The approach to truth has to be a subtle one, just as the approach to peace or joy. You can’t sledge hammer or charge your way to any of these.
Then again, you might realize that the ‘journey’ is never a journey in time or space but a shift in the state of consciousness, from the consciousness of fear and thought-driven activity to the consciousness of love and freedom.
In fact, you realize that you are never not in the consciousness of truth/love/peace/joy. You always are. It is your natural state. But you are not attentive to it for all the clamor and cacophony of conditioned existence in whose grip your attention is locked..
The journey then is a journey IN truth, IN love, IN peace, IN joy rather than from fear to freedom.
If you do not understand this, you are likely to spend your life trying to make an impossible journey.
Marcel Proust said:
The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
T S Elliot said:
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
But knowing that you’re going to end up where you began or that you will ‘know the place for the first time’ is not much consolation for those of us who are eager to ‘see with new eyes’. We want those new eyes NOW. We don’t want to wait a lifetime. Heck, we don’t want to wait. Period.
The good news is that there is no need to wait. Enlightenment happens in an instant and can happen now. Many people have been enlightened but few have remained enlightened 🙂
You see,
Enlightenment occurs as a moment of unmistakable awareness. If we maintained such an awareness, we would remain enlightened as we believe the Buddha did.
But unlike the Buddha, the rest of us fall in and out of awareness and remain mostly out of awareness.
The moments of awareness in which we glimpse truth fleetingly are rare and by most accounts, ‘random’.
They may give us a momentary and sometimes mind-blowing high, an intense experience of ecstasy or sublime peace or indescribable bliss or all of these and more but they last so very briefly. Too brief for most of us whose conditioning instructs us to doubt these non-physical, ‘supernatural’ or ‘mystical’ experiences, these unmeasurable experiences, these experiences that we cannot seem to repeat on demand.
So we dismiss them. We relegate them to the pile of ‘inexplicable and possibly imaginary, unreal, bizarre, fluke, freaky’ experiences that we and others like us might have gathered over time. We issue ourselves a mental warning against such tricks of the mind and the conditions in which we may have experienced them.
The long and short of all this is that we don’t take our very real encounters with truth, with the peace that surpasses all understanding, with spontaneous joy, seriously. And as long as we don’t, we don’t believe that we can ever experience all of this in a repeatable and sustainable way. What is more, we are wary of anyone who claims they can or even expresses a desire to.
But not only can we encounter truth in a repeatable and sustainable way, it is critical that we desire to, for without the desire, even though lacking belief, we have nothing. We must want it. And we must want it enough.
Now, ‘wanting something enough’ is not something that demands effort. If anything, effort gets in the way.
What ‘wanting something enough’ requires is sincerity and simplicity of heart.
What this means is that we must be prepared to put aside our ideas, our concepts, our ‘knowledge’, our beliefs, our expectations and instead keep our minds and hearts empty and open.
Impossible, you say. Well, actually no. It is very possible but it does take practice. More than anything else, however, it requires your desire and willingness to put aside all this mental content that you have acquired. If you have such willingness, you’re half way there.
But let me warn you. It’s a willingness that you may need to renew again and again, possibly every time you sit down to practice.
So what is the practice?
The practice of meditation
Well, you begin by observing your breath, your natural breathing. You don’t analyse it or change it or critique it. You merely observe it as you might leaves floating down a stream.
As you do this, the bulk of your thoughts and other mental preoccupations will start to settle. However, as you do this, you will also start to notice your thoughts. ‘Notice’ rather than be caught up in them.
Of course the tendency to get caught up in your thoughts is strong, very strong indeed. So, you use your breath to anchor your mind. Instead of getting caught up in the thought (or feeling), you return to your breath (from which your attention was drawn).
You resume watching your breath. Again, after a breath or two, sometimes even a fraction of an in-breath, your attention is once again pulled away by another thought, another feeling, a sensation.
If you’re not vigilant (something that takes practice), you’ll be sucked into the content of that thought, feeling, sensation and their stories, histories and projections into the future. Don’t be surprised if you get lost in this for several minutes and even the entire duration of your practice!
