“Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life, perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody. That is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority. When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy, if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The word meditation brings with it a contradiction: there is an object of meditation. This was what the Latins meant by the word meditation: we can meditate on a political problem or on an aspect of our personality, so our mind thinks and focuses on this themes. The word Dhyana in Sanskrit (badly translated into meditation) describes an experience that cannot be explained with the rational mind because there is no object of Dhyana, there is not even a subject, that is the one who meditates, because in the experience of Dhyana our ego disappears and we are no longer identified with a thought-form. This may seem like an abstract concept to most people but an experience cannot be taught, a technique it can; it is like explaining the joy to be on the top of a mountain and try to explain the experience of looking down to the World in awe; our words will never be able to describe to a person what we felt, it would be much better to guide them to the same mountain so they can have the same experience. This “bringing the person to a place” is called a meditation technique, but the experience cannot be taught and transmitted also because it will be different from person to person. This experience can be achieved through two methodologies: concentration and contemplation (see right and left hemisphere).
Concentration is fixing the mind on a single point and contemplation is observing everything without fixating on anything in particular and is inevitably linked to our senses which will receive smells, sounds, tastes, temperatures and friction on the skin. Meditation happens in the middle, in anatomy we would say in the “corpus callosum“, that bridge of nerve fibers that connects the right hemisphere with the left, this can only happen when the brain activity of the two hemispheres is in perfect balance. In logical terms we could say that Dhyana is the concentration on the whole or the contemplation of the void: clear, right?
To understand each other better, let’s remember that when you enter meditation you don’t create memories; if we have visions or if we visualize colors our mind is still active, we could be connected with some type of energy that we rationalize by giving it a particular shape or color, this also happens with the use of plants for example (see Entheogenic plants) ; after meditating, however, we realize that time has passed but it is as if nothing had happened. Now you may be wondering: why should I meditate?
For modern psychology there are 3 states of being:
- Sleep with dream production (the famous REM phase).
- Deep sleep where we forget who we are, our job, our age, sex, origin, we are no longer connected with our memory archive: even if the cycles are short, about 10 minutes, they are enough to save our mind, skipping these cycles (about 3 per night) we would enter schizophrenia after the third or fourth night, so there is no need to reiterate their importance.
- Waking state: the state in which we believe we are awake. For yogis this stage is defined as waking while dreaming, that is, when we do not live in the present, we carry out an action but we think about the future or the past, we are not concentrated or we are not contemplating 100%. This is why there is a fourth state for the ancient yogis.
- Deep wakefulness: presence, illumination are just synonyms, we are truly awake and attentive, we never think about the future or the past (unless it is strictly necessary to plan or remember something) but we are present with the body, mind and spirit in the this very moment).
To protect the mind we therefore enter into meditation while awake to recreate the same environment as deep sleep. The result is that we will emerge completely recharged; every time our attention and intention are in the present moment we save energy, every time we get lost unnecessarily in the future and in the past we send our energy to nothing causing a real depletion of our energy stocks. But be careful, true meditation has neither purpose nor end, if we sit with the aim of arriving or reaching something we will never enter Dhyana. Almost all religions and faiths have a version of it and you don’t have to belong to any spiritual group to practice it, connecting with the energy of the universe is a right that belongs to all beings in the cosmos.
Good practice to all of you!
