Meditation for beginners

Sometimes understanding comes when two or more things come together that strike a chord inside and you find that aha moment. This is my effort to put something together to propose an answer to a question I feel most of us have and yet haven’t yet brought together where understanding comes.

WHAT AM I?

I am the five thousand turnings of the wheel, the ten thousand layers of the onion and the snake curled upon itself.
I am the leaves blown and the tree they come from. I am the Buddha nature of all the saints under the big sky. I am the witness and the breath inside the breath, and the water that quenches the thirst. I am the hunger that drives you to find me in your lonely dark. I am no distance from you when you call out to me in your separation.
I am the ocean inside your heart where you come at last to know me. I am the least and the most, the no distance and the infinity. I am the thin page of your unknowing, and the joy that fills you when we meet.

Meditation

“I’ve come to learn about meditation.”
Come in and welcome. Sit over by the window and we can talk first.
“I’ve been feeling so drained lately and then I saw your leaflet that said meditation can restore my energy.”
There are over seven billion people on this planet and most of them are eating each other.
“What about those that live alone?”
They eat themselves from the inside out.
“Where do you get these funny ideas from?”
Not so funny really; just look at the energy signature of anyone and you can see it attached or attaching to something or someone and feeding.
“Feeding?”
An exchange of energy; it’s a cord of attachment that energy flows along; watch a woman walking by and you’ll see men shooting out threads of energy and latching on to her and feeding.
“Wouldn’t she become drained?
Energy flows both ways, she feeds off them too. But yes, sometimes it only goes one way, such as in a bad relationship where one partner feeds off the other.
“Like a vampire?”
Right, like a vampire, but instead of blood, energy is transferred.
“And you can see this happening?”
It’s plain to see.
“I don’t see it.”
In time, as your energy becomes lighter you’ll see it, first in the physical and then on the energetic level.
“Maybe ignorance is bliss.”

Once the doors of perception have been opened you’ll begin the journey, the deeper you go inwards the more you will understand, and once you’ve begun you never really stop learning.
“I’m not sure I want to see vampires or go on a journey, I just would like to find out more about meditation.”
Until you’ve learnt how to control your energy and channel it then you’ll eat and be eaten without even knowing it, the same as everyone else who is lost and being stirred in this soup that everyone calls life.
“What about love?”
There’s no energy higher than love.
“So falling in love is good?”
It may seem like falling but actually it is your heart being opened with the right key.
“It sounds a bit mechanical to me.”
In a way it can seem that way, but it’s really organic. Take for instance a pond; for a pond to settle and become still you need to stop throwing stones in it and then quite naturally it will become still.
“What’s a pond and stones got to do with anything?”
Well, you can liken the pond to your mind and the stones are your thoughts; when your mind is not distracted by your thoughts it becomes still, like the pond, and then when it’s still you can see deeply into what’s there.
“And what is there?”
You of course.
“But I can already see me when I look in a mirror.”

This is another kind of seeing, one where you can see what you really are without any confusion.
“I don’t understand, I thought this was me and who I am.”
That’s just your body and the changing seasons of your living. What you really are is not subject to time and space, but dances in the winds of the eternal and for a short period inhabits the body you find yourself in.
“So what you’re saying is I don’t know who I really am?”
You are what you know now, but as you go deeper your understanding and knowing will increase until you find your real self and then you’ll know for yourself.
“What will I know for myself?”
No one can tell you that, you will feel it when you know it.
“Why can’t you tell me what it is?”
Because if I told you my concept of what it is then you would be looking for that.
“What’s wrong with that?”
It’s not a concept, and so when you look for a concept you don’t find it.
“So what do I look for?”
You don’t look for anything, if you look for something you won’t find it for it’s not something and can’t be found that way.
“You’ve lost me.”

