on , it is basically everything which can be achieved in the realm involving perceived phenomena. In times past there were well recognized levels of mastery which gave access to what we would today consider as extraordinary powers. Even though it is amazingly difficult nowadays to consider what yogis were capable of achieving as they climbed the levels of mastery as remotely possible, we also realize that the witnesses came from such a large base of different traditions with such a consistency that we could accept that this difficulty stems more from our diminished ability to envision human abilities than collective fantasies from millenium gone past.

Exemples would range from mastery over the state of matter to extrasensory abilities such as curiously enough the pioneers of Quantum physics are grappled with at the beginning of the last century and coming back in fashion today with the new wave of Q physicists outside the formal sphere of influence . Think for instance of the “destructive” phenomena which plagued Pauli’s life for decades until his collaboration with Carl Jung brought both of them back to the idea of the Akasha or collective consciousness ( all this is part of my program Let’s rethink Life, where we look in great details at all the lost knowledge and its implication for uncovering a totally different way to imagine and lead your life) . They were by  no means the only scientists becoming aware of the limit of so called science , think of the dilemma which plagued Einstein later years, the conversation between Boehm and Tagore or in a different field studies on the properties of water which earned Luc Montagner a Nobel price . None of those practitioners, lay people, students of various philosophies or scientists would be able to go beyond the narrow confines of todays field of studies and interpretations.

So whether from lore of time gone past or opened minded scientists , we realize that ther is more to what we think we can do and how things work than is commonly taught and accepted . What scientists do with complex mathematical formula today is what ascetic practitioners realized and manifested with their own beings millenium, even centuries ago still . It is thus what is called the supra mundane meditation. its upper limit is what they used to call the pinnacle of what can be manifested but one needs to fully understand that in today’s term, we would still call it supreme achievements within the “matrix”

The second type of meditation takes a definite different path and view from the second level of practice onwards. It is aimed at fully realizing the nature of self and phenomena and did not exist except in a few buddhist schools, at least in known history.  Once again we talk about this a lot more and in greater detail in my 2 years initiative Let’s Rethink Life.

For now what is very useful is that those 2 types of meditation with vastly different aims have an initial level in common  and without mastering that level, nobody will make a realistic choice of where they want to go.

What is that level?

We need a little bit of background to quickly come to the practice side.  And it is this background that ensures that you will be practicing and moving in your meditation in a safe way without running the risk of getting caught up in new fangled concepts waiting to capture the unwary and unguarded practitioner. Here I would like to address the elephant in the room ; We have the habit nowadays to believe that we can do anything we like if we set our minds to it – watch a youtube video or read a book. If that was the case, I would venture that humanity would not be in the state of self destruction it is in today . If previous knowledge can be awaken by meeting a trace of it , it does not mean that you will be able to avoid the numerous pitfalls awaiting on the path.

It is true as well for the amateur plumber changing a tap , all is well as long as the task does not hide a defect in the water supply somewhere or you do not dig out a major duct, but when difficulties which could and should have been discovered by experienced plumber are ignored you could end up literally in deep waters

It is no different for any profession. People need to understand what skills are required and master them Experience of the practice gives rise to the heightened ability to recognize tale tell signs that are only ignored at the student’s peril. Meditation is no different except that it has deeper consequences affecting the very functioning of our psyche because cracks are not visible like a line appearing in a wall badly constructed . Therefore learning meditation from  a Youtube video has both limitations and inherent pitfalls in the long term.  It may be wise to at least have some knowledge of what happens and what can be expected .

This is why authentic Teachers give explanations to go along with the practice. Anyhow for the purpose of introduction, this common meditation level is based on the recognition that our minds are replete with endless discursive thoughts. In simple terms, we neither stop thinking nor are aware of all the thoughts that poison our minds, creating confusion, lack of clarity, dullness, conflicts, heightened emotions and so on .

The first step is therefore to become aware of this constant eruption in our minds and learn to start getting it under control by applying analytical watching of what happens in us. This is not a stage where you are able to subdue thoughts ( which btw is probably not required in the way usually described) but the one in which you give yourself the space to realize how busy your mind is and how much this business gives rise to constant confusion, preventing you to spend time noticing your environment, the trail of cause and effect, the connections between events .

The background deafening noise of daily life removes the possibility to become clear on what happens in our own life and continuously shrinks our ability and wish to remove the chaos.

When this step is practiced with a little bit of explanations , the experience is often heightened and questions are easier to resolve when someone is there to answer them