"As we meditate, we simply sit straight and watch the breath. So what does that do? It creates space. (Italics mine) In fact, the technique itself is just a trick. The main point is to recognize all these thoughts and distractions that are constantly bombarding us. ..." - Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, "Do Nothing", Tricycle Wisdom Collection
I think we need to take that statement literally. It is not so that the only form of meditation is to sit straight and watch the breath. What is so, every form of meditation creates space, and I would add, creates sacred space. In that sacred space or through it something can happen outside our ordinary experience.
I have long held that the world of our ordinary experience is a world filled with boundaries created by self will. Every sentient creature describes a bound space in this way. As we live we encounter and maneuver through this divided world of self will boundaries and it is this world that might be called "the world that God permits".
It is as if the primary covenant between God and Creation is the permission and consequent freedom described as self will. It is within this description that individuality appears.
It is also true that men have been aware of another world and yearned after it or else the power that comes of it. That yearning was present by evidence in caves and the like at least 45,000 years ago. That sacred world is what is left when self will of all kinds becomes either aligned or irrelevant. You might call that world "God's World" or "the Kingdom" or the "Pure Land" (Buddhist) or "Heaven".
To reach that clarity, the clarity of God's World and draw it close might be called "creating space" and it is what meditation is about. It is also what the highest forms of prayer and magic are about.
Your Rose Heat
Remembering you
under the crystalline sky,
the gray of the low
sun and the fierce cold,
how it brought out your rose heat
as you stood open
near the living source,
and near to me as you chose.
I have touched you there.
March 6, 2010 5:55 AM
simultaneously, when we touch one another there, we are touching both the bruise and the origin of healing. or so it seems to me.
ReplyDeletemeditation. can it really really bring us there? can it really? but of course, there are as many different forms of meditation as there are people.
it is painful to slip from that sacred space back into the land of superfluous distraction.
xo
erin
Erin, yes. I think meditation does change things in that way. I think it must because the influence meditation holds over the spiritual ways of men could not hold as it has. I think that means that at least some of those who meditate achieve major changes. I would say to complement your observation of the many forms of meditation that there are only a few basic forms of meditation while there are an indeterminate number of individual paths approaching these forms.
ReplyDeleteLoving you, my friend. You are right about the wound and the healing being intimately bound together.
Erin, I should add that meditation is not the thing that releases wisdom and power by itself. Meditation is a training that leads us to the soul's clarity. Clarity permits the capture of insight and power. Prayer solicits the same in the form of a grant from a higher power. Magic is the application of procedures that directly approach wisdom and power and the training takes place as part of those procedures rather than as part of the soul more directly as in meditation.
ReplyDeletePrayer trains us in communication with the living presence of wisdom and power.
I would say that all three approaches are interdependent or else may become truncated or crippled.