Why Meditate?

[Guest guest]

Hi all,

 

I received this today and thought it appropriate.

 

Victor

 

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Recognitions Newsletter - October, 2000

Volume 1 / Number 10

 

Theme: Creating Stillness Through Balance

 

Why do you meditate? Have you ever really considered your true motivation

in spending a very significant portion of your life engaged in something,

which to most people, seems intangible at best? To be sure, there are

probably as many reasons to meditate as there are meditators, but let us

examine this question from a Conscious Living perspective.

 

First, it is useful to consider why we do anything at all. Why do we act,

make choices, engage relationships, experience life as we do? Why are we

alive? What do we get for it? Many say that life is about growth and

expansion and therefore we engage life in all the ways that we do because it

is a means to experience that growth for ourselves, whether it is knowledge,

power, pleasure, wealth, or whatever. But, we can take it a step further to

a more fundamental understanding that life is simply about experience. This

is what Master Charles consistently says whenever questions of "life

purpose" arise.

 

This understanding about life as just being about experience is a very

liberating one because it takes the pressure of goal orientation out of the

picture. Anyone can experience, so there is no possibility of "failing"

life. Experience is not dependant upon doing, so there is no question doing

life "wrong". And, experience is not something we have to search for...it

is all around us wherever we are, so there is no possibility of "missing"

life.

 

So, let us now return to our original question about why we meditate. Of

course, based on our progression above, we now know that meditation, like

life itself, is about experience. Any experience comprises three elements:

the experiencer, the process of experiencing and the experience itself. In

some philosophical traditions, this is referred to as the knower, process of

knowing and object known. What is unique about meditation, among all the

other types of experiences we could have, is that meditation allows the

experiencer or knower to access itself directly. With meditation, it is

possible to entrain a focus in stillness (cessation of thinking), which

allows the experience of awareness (witness consciousness) to become

apparent. This is the right-brained, positive polarity and is the essential

balancing element in human experience.

 

In all other kinds of experience, the emphasis is on the side of the object

and process of knowing which is commonly understood as the left-brained,

negative polarity. An excellent example is our contemporary system of

education, which can really be more accurately described as an information

delivery system. It is completely focused upon saturating the individual

mind with as much external diversity and complexity as possible, while

virtually ignoring the subject or the "I". This leaves a major gap in the

three-fold process of knowing (as outlined above), which results in a

characteristically imbalanced human experience, with little understanding of

its own nature or capabilities. Such a dis-empowering experience of life

can be aptly described in terms of fragmentation.

 

So, when considering why we meditate, it can be understood that all the

"usual" reasons (which mainly involve getting something we want), do not

really address the core issue. What meditation uniquely offers is the

opportunity to know who and what we are as awareness rather than as a mind

identified with its data or negative history. Such an opportunity brings

balance to life, delivering the blissful freedom that is the hallmark of the

meditators' experience. More than anything else, stillness is the most

subtle and powerful experience of the positive polarity and results from

regular meditation along with a consistent focus on balanced Conscious

Living.

 

 

Quotation

"The aware are free and

the aware are radically happy"

 

-Master Charles