Welcome beautiful creators of your realities. You are bright and shining beings of Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness. You are in truth now and have always been enlightened beings. Does this surprise you? You were born that way, and your enlightened state is not a thing that you can lose like your keys, wallets, or any possession. No one can take it away from you either. Do you feel the truth of this? Do you know yourself as an enlightened being of Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness?
There are many people who teach meditation, and there is an unimaginable number of methods for meditation. Many of them are good. I have found that some people find some ways of meditating more helpful for them than other ways, but that is more often because of the person rather than the method. Some people like apples and others like pears; both are good, but we all have our individual preferences, and some people like both. Do you have a preferred or regular method of meditation? If you feel comfortable within it that is great. Keep doing it. If you don’t have a method, don’t worry. I’ll be introducing ways of meditating for absolute beginners in a series of short articles.
Many people give a great diversity of reasons for meditation. When I teach meditation, I often go through a long list of goals including stress reduction, pain management, psychological recovery, clarity of mind, enlightenment, and Divine union to name a few. What do you think is the most important reason for meditation? I would say that meditation is the road to rediscovering who I really am. We were born and are fully enlightened beings, and we have never stopped being such. We have, however, lost sight of our true nature, our Selves, the beings we were before we were in these bodies, and the beings we will continue to be when we decide to leave these bodies. We get distracted by the bright lights and enticing aromas of this physical world and get confused a bit by the nature of physicality. That is entirely understandable.
This is a beautiful world we live in with so much to divert us. We came here for precisely that reason: to enjoy the experience of being and creating in this physical plane. But we get so engrossed in this physical experience and its temporal and temporary nature that we forget our eternal Selves and begin to identify with our physical bodies and experiences. Meditation helps us to recall and re-member our eternal and enlightened nature. I have heard our experience in meditation described as the sky on a sunny day with clouds. We get caught up with the clouds and forget the clear blue sky and sun that is still shining its life-giving light. Meditation helps us to see past the clouds to the blue sky and the sun which are always there whether we see them or not.
Again, I ask. Do you meditate? If you do not, I highly recommend it. I will be giving a series of articles here on meditation. I would also like to recommend a great book by Victor N. Davich, The Best Guide to Meditation; published by Renaissance Books. It is probably the best overall survey of meditation practices around the world. It is also an easy and entertaining read. Here is a link to the book on Amazon. Also, check this space for the next article.
Do you think that meditation is something that only Buddhists do, or that you need to become Buddhist to do it? The next article will be a very brief and rudimentary survey of meditation and will open your eyes to the great variety of meditation tradition and practices.
