What's more important? Technique or meditation? What is meditation?

[dwai]

I know I've belabored this point several times in the past. However, I think it still needs to be called out (and perhaps a fruitful discussion will ensue). 

Techniques/postures/methods are secondary to meditation. They are means to an end. 

 

That then begs the question "What is meditation?"

Meditation is complete absorption in which there is no separation between subject and object, or, there is only subject, no object. This is also called "samādhī). 

 

So, sitting in full lotus, or x,y or z posture, or n-repetitions of any mantra, or breathing technique etc etc, DO NOT constitute meditation.  They are preparatory. This includes techniques like neigong, various yogic kriya, etc etc.  They are doing. Meditation is undoing (had to use this cliché).

 

Normally, our mind is always reaching out into the objective world, attracted to and attached to objects. My home, my car, my this, my that, and so on and so forth. This phenomenon is called "Chitta viskhépa" in sanskrit. 

 

What does "preparatory" imply? It implies that the mind is brought back from external focus/scattered attention to single-pointed attention/focus ( ekāgrachitta) and finally in cessation of the mind itself (manōlaya or better still, manōnāsha). The gate of meditation is entered when the mind becomes single-pointed. It becomes meditation with the cessation of the mind (identification with thoughts). This is the place of stillness. 

 

Once a practitioner has stabilized in meditation (stillness), they then can re-enter the world but fully stable in the knowledge of their true nature (empty, infinite, eternal, light). 

 

Forget about all the techniques, about being perfect in your forms and your posture, etc. Sit comfortably on a wooden or metal chair, and follow this meditation. It will super-charge your other practices if you do this every day.

 

 

Edited March 11, 2019 by dwai

[freeform]

1 hour ago, dwai said:

Techniques/postures/methods are secondary to meditation. They are means to an end. 

 

That then begs the question "What is meditation?"

Meditation is complete absorption

 

Spot on

 

 

[Sebastian]

Agree with Free-form. A lot of people think that you can become a spiritual expert by amassing techniques or following complex rituals. But the expert's mind is very limited. Remember this quote ? "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few."

 

Technique and the intellect is limited if it doesn't intersect with intelligence. Meditation is Intelligence working through you. It is being a beginner and offering your innocent mind to something greater than you. 

 

I think it's fine to use some technique as a preparatory stage to most meditations, if as you say, you view it as a means and not an end. Preparation can be a powerful gateway into meditation too. Some call it a formula. But after ingesting the formula, your focus should be somewhere else. 

 

 

[Spotless]

40+ years later and the mantra is always there - it might be a year or ten and someone brings up the subject and in the background it still plays

[Spotless]

On 3/11/2019 at 12:32 PM, dwai said:

Normally, our mind is always reaching out into the objective world, attracted to and attached to objects. My home, my car, my this, my that, and so on and so forth. This phenomenon is called "Chitta viskhépa" in sanskrit. 

In the video the teacher used the reference to “bare awareness” and refrained from the use of the word mind.

 

Bare Awareness is mesmerized in the cottony fluttering fog of habituation and labeling -  in the positions of mind and meness. 

IN meditation one is IN Bare Awareness - the cottony fluttering fog outside of its sphere.

 

This Awareness state is not easily understood as one “of focus” but rather as one not diffused and parted out.

 

The Awakened Abiding state is not one of focus in any sense in which that might clarify to someone in word what it is like. But like a clouded glass that has clarified as the refracting particles have settled.

 

Awareness typically is identified in the refractions and defends and organizes the many “I” they contain and the kaleidoscopes of mesmerizing patterns and rainbows. 

 

IN meditation Awareness is vital clarity in no inertia (stillness).

 

It is so true that the means of physically aiding this to happen is not more than basic practice.

[Everything]

Just letting go of thought, when there's no thought, there's no contradictory energy, and thus your true nature rises back to the surface. And you may feel the need to focus on a sight or sound to quiet your mind.

Edited March 15, 2019 by Everything

[neti neti]

Quote

"Meditation is never the control of the body. There is no actual division between the organism and the mind. The brain, the nervous system and the thing we call the mind are one, indivisible. It is the natural act of meditation that brings about the harmonious movement of the whole. To divide the body from the mind and to control the body with intellectual decisions is to bring about contradiction, from which arise various forms of struggle, conflict and resistance.

