Meditation

While meditating today i put together a lot of thoughts that have been floating around in my mind. i've been thinking a lot lately about taking the buddhism out of my meditation. First, i began to question why i was buddhist in the first place: it was for the meditation. So many people whose opinions i respected talked about meditation and yoga amongst other things as ways to continue expanding one's mind, and as things to pursue once you had gotten that message and hung up the phone. i had no clue what meditation even was or how to go about doing it or how it related to psychedelics so i tried a few avenues, which laughably failed, before stumbling upon and advertisement for diamond way. it said public guided meditation and that no experience was necessary, so after working up the courage, and running away, and working it up again i was finally more or less nudged into it. i guess the vibes hit me so strongly that day just being in a room full of sangha and everything felt so right that i forgot to question. i simply became buddhist.

that continued for almost a year until just recently the novel concept of trying out other schools of buddhism or other centers before deciding diamond way was the one for me finally hit. but it wasn't just diamond way, i was beginning to question why i was buddhist in the first place. after all, i've said from the beginning that i am not using buddhism as a religion, i think reincarnation is just as much of a pipe dream as heaven and i happen to have my own thoughts about where we go when we die that i don't need to seek religion to help me here. as a philosophy on how to live your life it was pretty cool with the karma thing and love your enemy help one another, it again didn't seem to offer too much more than christianity or common sense would. so essentially i was just using it for the meditation. i still entertained the idea that even if it didn't feel very trippy to me, if i could just work at it long enough and meditate hard enough whatever the point of it all was would make itself known and i'd experience altered states of consciousness way more pure and profound than their chemical counter parts. i began to wonder one day if the myths had anything to do with it or if it was merely in the focusing of the mind and the repetition where the key lay. for instance, if i did the same things but focused instead on random shapes and colors or meaningless objects while repeating a tibetan mantra i didn't even understand or even making up jibberish, would the effects be the same?

i figured there must be something to the spirituality tho and forgot about it, until i read this.

in this article steve vai talks about musical meditation and focusing on playing only one vibrato. he says, "Most important, don't let your mind wander. When you find yourself thinking of anything other than vibrato (and you will, probably in the first few seconds), pull your mind back to the note. Your mind will wander off into thoughts such as "Am I doing this right?", then "Boy, what a waste of time this is!" Eventually, you'll find yourself thinking about your friends, your financial situation, what you did yesterday, what you're going to do tomorrow, and of course, "Let's eat!" This is the hard part. Just keep pulling your mind back to vibrating that note. It's a discipline worth working on. Eventually, you'll exhaust all conventional vibrato approaches, all the ways you saw someone else do it. Then (if you have the discipline to continue), your mind will enter private realms and you will reach deeper into your own uniqueness for different ideas."

and that in a nutshell is meditation. whether it be through playing music, or furiously scribbling in a sketchpad, or writing essays about the back of a penny, christian prayer, tantric sex, drugs, meditation on your own personal mantra, or concentrating on dead chinese guys, the end result is focusing your mind on that single point until all distractions melt away and all that is left is that moment. be here now. So having better things to focus on than dead chinese people, meditation and religion no longer coincide in my world view. i almost want to stick to buddhism for the shallow reasons like i've made so many friends at the center i don't want to let down, and that with an actual sangha i might actually meditate on a regular basis and not let myself get so lax, or that i really don't have better things to meditate on, or that it's good for picking up hippy chicks, or just aids the public image i'd like to have in general. But as far as any serious spiritual quest goes, buddhism is no longer a necessary part.