Meditation
So here it is.
Meditation, without going into too much detail, is a state of mind where most of the excess clutter or sound that normally accompanies our thought processes is gone.
Now, whether this is the accepted definition of meditation I neither know nor am interested in. Should meditation be something other than this, and for some reason more estimable, I hope to discover it one day. As of now, I am not interested in dissolving my current delusions, should I be in fact incorrect.
Now, there are a variety of meditiative techniques whereby one may achieve a meditiative state, and their merit is based solely on their effectiveness. Any one technique is not superior to the other because of who uses it, how prevalent its use is, or where it originated. If it is successful in creating this state within an individual, it is good.
Whatever meditiative technique we employ, we must remember that this technique is only good insofar as it gets us to a meditative state. Once meditiating, we may continue in a vein of thought similar to the meditiative technique, but it is optional. Indeed, it is hard to imagine meditiation being useful if our meditiative technique determined our thought process for the meditation.
Now, while entering a meditative state may take many different forms, and while those individual forms may ultimately lead to the same place, it is unlikely that they will lead us to a homogenous meditation. Each individual pathway may not define our meditation, but it may limit the scope of topics. In essence, our meditation determines the mood and emphasis of our meditation. Thus, a technique that focuses on perception may lead us easily to a meditation about self-image, whereas another technique might make it more difficult to segway into self-image meditation.
The noise, the excess crap that sits in our brains and, with little rhyme or reason, pops into our active consciousness from time to time, is a necessary function of life. Without the ability to think loosely about several subjects at once, we very well could find ourselves unable to properly deal with our lives. Meditation, while estimable, should not be a constant state of consciousness.
I have previously sought to quiet the voices in my head that always seemed to interrupt my attempts at meditation. I assumed that these voices were what I was trying to get away from, therefore they could be of no assistance in their own demise.
But I was wrong. At yoga a week ago, I suddenly came to the realization that my mind wanted to think in terms of words and sounds. I was incapable of silencing these myriad voices because I was attempting to silence them all, rather than focus them into a single topic. When I realized this difference (an important realization, for it makes me accept these sounds, rather than fear or hate them), I was very easily able to enter a meditative state. Unfortunately, it was only for a brief moment, and then I was drawn out by the sudden and nearly terrifying realization that I had, in a very quick and easy fashion, dropped into meditation that had been so elusive for so long.
The next day, I also attended yoga, and was able to sustain a longer duration, primarily because the focus of the meditation was to bring myself out of meditation. Thus, I called an end to my own meditation rather than being ejected from it roughly.
Today, I was unable to reach a meditative state during yoga. But I refuse to be downcast about this, simply because I have now done it twice in the last week. This is most especially significant because I had begun to wonder if I had simply lost the capacity for meditation.
The goal for the next few weeks is to continue to use meditation to come out of meditation, thus hopefully retraining myself to reach meditative states and hold them for longer than I have yet been able to do. A 10 second meditation is a huge step for me, but it still leaves much to be desired.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
fogofwar) wrote,