 

Every decision to control only breeds resistance, even the determination to be aware. Meditation is the understanding of the division brought about by decision. Freedom is not the act of decision but the act of perception. The seeing is the doing. It is not a determination to see and then to act. After all, will is desire with all it's contradictions. When one desire assumes authority over another, that desire becomes will. In this there is inevitable division. And meditation is the understanding of desire, not the overcoming of one desire by another. Desire is the movement of sensation, which becomes pleasure and fear. This is sustained by the constant dwelling of thought upon one or the other.

 

Meditation really is a complete emptying of the mind. Then there is only functioning of the body; there is only the activity of the organism and nothing else; then thought functions without identification as the me and the non-me. Thought is mechanical, as is the organism. What creates conflict is thought identifying itself with one of its parts which becomes the me, the self and the various divisions in that self. There is no need for the self at any time. There is nothing but the body, and freedom of the mind can only happen when thought is not breeding the me. There is no self to understand but only the thought which creates the self. When there is only the organism without the self , perception, both visual and non-visual can never be distorted. There is only seeing 'what is' and that very perception goes beyond what is.

 

The emptying of the mind is not an activity of thought or an intellectual process. The continuous seeing of what is without any kind of distortion naturally empties the mind of all thought and yet that very mind can use thought when it is necessary. Thought is mechanical and meditation is not."
 
~J. Krishnamurti

 

Edited March 17, 2019 by neti neti

[neti neti]

Quote

"Thought cannot conceive or formulate to itself the nature of space. Whatever it formulates has within it the limitation of its own boundaries. This is not the space which meditation comes upon. Thought has always a horizon. The meditative mind has no horizon. The mind cannot go from the limited to the immense, nor can it transform the limited into the limitless. The one has to cease for the other to be.

 

Meditation is opening the door into spaciousness which cannot be imagined or speculated upon. Thought is the center round which there is the space of idea, and this space can be expanded by further ideas. But such expansion through stimulation in any form is not the spaciousness in which there is no center. Meditation is the understanding of this center and so going beyond it.

 

Silence and spaciousness go together. The immensity of silence is the immensity of the mind in which a center does not exist. The perception of this space and silence is not of thought. Thought can perceive only its own projection, and the recognition of it is its own frontier."  ~J. Krishnamurti

 

 

[windwalker]

On 3/11/2019 at 12:32 PM, dwai said:

Forget about all the techniques, about being perfect in your forms and your posture, etc. Sit comfortably on a wooden or metal chair, and follow this meditation. It will super-charge your other practices if you do this every day.

 

 

Is not sitting comfortably in a chair a technique. 

 

It's called the gateless gate there are many paths to reach it.

 

My taiji shifu, now 99yrs old once remarked " to really fan song, is very difficult"

 

It took many years to understand what he meant, many more to deepen the reality opened by the understanding.

 

Recently I had somebody aske me about the usage of taiji, whether it was real or not.

 

My answer,  touching him lightly the arm he bounced out.

 

We both laughed.

 

 

[Spotless]

4 hours ago, neti neti said:

Silence and spaciousness go together. The immensity of silence is the immensity of the mind in which a center does not exist. The perception of this space and silence is not of thought. Thought can perceive only its own projection, and the recognition of it is its own frontier."  ~J. Krishnamurti

 

Silence and spaciousness go together. The immensity of silence is the immensity of (Presence) in which a center does not exist.

 

(“the mind” deleted in exchange for Presence)

 

The “center” is the me-ness, positions and habituations that obstruct and constrict and create the gravity of fear and grasping.

 

One’s 10,000 favorite radio stations, thought forms, desires and fears - that mesmerize one’s  Presence. In which one’s Presence is held in           a-tension.

 

Suspend 10,000 tensions and in the moment you Awaken.

 

meditation is Presence - for those as yet held in tension - it is Presence while practicing non-participation in the noise of one’s tensions.

Edited March 17, 2019 by Spotless

[neti neti]

On 3/17/2019 at 12:17 PM, Spotless said:

 

Silence and spaciousness go together. The immensity of silence is the immensity of (Presence) in which a center does not exist.

 

(“the mind” deleted in exchange for Presence)

---

The “center” is the me-ness, positions and habituations that obstruct and constrict and create the gravity of fear and grasping.

