So I have been meditating on and off for over 20 years and I'm still a beginner! There are many subtle things here that grow more relevant the deeper we get.
(1) Meditate regularly.
Why is this so important. Already blogged but the usual reason we do anything is motivated by the need for something. Often we meditate to over come some barrier, or to feel better, or because we think it will be beneficial to us. This is classic unenlightened thinking because it revolves around a central figure who is commanding the show. This fake phantom does not exist, but it controls our lives all the same. So at the beginning (i.e. for me still after 22 years!) the motivation to meditate is still in someway bound to ego. I want to be more successful, I want to control emotions, I want to feel better, I want to be enlightened. Everyone has to start somewhere, but this is still born from the mistake of ego.
When we meditate regularly our ego will probably fight it. "Do it later, what I want is more important". "It's boring and no fin, serve me and do something more interesting." "You are not a meditator, you are a tough person who needs no help, meditation is for weak people or "spiritual" nuts and hippies". In some way or another the fake self, the small and superficial and actually dead (literally the celluloid hero of our brains) image we have of our true living self will try and derail the meditation.
Meditation is our master that we must submit to. And that sounds like Islam, but its the same point made in Islam and all the religions that to get in sync with reality we first need to get out of sync with the illusion of self. When God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, I believe "He" did not do it so much as they brought it upon themselves by manufacturing an inner self that could now reflect upon itself and so quite happily hide and ignore God - where God is essentially Reality. Mankind has this ability to retreat into fantasy and imagination and create unreal things, and the biggest is this inner belief and faith in a self hidden inside. If meditation does only one thing, it is to bring us out from that inner fantasy world into reality and abandon that inner shadow that we think is a true self.
(2) Meditate for other people
Essentially the same as above, but who are we meditating for? At the start we are meditating for our self. We want the benefits of this mysterious thing. As meditation progresses we aim to lift that grasp we have on it. On one level if I am improved by meditation then so is the world around me. The benefits leak out. When I would have got angry and hurt someone, no I seek to solve the problem in a more intelligent way that leaves no seeds of resentment or pain that will flourish to create future problems. But ultimately it becomes more clear that meditation benefits everyone and then eventually no one. But not "no one" that the ego might pick and go "ah ha told you waste of time, come back and do what I want" no that is "no one" as in "Ego you are not worth benefitting cos you don't even exist, and neither do all the other egos clamouring for personal attention and benefit, the benefit has been to see that all this daily activity is misguided and serves no one." If anyone is to benefit we first have to get over this fixation on separate individual selves. It always breaks up co-operation and peace. No one will ever be happy when they have only 1 eye that sees them self. That uncomfortable fact for the Ego is that it lives in a world of many selves, most importantly those parent selves which actually created it and without which it wouldn't even exist. Ouch! Take that ego.
So really meditation is for everyone and no one. And least of all our self. However small steps. If it helps motivation to think we are benefitting from meditation then that is not untrue.
* little addendum. In this material world it seems crazy to chant and meditate for other people. What is there is some magical ether that conveys good wishes and benefits to other people even without them doing anything. Well belief in such an ether is no less crazy than belief in a "me" hidden inside this body and mind somewhere**. People in glass houses should not throw stones. We are all crazy who have not yet seen the truth!
** Things are no so simple however. We do not extinguish the self in this move. This is not nihilism we do not throw anything away, we just see it from a different angle. We are there, there is still a self and existence. But the point is that this "presence" this knowledge that "we are alive" Woo Hoo! Party time, this "life" whatever it is, does not come from a hidden thing inside that was born with us and accompanies us that holds our memories, and what we "are" and sits there like a name tag making us different from other people and the world. And which eventually must hit the brick wall of death and then either go smash through to some magical after life or disintegrate into blackness (somehow). That is the fantasy born entirely of our imaginations. The truth exists even for people who have lost their memories. they can sit there and say I have forgotten, so memory for starters is just a tag on to what we are. And we don't spend every moment of every day sitting with our memories. They come and go, we recall them from who knows where. So they are not part of us. And in fact none of that list is party of us. Even our name was given to us by our parents, unless we chose another and that proves that name is stuck on top and not really part of us. And then anyway what was the name of that person before we got a new name? Indeed what was our name before we got a name at all? So even our name is not us. There is nothing that is us! We have no identity, it is all manufactured and stuck on top like a badly fitting coat. The source of all that we call life comes straight out of the Present Moment right now. It doesn't come from a hidden person called "me" or "my life." Rather the other way around. Faced with what is actually a miracle of existence we then grasp around and grab at things, one of which is this self we are given by parents and society and we hold on to that. Its no more than a name badge. And yes its not that important.
So meditation goes far beyond the limits of this small self in this small corner of the world that we like to think of as ours and which we normally grasp onto as all we have. Meditation really encompasses the whole universe and all of existence. But we have to start somewhere so we start with a small self, sitting in its small corner of the universe, with the door closed and the rest all locked out. But we don't need move to access the whole universe, that is both the reality of sitting meditation but also a metaphor of where we start bound to a physical body and self.
p.s. worth watching any desires that want to escape this small self, perhaps the Ego wants to be as big and important as the universe! That was all just metaphor. We already are the universe, it is the ego that makes us small.
== there are more that have occurred to me, I forget for now will update...
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