Meditation in Amsterdam - Other Things Meditation is Not
Hello all!,
Looking at the Meditation in Amsterdam website I realized that my previous post missed a couple of very important points about what meditation is not so though I'd continue with the thread of the topic and mention these in a brief entry for today.
Anyway these are two crucial things that meditation is not:
Spiritual woo woo
What does society at large associate with meditation? Probably has to do with chanting mantras, talking about chakras and re-incarnation. It is associated with "spirituality" whatever that term even means now other than a personal collection of beliefs that are personal, tightly held and impossible to prove.
The new age movement probably had a place as the natural opposition to the doctrines of organized religion but it suffered from big gaps of its own and in some cases it only helped the practitioner jump from the flames into the frying pan. Get caught in mysticism and even if you don't practice it in a church or a mosque (note how I purposely skipped the synagogue as the Jewish mindset is notoriously secular), and you still caught in the same paradigm but with more modern stories.
Indeed some of the reaction and misinformation about meditative practice has been inflicted by the more fundamentalist of organized religions to which any Eastern ancient practice is seen as pagan and therefore heretical.
However, these traditions are rooted in tools that don't require the practitioner to believe or stop believing in anything. They are totally a-religious and as to spiritual, well, it depends how you define the term and where you draw the line.
Does it feel weird when you go into a meditation area? Hell yes. It's not normal to go into a space where people have withdrawn within and it can have kind of icky feel to it. We're not used to that. People get together to chat, make noise. It certainly doesn't help if images of the Buddha are around, but these are, in the eyes of most practitioners, sign posts or reminders of principles and not symbols of a story that must be believed.
*Reminder to write a post elaborating on this last point which is incredibly important and is illustrated in the well-known "kill the Buddha" adage.
An End in Itself
Here's another beautiful trap we're likely to fall into when we get into the practice of meditation. We want to get good at it. Be able to go the distance from 10 minutes to an hour and zero thoughts in your head during the whole time.
This is very similar to people who get into yoga to "get in shape" and think that the postures are there to make you flexible. If you can touch your toes with your legs straight, you're doing well.
The problem here is that we fail to recognize that meditation is the vehicle, not the destination. And when we do this, and meditation becomes an end in itself we get frustrated when we have a bad session and the neighbor's dog distracts your zen. This is the old "get out of my way you jerk! can't you see you're getting in the way of my enlightenment!?"
This is why at Meditation in Amsterdam we spend quite some time understanding the purpose of meditation and how it will help us. Yes it does quite down the mind, but then what? Why is that important and would we not be left with a big void and a blank stare in our face? Is this good or bad and how come? And so on.
For the real benefits to be achieved, our practice of the techniques need to involve a philosophical and even psychological element to them which gives context to meditation. Without context we really have no clue what we're doing.
So, hope this starts to clarify the panorama a bit more as we get deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
Namaste
Pablo
www.meditationamsterdam.com
Looking at the Meditation in Amsterdam website I realized that my previous post missed a couple of very important points about what meditation is not so though I'd continue with the thread of the topic and mention these in a brief entry for today.
Anyway these are two crucial things that meditation is not:
Spiritual woo woo
What does society at large associate with meditation? Probably has to do with chanting mantras, talking about chakras and re-incarnation. It is associated with "spirituality" whatever that term even means now other than a personal collection of beliefs that are personal, tightly held and impossible to prove.
The new age movement probably had a place as the natural opposition to the doctrines of organized religion but it suffered from big gaps of its own and in some cases it only helped the practitioner jump from the flames into the frying pan. Get caught in mysticism and even if you don't practice it in a church or a mosque (note how I purposely skipped the synagogue as the Jewish mindset is notoriously secular), and you still caught in the same paradigm but with more modern stories.
Indeed some of the reaction and misinformation about meditative practice has been inflicted by the more fundamentalist of organized religions to which any Eastern ancient practice is seen as pagan and therefore heretical.
However, these traditions are rooted in tools that don't require the practitioner to believe or stop believing in anything. They are totally a-religious and as to spiritual, well, it depends how you define the term and where you draw the line.
Does it feel weird when you go into a meditation area? Hell yes. It's not normal to go into a space where people have withdrawn within and it can have kind of icky feel to it. We're not used to that. People get together to chat, make noise. It certainly doesn't help if images of the Buddha are around, but these are, in the eyes of most practitioners, sign posts or reminders of principles and not symbols of a story that must be believed.
*Reminder to write a post elaborating on this last point which is incredibly important and is illustrated in the well-known "kill the Buddha" adage.
An End in Itself
Here's another beautiful trap we're likely to fall into when we get into the practice of meditation. We want to get good at it. Be able to go the distance from 10 minutes to an hour and zero thoughts in your head during the whole time.
This is very similar to people who get into yoga to "get in shape" and think that the postures are there to make you flexible. If you can touch your toes with your legs straight, you're doing well.
The problem here is that we fail to recognize that meditation is the vehicle, not the destination. And when we do this, and meditation becomes an end in itself we get frustrated when we have a bad session and the neighbor's dog distracts your zen. This is the old "get out of my way you jerk! can't you see you're getting in the way of my enlightenment!?"
This is why at Meditation in Amsterdam we spend quite some time understanding the purpose of meditation and how it will help us. Yes it does quite down the mind, but then what? Why is that important and would we not be left with a big void and a blank stare in our face? Is this good or bad and how come? And so on.
For the real benefits to be achieved, our practice of the techniques need to involve a philosophical and even psychological element to them which gives context to meditation. Without context we really have no clue what we're doing.
So, hope this starts to clarify the panorama a bit more as we get deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
Namaste
Pablo
www.meditationamsterdam.com
Comments
Post a Comment