In the world you’ve grown up in you’ve used your mind/intellect to find everything you’ve wanted, but what I’m talking about is not of the mind and can’t be found by using it; your mind can only take you so far and then you have to let it go, and fly.
“Fly? Fly where?”
To fly you have to let go; and the where is not a place but an unlearning of all you’ve been taught so that you unbecome to become what you really are, and in that is freedom, and in that freedom you fly on wings of joy and your heart feels to burst in total love.
“So it’s a wild ride then?”
Sometimes it can feel energetic and other times it is bliss in stillness and silence.
“You sure you’re not on drugs?”
Drugs won’t take you there. You could spend an eternity on drugs and never get there.
“Some drugs are immediate.”
That’s just the rush.
“What is eternity?”
Eternity is now.
“But how can that be?”

All that’s outside of now is subject to time and time is not eternal. Only in the now can you experience the eternal.
“But eternity is a long time.”
Eternity has no time; if it did it would not be eternal.
“What is time?”
Time is an illusion and a figment of your imagination.
“But I have a clock and it tells the time.”
It tells you what you have been taught to see. When you were a child and impressionable you made a contract to understand a part of the illusion by learning how to measure it with a mechanical construct. The real time is now and is immeasurable because it’s timeless.
“This is a hard concept to understand.”
Well I did say my concepts are subjective and that you should understand for yourself.
“I was never taught how to understand these things in school.”
Right, you were taught to know set patterns of the illusion as they would have you know.
“Do you mean that my way of thinking has been taught to me and is not my own?”
But of course.

“Can I change this way of thinking? And what’s this illusion you go on about?”
Yes you can change your thinking but first you have to find what’s real. Once you know that all things can become clear to you and then you’ll see the illusion for what it is.
“What is the illusion?”
The illusion is what appears to be real but is in fact only a passing image that is changing into something else.
“That could be everything.”
Yes.
“So nothing is really real, it’s all an illusion?”
Yes. We inhabit bodies that will turn back into dust one day and we reside on a ball of rock that was once molten that flies around a sphere that is constantly igniting and sending out from itself in all directions a stream of energy, one part of which we call light and this light bombards the planet and enables all life as we know it to be and expire in cycles that perpetuate themselves over and over.
“So it’s all an illusion because it’s all in a state of constant change?”
Yes, that’s one way to see it. Another way to see it is that nothing is solid, everything you see is made up of a few small particles whirling around so fast, things appear as solid but if all the tiny particles were to become still and stop moving then everything would wink out of existence.
If all of the actual solid matter of the whole planet was condensed together so that there was no space in between these tiny particles then the whole world would be the size of a football, that’s how solid this planet is; everything appears real but it is all made up of a few particles whizzing around incredibly fast in a huge space to make it look real, but it’s all an illusion.
“Scary.”

It would be if it wasn’t all held together by something we can’t see.
“It sounds a bit far-fetched to me.”
Quantum science has proven all this to be so; it was even known by enlightened ones that came here long ago.
“How so?”
Well Buddha for one said: ‘time and space’ are not real.
“But how could he or anyone know, they didn’t have scientific instruments back then that could see tiny particles?”
As it is within, so it is without. Once you know the inner world the outer one holds no mystery that can’t be known.
“I need some time to digest all this, let’s have a cup of coffee.”
Good idea.

Let’s take our coffee outside, it’s a beautiful day; we can sit under the trees in the shade.
“I’d like that.”
We can practice meditation if you like.
“You’ll have to show me how.”
It’s very simple.
“Maybe for you but I’ve never done it before.”
You may have done it more than you know.
“I don’t see how.”
In a way, everything is a meditation, or can be. When you allow yourself to listen, to be a part of all that’s around you, and then you find yourself becoming quiet, that’s going within and becoming a part of the whole. It’s an awareness with little or no chatter from your mind, an expanding of your consciousness without any fixation, but a letting be.
“That sounds a little bit too esoteric for me.”
Sit here under the tree.
“OK.”
This will be your initiation into meditation.
Now, relax, close your eyes and just breathe. Let go of the thousand things in your mind, let all the cords of attachment drift away.
Listen to the wind sighing in the leaves above, and the loud bee passing by. Hear the birdsong.
As you expand your senses become aware of yourself experiencing all this, and then gently bring yourself back to you.
“Wow, it’s amazing, I feel so alive.”
Don’t say anything, just experience.

Images from Pixabay

Gratitude to Mr Prem Rawat for giving me the tools to go within...