It’s useful to periodically review and re-assess our current state and self-identity and how we present ourselves in the world. Do our actions match our desires? Are your motivations aligned with your values? Does our understanding and speech match our knowledge? Who are you, anyway?
Thinking lately along these lines, as the ego wonders if I’m ready to take on a new meditation group. We’re re-starting a meditation group that ran for years until COVID, the group where I first discovered meditation. I came to the group as an absolute beginner. It was at this group where a visionary experience launched me full-speed into classical yoga/meditation practices. And now the group re-starts, this time with me as the main facilitator. So what am I doing in that role? Who am I now, what do I have to offer?
I’ve also been challenged lately to translate the lessons that have come through meditation practices, hatha yoga practices, and the study of classical yoga. If these are useful lessons then they must be applicable to other people in other life situations, with other cultural references and world views. Otherwise it’s too easy to ignore and write off as the ravings of a niche group, an insular self-justifying cult.
So let’s try and summarize some of the lessons that have been presented, in a way that can be understood from a wide range of perspectives and world views. This should start a foundation on which we can base meditation techniques and discussions:
- You are not your Body, You are not your Mind.
- At the core of who your are is (nameless), something that connects you to other life and to something greater than your individual self.
- #1 and #2 are not Doctrines to be Believed. They are operational truths about how our life experience happens. They have to be encountered as an experience each individual person has, not something one hears or reads about. Direct experience of #1 and #2 is a very powerful and effective cure-all, a tool to help with issues of worry, fear, anxiety, negative emotions.
- Some meditation techniques work on the symptoms caused by our life struggles, alleviating worry and fear through visualizations or energetic breath exercises or many other methods.
- Other meditation techniques focus more on points 1,2,3 above, targeting the source of our life struggles and not the symptoms.
- Careful understanding and study of topics such as perception, knowledge, experience, consciousness, and awareness are a part of meditation, as introduced in #5 above.
Two points here:- Reality as best understood in terms of our Life Experience, and not strictly in terms of Objective Scientific Fact. Logic and science are a sub-set of reality in this view.
- We have opportunity to improve our life experience by altering our perspective: First you have to think differently, so that then you can feel differently, and then you can experience life differently. The most powerful and beneficial meditation techniques (mostly? Always?) work in this direction.