16 minute read
Chapter 3: Improving and Deepening Your Meditation Practice
chapter 1
The Nonmeditative and Meditative Perspectives
After exploring the fifteen purposes of meditation, it is time to discuss what meditation actu ally is. I am going to dedicate two chapters to understanding the nature of meditation. There are plenty of techniques out there, but the specific practices don’t necessarily help answer the question of what meditation is. If someone asked you, “So what is meditation?” would you reply, “Focus on the air that enters your nostrils,” or “Dance wildly until your mind loses all boundaries,” or “Sit motionlessly, feeling like you are a mountain”?
It is essential to first understand what meditation is as a principle, not just where it can take us. Do we really know what meditation is? In fact, I would recommend asking yourself this question from time to time, because too often when we try to describe our meditative experience, we simply say, “I felt extremely relaxed,” or, “There was a vast space inside me.” But what really happens in that powerful moment of closing our eyes? Since the world of meditation is all about increasing our awareness, the more you become aware of what exactly is taking place, the deeper the meditation goes.
What is important to understand about meditation is that it is, first and foremost, a state of mind, a perspective. Generally (this is a gross generalization, just for the sake of conveying this topic), the mind has two different perspectives, two ways in which we can look at our lives, the world, and ourselves: the first is our ordinary perception—the nonmeditative perspective, which is our constant experience—and the other is the meditative perspective. These perspectives have absolutely no connection to one another; it is as if they are two different worlds, or two different experiences of reality. The whole idea of meditation is to be able to shift to the second,
meditative perspective in no time. In fact, if you are able to make this shift at will, at any point in time, that is an indication of your degree of inner freedom.
The interesting thing is that in the meditative perspective, everything that is real in ordinary perception is gone: it disappears just like that, with the snap of a finger. This makes it like magic; you close your eyes and suddenly shift to another part of your mind. It is an out-of-this-world experience, really. Think of your head as having two regions, one at the front, where ordinary perception is, and the other at the back, where the other perception comes from. By making a slight shift from one region to another, all of a sudden the world as we know it disappears. That is how powerful meditation is.
Now I am going to describe several elements of our ordinary perception and how they transform as soon as we move to the meditative perspective. It is easier to understand what the meditative perspective is by first defining what it is not. Feel free to add more elements from your own direct experience. This is just a basic overview, which is designed to evoke the feeling in us.
Before describing each of the elements, I will invite you to close your eyes for a moment. This makes the moment of decision to enter the reality of meditation more conscious. So, let’s close our eyes for just a moment.
Time and Timelessness
The first thing that characterizes nonmeditative, ordinary perception is the feeling of time. Time is probably the most meaningful element: as soon as we open our eyes, we are filled with the sense of time—even without clocks and without a conscious awareness of the movement of time. Time implies what was, what is, and what is going to happen. There is a feeling of moments ticking by, as if one moment follows another. There is a sense of something that keeps building up, a feeling of a brick-by-brick movement that obviously also creates a sense of moving, even rushing, forward, as if we are marching toward a certain destination. Because life is experienced as rushing forward, it must inevitably require constant effort. For this reason, ordinary perception involves a sense of effort, the feeling that life is a constant demand and that we must always be on our toes, in a state of unhealthy concentration.
This also gives us the sense of becoming. Becoming is a crucial element: it means that our sense of identity depends on time. We experience ourselves as something that was, that is, and that will be; a being that is also progressing, improving, and hopefully changing for the better, with great hopes for the future driven by a sense of incompleteness. For example, right now, I don’t know what meditation is, but I hope to know what it is. I hope to become a medita-
tion master, and consequently become this and that. Becoming means something that I am not already, but that with every moment, I am getting closer to.
The ordinary perception, then, is that our sense of identity is deeply connected with time. There is a linear perception, a conviction that this is how life is: a straight line forward. There is just one direction, and we are moving toward it.
Now, what happens when we close our eyes?
If you become aware of what actually takes place, you will realize that the sense of time disappears. It is like you’re cutting out the sense of movement. You do not participate anymore. You are thrown out of time, and with it, all sense of action and effort becomes utterly irrelevant. You might think at that moment, It feels like time has stopped. But this is not what has happened—saying that time has stopped implies that it exists generally. The right understanding is that time is nothing more than a mental perception. It is a perspective that you can either have or be free of at any given moment.
Becoming and Being
When we close our eyes and there is no more movement and we are no longer a part of the big project of life, we move from becoming to being. Understanding the difference between becoming and being is perhaps the most fundamental insight into the nature of the meditative state. Being means that there is a sense of pure existence that cannot change or evolve, and therefore cannot become more complete than it already is. In being, my identity is unchanging. Becoming, however, is exactly the opposite: identity depends on evolution.
