Meditation, and spirituality easily evolves into nonsense. The more people talk about it, the nutzier it gets. Our current ideas about meditation are a good example of this.
When I hear people talk about meditation it sounds like they are trying to get something with their meditation. Like, if I do this practice, I will gain something. I’ll gain wisdom, I’ll gain enlightenment. Sometimes it’s simpler, I’ll get better health, and that’s fine but it’s still consumer mentality.
It would be more useful if instead of “meditation,” we used the word “listen”.
Meditation is a buzzword now. With meditation we have the idea that we’re trying to conquer the mind, or trying to go beyond the mind. It feeds into the idea that something is wrong with you and it needs to be cured by the meditation.
But if we use the word “listen”, now all of a sudden you are a participant in this activity that you’re doing. You’re listening. Listening implies the listener, right? You can’t listen without knowing who you are, listening. So try changing your meditations into just simply listening.
This makes it so much easier, because you can do this anywhere, right? You don’t have to be sitting in some particular posture, it doesn’t have to be quiet. Listening can happen anywhere, eyes open or shut.
Also, as a joke, because I like taking stabs at spirituality, I’m going to say I think the reason the original masters invented meditation was to get people to be quiet for a few minutes! It’s like, questions, questions, this, that, that, this, that, that. Finally they said… okay, just sit still for a few minutes, please.
And this certainly applies to us today, doesn’t it too? Meditation literally means stop the questions for a few minutes, stop the anxiety for a few minutes, like, take a breath.Take a breath.
Whew!
But change meditation to the idea of listening and suddenly it puts you in the driver’s seat, it makes you the master of your process of what’s going on.