 

One’s 10,000 favorite radio stations, thought forms, desires and fears - that mesmerize one’s  Presence. In which one’s Presence is held in           a-tension.

 

Suspend 10,000 tensions and in the moment you Awaken.

 

meditation is Presence - for those as yet held in tension - it is Presence while practicing non-participation in the noise of one’s tensions.

 

Most excellent my friend. The experience of awakening to one's immense Presence is the freedom of being the seeing which sees beyond itself.

 

That which tends to attend to this that and the other, instinctively assumes this or that's identity and explores rabbit holes endlessly... feigning unfamiliarity along each trail's scent as if the novelty were not its own. But in just a split instant of abiding as the timeless now, attention suspends. Grasping ceases to scratch after that which was always firmly held, and all that arrests oneself in slumber seems to gently shake off, like shackles on a man too burdened for too long to believe he's been set free. 

 

One seems to wade through tides of tension, yet the vast depths which propel us toward shores is the same which lovingly draws us back home... diving deep into that stillness where waves no longer crash.

Edited June 28, 2020 by neti neti

[neti neti]

Dodging 10,000 raindrops, naturally, without avoidance. Such that even if drenched in the storms of madness, one strolls along content knowing the madness to be one's own. This too shall pass. Watch the weather baby, because it's gonna change.

Edited March 18, 2019 by neti neti

[Everything]

15 hours ago, neti neti said:

 

Most excellent my friend. The experience of awakening to one's immense Presence is the freedom of being the seeing which sees beyond itself.

 

That which tends to attend to this that and the other, instinctively assumes this or that's identity and explores rabbit holes endlessly... feigning unfamiliarity along each trail's scent as if the novelty were not its own. But in just a split instant of abiding as the timeless now, attention suspends. Grasping ceases to scratch after that which was always firmly held, and all that arrests oneself in slumber seems to gently shake off, like shackles on a man too burdened for too long to believe he's been set free. 

 

One seems to wade through tides of tension, yet the vast depths that propel us toward shores is the same which lovingly draws us back home... diving deep into that stillness where waves no longer crash.

Yeah, releasing resistance and going with the flow. The Art of Allowing. The Art of Feeling Better and Feeling Good. The Art of Relief. The art of letting go and letting god. LEtting go and letting flow. The art of Freedom. The art of loving unconditionally. 

 

Sometimes when people release allot of resistance, they often cry tears of joy. Due to a sudden surge of newly ALLLOWED flow, that feels so good, that the releasing of resistance expresses in a tear of joy, that tear actually contains the negative energies and toxins of whatever the negative resistant idea or believe that draw it causing discord and has been released. Reallowing full emergance of greater allowed fuller flowed consciousness of greater consciousness.

 

This conscious practice of releasing resistance, that is the practice of meditation, is so beneficial exactly because one realises the actual true benefit of releasing resistance, because of their being fully consciously present as they're meditating and releasing resistance. While when someone sleeps, they also release resistance, but they're not always fully conscious of allowing it to happen. Often people then wake up and emmediately and unintentionally activate the habbitual thought patterns of resistance, and they feel bad and tired again instantly after awakening.

 

And constantly going back to sleep everytime you feel bad, well, that can also be a path towards finding alignment with their soul. But it takes a longer while. But if one has the freedom to sleep whenever they want, surely, it is one way to go about it.

 

But when one takes such a tiny small effort of meditating, which is really the most easiest practice, one can benefit for their entire life evermore. And when one meditates untill one can truely find that alignment and allow it and maintain it throughout their entire day. The benefits are not  that different from what Jesus could accomplish. But one has to care more about how they feel, more than anything else. Meaning, unconditional love. For the purpose of allowing their soul, and furthermore, God, to fully flow through them for benefit of all, including self. It begins with the selfish desire for the benefit of all. But also a selfish desire for the benefit of self. For one realises, the greatest benefit that one can allow for oneself, is also the greatest benefit one can allow for all. To allow your true being to be always right here and now fully flowing through you. As all that you've truely become and will be the ever becoming of evermore. Ever so more fully allowed to flow through you here and now, as you meditate. Relax and focus on a sight or sound, untill your mind quietes, and you full self is naturally allowed to flow again. Full harmony of physical and non-physical consciousness is allowed again. For the benefit of self and of all.

Edited March 19, 2019 by Everything