This is also the difference between now and time. Even the present is a part of time, since it is only a part of the line that includes yesterday, today, and the tomorrow already ingrained in today. The now, on the other hand, has nothing to do with time. This is why the words now and being are deeply connected.
As soon as there is this sense of being, there is also a feeling of a spreading of perception: instead of the ordinary movement forward, there is a feeling of something that expands in many directions, with no one clear pathway. It feels as if life is opening up; life in the now is opening up.
With this in mind, we are going to close our eyes for a moment. But before you do this, pay attention and notice what is happening. Right now, your eyes are open, we are in communication, and you may feel that you are learning, in the process of becoming an improved you. As you close your eyes, realize that by doing this and choosing to enter the meditative perspective, you are disrupting time and becoming, enjoying this complementary half, the very opposite. Of course, these two perspectives don’t compete; it is not that one is better than the other. They complete one another, so perceive them as a circle. Ideally, we are meant to have both, and to possess the capacity to choose between the two whenever we feel like it. When, for example,
we are tired of becoming, we can immediately close our eyes and, in a second, we can disrupt this movement.
Moods and Equilibrium
Moods are a strong characteristic of ordinary perception. When we are under the reign of this perception, we are susceptible to mood dependency. This means that our moods completely depend on external triggers. There are ceaseless ups and downs, including brief, painful moments of failure and pleasant moments of success throughout each day. We constantly crash or feel elevated. For a moment, we are full of optimism, and a second later we feel completely disappointed and frustrated and that life is no good. It feels like we are on what I call an eternal seesaw: going up and down, up and down, all day long.
In reality, this eternal seesaw is not the result of the events that take place in our lives, but of our thoughts about these events, the way we interpret these events, and the fact that we believe our reactive thoughts. But we are rarely aware of this truth. As a result, we constantly try to improve our mood and to avoid negative situations that might bring us to a bad mood.
In the meditative perspective, we can only have one mood. This is because we move away at once from external triggers, and we are no longer a part of life’s ups and downs. It is as if the moment of meditation conveys a statement: “Now I am taking a break from this constant fluctuation. I know that whatever change of mood I might be experiencing can only be the result of me believing a certain thought that then makes me feel this way or that way.” With this statement in mind, it becomes clear to me that I am able to control my mood.
Feel how, now that you are about to close your eyes again, you are actually deciding to discontinue your connection to external triggers for a moment.
Bodilessness and Bodily Awareness
Let’s take a look at another element that characterizes ordinary perception: a lack of bodily presence.
This may sound surprising, since we tend to believe that when we are in the ordinary perspective, we are completely identified with our body. In fact, we are identified with the idea of having a body, but are we in the body? Far from it. We are actually stuck in our head, and our presence doesn’t permeate the body at all.
When we do feel the body in ordinary perception, it is mostly through either intense pleasures or disturbing physical sensations. When there is a certain physical problem, signaled by the presence of pain, we become conscious of the existence of the body. But even this is not bodily awareness; it is more like a sense of being disturbed and prevented from doing what we want to do.
We can say that in ordinary perception, it is as if we drag our body with us from here to there: as long as it doesn’t complain, we don’t even notice the full presence of the body. We certainly don’t breathe into this physical presence, and we don’t inhabit it. At the same time, we experience heaviness and density. This is a strange phenomenon, since you might think that in not feeling that you have a body, you should actually feel light, airy, and spacious. In actuality, it is the very opposite: the idea of possessing a body makes us feel heavy, but without enjoying its physical presence at all.
On the other hand, when we change this perspective in meditation, we are finally, for the first time, fully present in the body. We move from head to body.
People often assume that the physical body is not spiritual. But the only thing that can keep us in a nonspiritual state is our thinking. The body can actually be our direct link to reality, more so than anything else.
So when I move from the head, begin to breathe, and allow my being to spread throughout the body, this immediately leads me to spaciousness and airiness. In no time, I feel as if I have been filled with space, and I lose any familiar sense of heaviness. How can this be? This is the amazing paradox: if you are fully present in the body, its subtle spiritual presence arises, and you realize that it is truly made of space.
More than that, in the ordinary perspective, we are aware only of material reality: it appears as if all that exists is made of dense matter. The universe can only be this hard reality of flesh and blood, machines and substances. But as soon as we close our eyes, we reveal a far subtler world, a world consisting of vibration and energy. All of a sudden, you can come into contact with the dance of life inside you, with life as a flow rather than a rigid reality.
With this conscious view of the body in mind, let’s briefly close our eyes. What is happening when we choose the meditative perspective?
Personality and Subjectivity
We gradually come to realize that when we close our eyes, we detach from time, becoming, and the eternal seesaw of our mood swings. We fill our body with presence and begin to feel that being present in the body is actually quite spacious. And we learn that by closing our eyes, we can move our attention away from phenomena and personality.
