Meditation

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This is one of the most common myths about meditation. People think that meditation consists of sitting still, possibly in the buddha posture, unmoving.

Not even in the sightest is this true.

Many meditation exercises involve sitting still. But meditation is not an activity and it is not an experience. Meditation is the existential realisation that the consciousness which is aware of anger, pain, fear, love, joy, gratitude is separate from any and all of these experiences.

So suppose you are angry. If you storm and rant and rage and plan revenge, then you are not in meditation. If you sit and keep very still, but continue to rage internally, you are not in meditation. If you suppress the anger with premature forgiveness, you are not in meditation. (Some schools of meditation unwittingly encourage this). If you sit and succeed in detatching yourself from the anger, then of course you are in meditation.

But suppose that you first put a big cushion on the floor. And (don’t hurt yourself) you attack the cushion with all your might, beating it, screaming, shouting, hitting. Then if you remain present and aware as you do that, you are in meditation as you do it. Any action carried out with awareness carries the quality of meditation.

If you then sit silently and just allow your experiences to be as they are, quite likely you will feel a deeper calmness and peach than if you had not done the anger release. This is meditation not because it is calm and peaceful, but because you are present and aware.

These are two different qualities  of meditation. Being aware during anger release or other action is a meditation of the outgoing or male or yang energy. Being aware in silence is meditation of the receptive or female or yin energy.  But they are both equally meditation.

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The other day I picked up  in the Oxfam bookshop a book called “The meditator’s handbook” by David Fontana, a university professor in the UK. It is billed as “The Meditator’s Handbook: a complete guide to eastern and western techniques” of meditation. Fontana has “studied Eastern and Western religions, meditation, dreams [etc] for over 25 years” with a number of different meditation teachers.

But reading the book, it appears Fontana has thought about meditation a lot, but if his life has been transformed by meditation (transformed, not just improved) that doesn’t come across. I struggled to have any sense that Fontana really understands the power of meditation to radically transform our lives. He seems stuck at understanding meditation as a source of enjoyable and useful experiences.  Sadly this is very common in books about meditation written by Westerners.

So I’ve started a series of posts on what I term radical meditation. You can find these under “Pages” on the right. If you have any questions, please post them as comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

As I say in one of the pages, I’m not enlightened, so there’s very much that I also can’t speak of from experience, or I’ve only had illuminating insights that aren’t yet a permanent part of my life. But at least I am aware of that and honest about it;  so many meditation writers don’t seem to be. And there is certainly much that I can speak of with authority. Where I rely on the teaching or experience of others about meditation, I will say so.

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