9 Meditation
Meditation is about healing your life.
To be healed you must first discover your wounds.
Once you are healed your life will be holy.
Meditation is the art of being both totally relaxed and completely alert.
All your life you were either one or the other, now you must find out how to be both.
Only a still mind can see clearly, and only an alert mind can see deeply.
Meditation initially sees the rise into self-consciousness.
Any meditation that doesn’t bring about self-consciousness would be better called suppression.
Without self-consciousness you will remain a victim of the self.
When you start to understand why you act, then the passage has begun.
When there is no control the unconscious starts to reveal itself.
It is the controller who maintains the unconscious, for he is afraid of losing control.
Only when the unconscious rises into consciousness can you be free of it.
To listen to something that is very quiet like the murmurings of the unconscious, you must be completely attentive.
When sitting in meditation you should just sit and watch – everything you need to know will become apparent once you stop moving away from it.
When you try to achieve something it is the self that moves, distorting reality as it does so.
As long as there is control you will see only partially.
When thought is just thought and not ‘my’ thought, then where is the problem?
Meditation is attention to the totality of thought and sensation.
The wider your attention, the broader the understanding.
You must be very alert for the truth often arises in the most unexpected places.
When you are attentive to the arising and falling away of thought and sensation without reaction there is no centre.
It is being caught in reaction that creates the centre and thereby the self.
Why is it easy to be objective in regard to sensation and not to thought? If you look closely you will see that you cannot control either.
Total attention breaks the link between action and reaction.
Reaction is a product of the unconscious mind.
When you are totally attentive, to the inside and the outside, there is no reaction that escapes notice, and then it is not reaction any more.
To see clearly conflict must come to an end.
If you have conflict you will also have double vision.
Conflict dissipates energy and prevents you giving anything your complete attention.
What conflict creates is simply further conflict.
Silence which is the result of control – and therefore conflict – is not silence at all.
Meditation which is total attention is free of conflict.
To be at one with oneself and with the other – that is what I call meditation.
When you are attentive to the other, then you are free of your self.
The more attentive you are the more there is to attend to.
Attention arises out of interest.
Even by force you will not be attentive to what doesn’t interest you.
When there is interest then attention arises in a most natural way,
Meditation is about being attentive to the newness of life.
Meditation means being fully present as each moment unfolds.
Meditation increases sensitivity to the point where you are able to see the new as new.
The first thing you must learn is how to pay attention.
All your life you have been learning how to be inattentive, now how to attend?
As attention is to the moment, it can never be acquired.
If you are attentive you will be learning at all times.
Meditation is not a searching after truth, rather it is about being present when truth arises.
What you seek is only a projection, the danger is you may find it too.
You must search for only what is absent, but when the searching comes to an end then the truth is no longer absent.
Meditation is a negative process of seeing and discarding whatever is false.
In meditation do not try to think, just be aware of thought.
He who tries to think through a problem – it is he who is the creator of the problem.
What you think is nowhere near as important as what your relationship to thought is.
When you first sit in meditation the stark reality is that you see that the mind is in a state of conflict and confusion; this in itself would be enough to let go of the self if it wasn’t evaded.
Comparison is conflict; wanting more is conflict; image-making is conflict.
The self can continue only by reaching out to an unreal tomorrow.
But of course avoiding conflict cannot overcome it.
Conflict becomes apparent in two ways: through suffering, and through meditation.
Suffering often brings about silence, true – but you flee from both, don’t you?
Conflict there is: will you escape from it, or confront it?
If you don’t confront it, be sure that in the end it will confront you.
The gap between ideology and reality is revealed in meditation.
Your ideology is what you would like to appear to be; reality is what you are.
All your life you said one thing and did another – why didn’t you notice it?
To see the disparity in another is simple enough; then why is it so difficult to see it in yourself?
Meditation should bring you to a crisis otherwise it is not really meditation.
A crisis is a turning point, perhaps the point when you finally turn away from yourself.
When you take stock of yourself you will see it’s not worth the effort to sustain the fiction any more.
If it can be interrupted it is not meditation.
Nothing is a distraction unless you name it as such.
When you attend to a distraction, it is no longer a distraction is it?
Why be distracted by reality when you could attend to it?
Meditation is not so much a formal practice, as an open awareness.
You can be attentive in any environment.
Meditation that can be maintained only under ideal conditions is hardly worthy of the name.
The meaning of total attention is that you should be attentive to the totality of your life.
Meditation is being peaceful, not to the exclusion of reality, but in the face of it.
Denying that is true never made it go away.
Meditation is the development of detachment, not aversion.
Meditation and everyday life cannot be separated.
It is in everyday life that the false is most evident.
Meditation, which is the understanding of each thought and action as it arises, is the ending of the separative process.
Meditation is not just one more thing you do, it is the understanding of why you do what you do.
To meditate is to die a little death each day.
Meditation is the practice of dying to self so that real living can begin.
The culmination of meditation is living without motivation.
First you must learn to look objectively at things as they are.
Next you must look with the same equanimous mind at your self.
If you want a mantra to really quieten the mind, then take these two words: let go.
Letting go of things there is freedom to move;
letting go of control there is freedom to see;