Meditation, The Only Revolution (rev. 30 oct 2010)
Meditation today has become a household word, with everyone who teaches people to touch their toes taking up the mantle of meditation-guru. So before we begin, let me warn the average prolific surfer that this is not a course for the busy consumer, mesmerized by what he can own and try. This particular course is not about improving your job-skills, your sex-life or your SAT scores. This is more for the monastic devout set, those who see nothing profound about astronomy, hip-replacement surgery, air-bags or HD TV on their cells. Those who need daily life to be raising their hearts to that which has nothing to do with man’s obtuse progress, raise them to that which is higher than man’s celebrated accomplishments, be he man who has never seen a piece of iron, or man who has walked on the moon.
If you try reading 10 pages ahead or so you will see that this is not an easy study, this is nothing like the self-hypnosis that is being taught the general public. You can’t walk up to anyone displaying symptoms of problems and begin telling them any of this. This is for the person who is looking for it, for whom only the ultimate will serve. We are used to experts helping people who are not experts, at least in theory, but nothing you learn here will help anyone but the expert.
Reading becomes a contest if there is both a reader and a writer. Most of us have no doubt heard the one about how impossible it becomes to add anything to the full cup. What’s the function of being the reader? Is it to be convinced? Here the writer does not want you convinced. Conviction is theft, and nothing valuable should be put up for conviction. Is it the reader’s job to exercise judgment? The mind can never become new or be considered open if we can not doubt ourselves every time we doubt the writer. To doubt the writer is fine when we also doubt our doubt, so the mind will not close.
Does a reader exist as the fear of being convinced to do or say the wrong thing in the future? And can any such fear be due to the failure in the past to ward off convictions, to fail to doubt that which is asking to be stolen? Are the convictions already there, ready to do battle instead of to inquire? Is there any fear of being convinced that is not a fear of the habit rather than of the next chapter? And why is the habit so limited, that it begins to kick like a mule when it has accumulated a certain amount of conviction?
Who was it in our distant past who assumed that we could not find things out for ourselves, but had to be told what to believe, had to live of stolen insight and take the chance that it is fraudulent? If you know something about a time you were not in, isn’t the knowledge a destitute substitute for having been there, a false clue or lead, even when it is as well-meant as possible? Doesn’t that knowledge make you even more of a stranger to that time? The stalk testifies that there is the root, and with the knowledge you were convinced to accept you have become a stranger to the root.
Meditation is to come to a complete stop. This is opposite to going on, and what makes it so powerful is that going on is the acceptance of man’s terms for having man on Earth (and for presuming to eventually invade the cosmos above it as if the moon were a welcome mat at the door of God’s better housing). We are conditioned, and then this conditioning drives us through every day. When we come to a complete stop we are offending the authority which conditioned us. We are loosening its grip, threatening to free ourselves and find a life that serves no one who has manipulated his way to a point in the pecking order by manipulating us, fabricating truth and reality in the knowledge that trust and distrust are impossible to separate rationally; that we must trust the designers or perish and we must distrust them or perish.
Freedom, according to what we are taught, is financial success. But success is to be more able to demand service than failure can do. The more one succeeds the more people and other resources have to serve one. Is it actually possible, in the real world, as opposed to the world according to our training, the world according to books of history, biography, religion and fiction, to require more service and also become more free, or is freedom born of freeing others? Can we ask this question together, or does the reader have to ask himself? Can we succeed and also throw off the shackles of conditioning? Or is success the ultimate enslavement, a religion of man’s giving man what nature never could, what nature does not give gibbons or the wild orchids? Is having your own 747 evolution?
Can we feel how man has the world in his grip, how one can not expect anything but that man’s rules are the rules of living for all living things? Can one feel this new God, man?
Freedom? Will man let me be free? Impossible! It is like letting a cow retire when it can still make all those liters of perfect milk each day. If one looks at oneself as potentially free one sees oneself as a trespasser on man’s property, doesn’t one? And yet, if this is truly the case, if man has become God on Earth, all life that is not serving man is doomed to absolute extinction. What is the hope of remaining-biodiversity conservation but to prove that nature is worth more than fertile land? And what kind of argument is that when land-prices will always rise? Job-security! Prove it perpetually.
And this is the other side of freedom. Nature is free. Its freedom may kill it, but it is living free. And it is this natural freedom that is the antithesis to success. It is a freedom no one has a right to by law. And meditation is to bring about this right to, not for the masses but for the one. Meditation unwinds the strands of conflict, and without conflicting one can not be owned or frustrated.
Can anything oppose a freedom one has a right to, not by law, but by nature? This is not merely a freedom from fear or from pressure or tension, not a freedom of relief but a freedom that is love. Not a love familiar to man, which is the rubbish of sentiment and wishful thinking, but the love that evolved the beauty of life, the incredible diversity of beauty including the beauty, equally invisible to man, of the preschoolers, the untutored lives of little children, following something, when we are not directing them, that is theirs since birth, and not programmed by greedy authority.
You are very perceptive of human condition as it expresses these days. Brings out my inner self movements in broad daylight and makes one realize what a fool I have been all these years. When i was ten years old this was clear to me but had no context and and due to other life-related pressures the light slowly faded.
Thanks for providing the clarity and providing the correct context. In reading books I found there were only two other people in my lifetime who were as clear as you – one was JKrishnamurti, and the other was Agehananda bharati.
I used to describe what you are saying as – there are two aspects of life that run parallel. One aspect is the life we live in the present and all life-forms live this way; and the other aspect is the life humans live by thought-construct. People’s lives function between these two extremes (sane to insane).
Freedom is freedom of the known.
Please do not delude yourself. Nature is bound. Nature has no idea what freedom is. Nature can only function in its bounds. Nature cannot go beyond itself. The human learnt it all from nature. Nature is as greedy as the human. Water has only one course. To reach the sea. What comes in its way it destroys, as long as it can reach the sea.
ajay’s is a common misconception, but it is the nature of self that everything it knows or accepts is a misconception. If he had said that nature is beautiful it would not mean that he is in any sense aware of it. He is just looking for the right thing to say, like the right move in a boardgame.
Nature is intelligent and always has been. We have to be aware of how this functions to be clear about it, and school won’t teach us anything that requires sensitivity to discover. How can one be stupid? By having a complex form and a simple mind. So if there is fresh new life on a viable planet this is simple awareness, but since its form is also simple it is intelligent, and therefore it enjoys life and evolves.
Now, today, a billion years or whatever into evolution, most life is profoundly complex. Does this mean it is suddenly making all kinds of mistakes? No. The form is only as profoundly complex as the intelligence. Evolution does not design crashes.
So nature rarely makes mistakes, all those species normally live intelligently. Why? Because they are all where they evolved to be. Man is the exception. Man leaves his niche and his habitat, which means he invades other habitats. And so he is always mistaken; he makes only mistakes, he is unintelligent perpetually. Because intelligence is one thing: harmony. Only life in its niche within its habitat harmonizes.
Why are we conditioned to call ourselves ‘the intelligent lifeform’ and nature the opposite? Because we are mistaken only as long as nature is intelligent; if we say it is nothing there is no mistake in conflicting with it and exterminating it. In the middle east and the west religion is the first piece of history, and its first teaching is that God made man and only man in his own image, and the first religious service was to torture animals. This is the prosperous preparing us to serve them, the experienced tricking the innocent into unquestioning obedience.
Meditation is about mistakes. Act and it is a mistake. Stop and it is a question regarding action. Make the question sincere enough and the intelligence resurfaces. This intelligence is love.