When finally you regain your awareness that your mind has drifted away from the breath, you can bring your mind back to the breath. And this is what you keep doing again and again and again for the entire practice. Indeed, this is the practice.
Notice, nowhere did I say that the practice is about stopping your thoughts or stopping thinking.
If I had a dollar for each time someone has told me that this is what they understand meditation practice to be…
So this is the process and practice of meditation. In the early stages of practice, the mind will swing wildly from very brief moments of breath awareness to much longer periods of thought/feeling/sensation/engagement. Over time, however, this ratio will begin to shift.
But please be patient, the shift may be minute indeed even over years of practice. However, small as it may be, its benefits are ENORMOUS.
How meditation works
You see, every time you are able to take your attention away from the thoughts/feelings/sensations occupying your mind AND you are able to do this lovingly, WITHOUT self-judgement or self-chastisement, you are practising acceptance. This is something essential in all your life relationships, with yourself and with others.
HEALING Every moment you spend on your breath and in this state of acceptance, you are allowing your bodymind to de-stress and heal (be in its natural state of wholeness).
AVOIDING/RESISTING Every time you are able to allow any thought or feeling or sensation to arise in your mind, you are practicing non-aversion and in the process, becoming less and less fearful, for no matter what awful or unpleasant thought or feeling it is, you are able to acknowledge it without running away from it or pushing it away.
CRAVING/ATTACHING In the same way, no matter what exciting, attractive, desirous thought or feeling arises, you are equally able to acknowledge it without getting sucked into it. In other words, you are practising non-attachment and in this way, freeing yourself from the stranglehold of cravings.
FLOW Every time you become aware of a thought or aware of your breath, you are practicing becoming more and more present, more and more in the here and now, more and more in the dynamic and eternal flow of Universal energy/love and all the power and possibility therein.
UNCONDITIONAL SELF Every moment that you are free from thought – in the gap between thoughts, you are experiencing your true, unconditioned, unscripted nature.
TRUE FEARLESS SELF Every time you experience your unconditioned, unscripted nature, you experience ultimate truth and this is a powerful base from which to live your life, from which to discern what is true and valid in your walking, conditioned life and what isn’t.
It is this unshakeable base of truth that shines light on all the darkness and fears that you experience in your conditioned life.
You experience in an unmistakable way where true power, peace, joy and possibility really lie – nowhere outside you but within you.
RECALIBRATE Every time you sit in practice, you reset and strengthen your ‘base line’ i.e. your default mental and emotional state. This is hugely important because your default mental and emotional state becomes recalibrated to a much more peaceful and quietly joyous position.
FULFILMENT Every time you sit in practice, you widen the gap between thoughts/feelings/sensations and as your mind-body becomes more and more transformed in this way, clearing out much of the noise as it were, you are able to experience the goodness of life ever more fully. It’s like tasting a piece of salmon – If you want to taste it purely, you want to have it on its own rather than in between slices of bread and other ingredients.
These are just some of the ways in which the practice of meditation, which is the practice of sitting in truth, benefits you. As you can see, this is a gentle, softly, softly approach, rather than a sledge hammer, forward charge approach.
You cannot hunt down the gap between thoughts and it should not be your goal. It is not a sitting target waiting for your arrival. Rather, you focus on observing your thoughts and as you do, the gap is revealed.
But even when you don’t encounter the gap, there are many benefits you gain. In fact, it is advisable that you don’t approach meditation with the intention of finding the gap. It’s far better to enter it with the intention of just observing your breath, remaining vigilant in a calm and joyous way and being accepting of everything that you experience during your practice.. (Can you see how this skill might apply to the rest of your life?)
This in itself causes a shift in your state of consciousness, from one steeped in conditioning and all its fears, anxieties, demands and dependencies to one that is free of everything known and experienced in the conditioned state.
But be aware, this does not mean that you shift into denial of reality. On the contrary, it is about encountering reality for the first time. It is about arriving where you started and knowing the place for the first time or seeing it with new eyes.
Now, go practice!
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