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MEDITATION
Why Meditate?
Meditation is not dwelling on a special state of mind. It is being with things as they are. It is being with the beauty, the boredom, and the catastrophe of our life —with the happiness, the tension, the lethargy, the speed, the thoughts of our relatives, our co-workers, the driver that cut us off, what to eat for dinner, pain in our legs, how we are a great success, what a failure we are, fears for our children, the sounds of the neighborhood, our sense of basic dignity, moments of non-thought being, everything.
It's important to see that the foundation we use, the practice we use, and the result we achieve are fundamentally the same.
The basis of meditation is the natural disposition to be as we are, to be with things as they are. Formal meditation is a reminder to relax and be natural in this way. And the result is settling down with the natural processes of our body, speech and mind. That way, we start to uncover and bring out the qualities, flow, and power of our own energy.
In this process, there is no for or against. We're not trying to change anything or accomplish anything, except be wakeful to our energy.
As we meditate, our perceptions begin to become very clear, and our intelligence is sharpened. We begin to go along with the patterns of sanity and wisdom we perceive, and to go beyond the patterns of neurosis we inherit from ourselves and our culture.
We begin to realize there is no alternative to the experience we have, that our experience is the only experience there is, and that is our working basis. Finally, the more we see how our mind works, the more confidence we have in our own mind and our own kind of wakefulness.
Our appreciation becomes its own strength and that strength grows. Everything is strengthened when we relax and are ourselves. We develop confidence in ourselves and confidence in our experience.
In this way, meditation is a practice to develop intelligence, skillfulness and dignity.
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