How to Meditate Honestly
When we learn how to meditate most of us assume that meditation is like anything else, a ‘thing’ to be learned and mastered. We assume there are postures, positions, techniques, and typical connotations of right and wrong methods. All of these things however could not be in further contradiction to the truth of meditation.
When learning how to meditate, we are learning about ourselves, not something external. Meditation at its core is honest awareness of the self, as well as an honest relationship with ‘experience’. What I mean by honest is simply experience lacking judgment. Judgment is something we bring to nearly every moment of our adult lives. This tastes good. I feel uncomfortable. That is noisy. This is a pleasurable film.
We rarely observe things simply as they are, independently of the way we think and feel about them. And it is this thinking and feeling about things that cause us heaps of discontent in our lives. Our thoughts and feelings are conditioned responses or logical operations on past experience. Past experience is dead, and to the extent that it is so, it inhibits honest experience of the present. It is like judging a new acquaintance because they bear some resemblance to someone you knew from the past. We could be correct in our judgment, but are most likely not. Either way, we are not looking at the person in front of us, but a figment of the past.
I am not advocating we have a psychological disconnect with our own memory or history. But I am suggesting that our identities and associations cause us pain and suffering. And if we are able to see those experiences as they are and were, fleeting moments of beauty or pain, without associating them with personal values or judgments, then we open the door to genuine meditation. And we allow the beauty of life to manifest.
So to get back to the ‘how to’ part of how to meditate, self awareness is the beginning and the end. We need to look at ourselves within our environment. We need to taste our food, listen to sounds, watch our own thoughts, and be ever mindful of immediate experiences as well as our own judgments of them creeping in. When committed to self awareness we gradually begin to deconstruct these identities we’ve spent a lifetime building, identities which separate us from truth and reality. Perception of this causes its dissolution, and the result is unconditioned meditation, unconditioned and free thinking.
Simple exercises for meditation are aimed at removing distractions and creating sustainable relaxation and comfort in ones posture for the sake of concentration. But these things are not meditation. True meditation can happen anywhere, any time. One can meditate while eating, in battle, in a brothel, and even at work. The human mind can realize beauty and life whenever it is allowed to function and experience without selfish judgment.
This kind of self awareness requires a commitment to the truth that extends well beyond a few minutes of quiet time throughout the day. One needs to be committed to asking why? Why did I just say that? Why did I do that? Why are my legs crossed at this moment in time? Why did I not make eye contact with that beggar? Why are my arms crossed while talking with my mother? And when we begin to see the conditioned elements in our behavior, the door opens for the unconditioned. We can relearn natural and passionate behavior. Innocence will return to our lives, and with it energy and compassion.
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