Radical meditation – (1) Three levels of meditation

There are many books and websites about meditation. Unfortunately few of them realise its full potential to transform your life. Mostly, they describe meditation as a source of calmness or or useful and enjoyable experiences. But that is only the foothills. This series of pages is an attempt to explain how sitting quietly for a few minutes a day relates to the radical transformation of your whole life.

I want to start with an up-front declaration.  I’ve never seen anyone else who write about meditation say this – you read it here for the first time!

It’s this:  I am not enlightened (=awakened), and so I also do not realise the full potential of meditation. You can only really learn about meditation from the writings of someone awakened. But I certainly have enough experience and enough illuminating glimpses of the beyond to write with authority. When I rely on the experience of others, I’ll say so.

Radical meditation, relaxation meditation

Many of the things I read about meditation, for example that it lowers blood pressure, leave me saying to myself “That’s not meditation at all.” But I don’t want to get turn “meditation” into a tug-of-love word between different schools of thought.  So let me outline three approximate, simplified levels of meditation: radical meditation, mindfulness meditation, relaxation meditation.

IMPORTANT NOTE! Over several thousand years, the foremost enlightened sages  have written about meditation with bewildering subtlety.  All I am trying to do here is one single thing: to make clear that there is far more to meditation than most blogs and books explain.

Relaxation meditation is the easiest to describe. Sit quietly and count your breaths systematically. Most people will first feel bored and impatient, but after only a few minutes, you are likely to feel a quietness and a relaxation kicking in. This relaxation is a physiological response, “The relaxation response” famously studied be Herbert Benson (www.relaxationresponse.org). It comes from focussing the mind on one object. The rushing everday mind somehow gets switched off in a physiological way.

This relaxed state is not in and of itself meditation. It is equally relaxation, a beginning of meditation, or a beginning of (self-)hypnosis. If you do nothing, it’s relaxation; if you do mind games to achieve a result in the world, it is hypnosis; if you use it to scientifically enquire for your innermost self, it is meditation.

Also, no activity – sitting and counting the breaths, or watching a candle, or chanting a mantra, or dancing, is in itself meditation. These are better called meditation exercises.

Mindfulness meditation. Imagine this: You are walking slowly across a big lawn, with your eyes closed. (But safely!). As you walk, you are paying attention to the sole of your left foot. You notice that as you put your foot down and lift it up, the sensation of pressure on the sole comes and goes .  So there is the sensation of pressure, which comes and goes; and there is you, noticing the sensation (or witnessing it or being mindful of it.)  This awareness is meditation. And in a way that’s all there is to meditation. It is just being aware that there is an experience, and there is something in you which is aware of that experience. If you drink a cup of tea  being fully alert and present and alert in the experience, noting the taste of the tea and noticing yourself drinking it, that too is meditation.

So (1) you are not the experience, you are that which notices the experience. (2) the experience comes and goes, but you remain.

Or suppose you are angry. One moment, you were not angry. Then something happened, and anger arises. You storm and rage, and you plan in your mind to attack someone.  In that moment you think “I am angry,” and there is no distance between you and the anger. But most likely, after a while you start to cool down.  At that point, you feel the anger still, but you are consciously choosing not to act on it. That moment – when you still feel the anger but choose not to act on it – is a moment of spontaneous mindfulness,  of  spontaneous meditation.

Some people like to hold on to the anger, and for them, this moment never comes. But if you don’t like to be angry all the time, you can assist that moment of cooling down to happen. One way is to let yourself feel the anger, but instead of doing anything about it, you sit, and count your breaths. So you’re sitting there, and you are boiling over, and your mind keeps running off on fantasies about what you are going to do to the other person. But you bring your attention away from the mind and into the present and the breathing. You let yourself feel the anger without acting on it.  The point will come where you wrest your attention back from the anger, and let it go. This is cultivated mindfulness or, in simple language, just meditation.

Again (1) You are not the anger, you are that which experiences the anger. (2) the anger comes and goes, but you remain.

Finally suppose you eat too many cakes. Consider a thought such as “I must eat another cream cake,”  and suppose that one day instead of acting on the thought, you sit and just watch the thought mindfully. Again, it helps to count your breaths. The breathing is always in the present, never in the past of the future, so remaining in contact with your breath helps you to stay in the present and separate from fantasy cream cakes, which are always in the past or the future.