Usually, our attention is focused on the issues that occupy our personality, all the objects of the world with which it is engaged. This creates in us not only the feeling of time, but also of space.
When we close our eyes, it’s like saying, “Now I’m not dealing with my personality and with its complex relationship with the visible world. I am not dealing with the world of objects at all.” Just feel how powerful this can be—by making such a declaration, the moment I close my
eyes I imply that in an instant, all of this disappears and the sense of being located in the world is no more. When I am no longer in the world, I am not invested in all those things that ordinarily occupy my personality. After all, my personality is made of constant interactions with the outer world.
So, as I close my eyes, I actually say, “Goodbye! It was nice to meet you, and it will be nice to meet you again. But until then, in this shift of perspective, I am no longer my name or my person. I am not in the world and I don’t need to interact with it. I can immediately turn all of that off.”
Feel how you can turn it off. You may discover that it is much easier than you think. In fact, it is the easiest thing in the world. Because we have these two perspectives available to us all the time, we can choose to leap into the meditative perspective whenever we want.
In ordinary perception, we also believe that “I am my thoughts, feelings, and actions.” This is directly related to our identity as a personality in time and space: we feel that we are completely identified with our thoughts, with our feelings, and with what we do. We cannot separate ourselves from this. There is absolutely no existence for us without it.
In the meditative perspective, it is as if all of a sudden, we are undefined. We just are. We realize that we don’t need these thoughts in order to be.
Craving and Completeness
One more element is craving and fake need. When we are immersed in ordinary perception, we experience craving. Many things need to happen to satisfy us: we need this, we need that; we want this, we want that. We are intensely hopeful that certain things will come in our life, and that they will come exactly when we need them to come. It is very much like feeling continuously thirsty—a sense of constant dissatisfaction.
All these elements are deeply connected: time, becoming, and dissatisfaction. If my identity depends on time, it is unavoidably incomplete. It always needs something to happen and it is always on the run. But when I close my eyes and shift to the meditative perspective, I don’t even remember what I needed. This conviction that I need certain things so badly can disappear in a moment. It simply becomes irrelevant, because I immediately cut off the connection with all that. Instead, there is a sense of wholeness and completeness.
Another characteristic of the nonmeditative perception is scatteredness: we are all over the place. There are so many different things that draw our attention, and this is naturally enhanced nowadays with the intense stimuli of social media and technological availability. We do so many things, think so many thoughts, and have so many contradictory voices inside us.
But as soon as we close our eyes, we become unified. It is as if the many have become one simple being. Instead of countless and diverse thoughts and impressions, there is only one state, just as there is only one mood.
When we begin to realize that we can make the world disappear in the blink of an eye, it is the beginning of freedom and real choice. So let’s close our eyes for one more moment and simply allow this to happen of its own accord.
Body, Mind & Spirit / Meditation
“Think of it as your personal meditation bible, filled with practice options that would fit any mood, any situation, any moment in your life.” —Dr. Itai Ivtzan, author of Awareness Is Freedom
Free Your Awareness and Awaken Your Energies with 35 Worldwide Meditation Techniques
Enjoy a healthier and happier life with reduced stress, decreased pain, improved sleep, and lengthened attention span. The key to these and other benefits? Meditation. Appropriate for practitioners of all skill levels, this new addition to Llewellyn’s Complete Book Series features thirty-five fundamental meditation techniques from traditions around the globe, including one unique method of author Shai Tubali’s own creation. These include:
Zazen (Classical Zen Meditation) • Qigong Standing Meditation Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Body Scan • Taoist Inner Smile • Osho’s Mystic Rose Japanese Forest Bathing • Sufi Whirling • Gurdjieff’s “I Am” Meditation Christian Prayer of the Heart • Islamic Dhikr • Sikh Kirtan Kriya Jewish Hitbodedut • Tantric Hindu Kriya Yoga • Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen
Shai presents each technique with its historical background, cultural context, potential benefits, and clear instructions for practicing it at home in a non-appropriative way. You will explore the fifteen purposes of meditation and the role of chakras. You will also learn how to align your mind and body, open your heart to love and compassion, use the hidden powers of sound, and more. This comprehensive, easy-to-understand guide introduces the magic of meditation in a way that is experiential, practical, and deeply researched. Every page encourages you to take your journey into the world of meditation further than ever before.
© Carolin Saage Shai Tubali is an international speaker, author, and spiritual teacher. He is one of Europe’s leading authorities on chakras and the subtle body and has published twelve books. Shai also serves as an academic researcher at the University of Leeds and has developed several meditation-based therapeutic methods. Visit him at ShaiTubali.com.
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www.Llewellyn.com $27.99 US