It may be hard work to sit and let the though of the cream cake be there without acting on it, but if you can, then a point will come where the thought dissipates and we don’t want the cake any more. Again (1) you are not the thought of wanting a cream cake, you are that which experiences the thought. (2) The thought comes and goes, but you remain.

Mindfulness meditation as it is commonly understood in the West, consists of  this kind of  distancing yourself from everyday thoughts, moods and feelings.

Radical meditation. Let’s imagine that your husband or your wife dies. You are very sad; waves of grief flow through you. And you you watch the grief, which means feeling it without either pushing it away in denial or holding it tight in self-pity, it to flows in and out of your consciousness and you are left at peace. These too are moments of  mindfulness: they may happen spontaneously, or we may help ourselves to have them with or without the aid of meditation exercises.

But there’s more: at some point, the thought that “I am John’s husband” or “I am Mary’s wife” also separates from you. One moment – often a very painful moment indeed – you were attached to the person you have lost, the next moment the attachment is gone. The idea that you are someone’s wife or husband is also just a thought. Unlike being angry or eating another cream cake, it is a thought we want to keep. But it’s still just a thought.

Radical meditation consists of applying the understandings that
(1) I am not the thought (feeling, mood, experience), I am that which experiences it
(2) the thoughts etc come and go, but I remain
to every possible area of life.

For example, all the following are JUST THOUGHTS:

— I am Christian / Catholic / Protestant / Jewish / Mohammedan

— I am John’s wife / Mary’s husband

— religious beliefs which are not your own direct experience

— I am working class / middle class etc

— I am a carpenter / dancer / accountant / therapist

— I should do what others want me to do instead of what I want

— I am English / German / American / Chinese

— the deep primal emotions which shape our lives and which are often so buried that we cannot easily even know what they are.

— our defenses and lifelong behaviour patterns.

Radical meditation consists of actively seeking these out and mindfully meditating on them until we understand that we are not identified with these roles, masks, defences, illusions and primal emotions. There was a time in our lives, long ago, before any these existed in us; there will be a time after they are gone. Meditation consists of deepening the sense of presence, of the consciousness which the experiences float in and out of.

Meditation doesn’t stop you from being a carpenter / a dancer / English / working class etc etc. These are facts in your life. All that drops is the identification. You have more a feeling that these are roles you are playing, not something that you ARE.

In the same way, meditation does not mean that John and Mary will stop loving each other as wife or husband. If there is love there, the meditation will make that deeper and the relationship closer. But if there is no love there, then all that is keeing them together is identification, attachment, the thought that “this is who I am – John’s wife, Mary’s husband.” In that case, radical meditation will bring an end to the relationship.

This is of course what happens in many relationships without the aid of meditation exercises. Radical meditation is the attitude to life to actively seek out and challenge all sorts of thoughts, masks, primal emotions and so on. It is systematically enquiring “Who am I? Who is the one that all these experiences are happening to?”

This is a major task! It means taking life as an adventure into the unknown – who am I if I am not a Christian / Jain / Mohammedan? Who am I if I am not the games and defenses I’ve used all my life? Who is the one inside me who experiences love, pain, joy? Who is the one who experiences Englishness, or being a therapist?

As we witness, or are mindful of, all these things, slowly the sky of the mind begins to clear.  We feel a kind of inner spaciousness and we are able to pull our attention in and in and in inside ourselves. All those things – roles, nationalities, identifications of all sorts seem less and less part of ourselves, more and more peripheral. We start to experience a pleasure that comes from just being, a  contentment and joyfulness which arises from the very centre, and is not dependent on any outward events.

The enlightened ones say that in the end everything whatever is just a thought, including our bodies. They teach that, as with mindful awareness we can realise that as we are not identified with anger or grief, we can also know that we are not identified with the body itself. Though I do not experience this as more than momentary flashes of insight (and very wonderful they are), I’m sure it is true.

Thus meditation inevitably connects  with  things normally thought to be the realm of religion. This is offputting to many people, though without any need. There is no room in meditation for any religious beliefs, because these too are just thoughts. So there is no need to associate meditation with religion as religion is commonly understood. But meditation is the enquiry on the deepest level of “Who am I? Who is the one who experiences fear, joy, love, pain? Who is the one who experiences life and death?” This undoubtedly is spiritual in a certain sense of that word.

I’ll explain more in future posts.