What is Meditation

Meditation Techniques

Spiritual Inspirators

 
 


CONSCIOUSNESS & AWARENESS

I. Consiousnes & Evolution

II. Defining Awareness & Consciousness
III. The Mystery of Awareness

IV. The Enigma of Consciousness
V. Consciousness in the East and the West
VI. What Can be Said About Consciousness
VII. The Ouroboros Consciousness
VIII.  Ouroboric Super-Awareness

IX. The Super-Awake Flow
X. Fields of Consciousness

XI. Group Meditation
 

 
THE INNER AND THE OUTER PERSON
The inner and the outer Person
Integral Suffering and Happiness
Modern Forms of Suffering
 

THE BUTTERFLY OF THE SOUL

The liberation from or of the Self
The Glue of Love
God wants to be Human

CIVILIZATION & CONSCIOUSNESS
Civilization and Consciousness 
Civilization and Consciousness Part II

 








For people who do
not believe in god:
Replace the word 'god'
with consciousness.

 
WHAT IS MEDITATION.DK

He who seeks God in some way (read meditation technique or ritual),
grasps the way and loses God, who dwells in the way. But he who seeks God without a way, grasps God and lives with the Son.

Meister Eckhart

Meditation is Eternal Spiralling Repetition towards Wisdom
There will be a lot of repetations on Meditation.dk.  A curious feature of the outward-facing, information-based academic ego is that it believes it understands as long as things are explained just once. This is indeed the case for knowledge or information. Wisdom, however, operates differently. Here, eternal repetition serves as the cellular massage that gradually softens us enough to move in the simple forms of truth. Only mantric repetition allows us to "walk the talk" from knowledge to wisdom. Every time you focus on your stomach for even a minute instead of looking down at your smartphone, a neuron grows in the right direction in your brain. In this context, meditation can be metaphorically likened to scooping darkness out of the soul's primal body with a teaspoon. If Sisyphus had learned the secret of mantra meditation, he would have been happy.

Meditation is to sit still in wakefulness.

Meditation is difficult because it is simple.

Meditation is wakeful, effortless effort.

Meditation is something that happens - not something you do.

Meditation is seeing realising that God is a projection.

The unknown remains unknown because we think we know it. In constant self-remembrance, this truth will be repeated as a mantra on Meditation.dk.

The Potato Sack
We block information when we receive information. Let me give an example. I was a tour guide for 30 tourists in Northern India. We were driving in a ramshackle bus by Western standards at breakneck speed through cows, goats, endless crowds of people, and vehicles that mostly resembled props from the movie, Planet of the Apes. Bus travel in Northern India is like being trapped in a fractal, where the same decayed roadside-bombed village with the same dark-skinned people with dark hair and dark eyes in a spiraling eternal chain dance keeps reappearing hour after hour, no matter how much the driver accelerates to escape this karmic cycle of dusty roads that will never end. The goal is Nirvana, in the form of our hotel's clean and orderly freedom from all things Indian. (Even this five-star order turns out to be Maya, an illusion that reveals itself in the sound of the first cockroach crushed underfoot on the bathroom floor.)

During such a trip, a tourist struggled up through the winding bus with a question: About half an hour ago, we drove through a town where a woman on the roadside was carrying a large sack. What was in that sack? Without hesitation, I replied: There were potatoes in the sack.

The guest was satisfied with the answer and returned to his seat. Time and time again, during my 10 years as a tour guide in the East, I experienced how the Western mind is conditioned to receive 'explanations' that, in reality, explain nothing or are insignificant, such as when a tour guide piles up irrelevant details about how many bricks there are in a particular building. When delving deeper, questions are asked that directly relate to the familiar home life but are infinitely irrelevant in an Indian's world. Especially in India, I received many foolish questions that led to even more improvised foolish answers.

Explanations Explain Nothing
I realized that it was actually India's insane unpredictability that gave rise to this need for explanations. Through 'explanations', the content of which no one was interested in or at best had forgotten half an hour later, India's anxiety-inducing incomprehensibility was dispelled. This country's chaotic mathematical metabolism exposed to me the fact that logical explanations can be just as effective as religion in keeping the unfathomably incomprehensible incomprehensibility we find ourselves in at bay.

No one wants to waver in their faith in the cosmos by worrying about what Atlas stands on, let alone what the Indian turtle, supporting the elephants, stands on itself.

India is a great place for self-discovery. For the country's wonderfully bustling life can be seen by the fortunate as a mirror reflecting the chaos that exists within ourselves.

Now, after many years of staying in India, I will attempt to describe the troll that holds up the turtle, without dismissing it by calling it a potato. The astonishing thing is that this troll hides within ourselves, beneath our skin, in our own bodies. It can only be found and exposed when, with eyes tightly shut, one gropes blindly for the hidden within the obvious.


The Invisible Thread
Once upon a time in ancient India, a king suddenly became angry with his prime minister.

The king sentenced the minister to life imprisonment at the very top of a high tower. The tower was 20 meters tall, and there was no way to escape.

However, the minister had a loyal and intelligent wife. One night, she went to the tower where her beloved husband was imprisoned. She tied a 20-meter, nearly invisible thread made of spider silk to the hind leg of a beetle. At the end of the spider silk, she tied the thinnest silk thread she could find in the kingdom, also 20 meters long. At the end of the silk thread, she now tied a string, and at the end of the string, she tied a sturdy rope.

Then she smeared honey on the beetle's antennae and placed it on the tower. The beetle, constantly smelling the sweet honey, steadily climbed to the top of the tower in hopes of finding the honey. When it reached the top, the minister grabbed the beetle.

He now had an invisible thread in his hand. With the help of the invisible thread, he pulled up the silk thread, and with the silk thread, the string, and with the string, the rope. With the help of the rope, he could now climb out of the ego-tower. He lived happily in freedom until the end of his days, together with his divinely faithful wife.

As with all fairy tales, especially those from India, there is a deep meaning behind this story. The king represents your old ego-self. The minister in free and happy love is your soul's butterfly.

What does the invisible thread mean? Discover it for yourself and tell yourself.
 

Everything is Connected to Everything Else

Learn to see. Realize that everything is connected to everything else.
Leonardo Da Vinci.

Whether we perceive it religiously as God or not, everything is connected to everything else. The faithful wife represents God or the Great Whole that we are always a part of.

Right now, at this very moment, you hold the thread of freedom in your hand, just like the minister.

The thread of freedom is a simple micro-feeling... the sensation of being connected to your surroundings, your body, your family, friends, people, the entire Earth, and the universe.

I dare to say that without this simple feeling in the inner darkness of your body, life would be directionless and meaningless.

However, the thread of freedom is almost invisible, and you're seeking something grand to save you from your life's imprisonment in the ego-tower. How often have we discarded it in pursuit of what we believed was freedom?

The Thread from Above
Therefore, we act like the arrogant spider in a small story by Sophus Claussen: The spider bites an apparently useless thread. After the spider's fateful bite, the entire beautifully constructed web collapses; for the thread from above was the thread the spider had come from and held the entire web up. It is the Thread from Above the spider has bitten - the thread that connects us to the infinite whole.

Translated to our everyday lives, it means that we always have freedom within us. It is almost invisibly present as a small point in our heart. The way out/in to freedom is hidden in the infinitely small. But it is easy to overlook in the pursuit of experiences - so we bite the life thread or discard it instead of pulling in the saving rope.

The delicate little life thread is the path to the heart's glimmer of love. The little glimmer of love is freedom. It was always free. You were always free. The challenge is to recall it... and live it. When you feel this small sensation of freedom, your paths no longer lead to a goal. For you are the goal, and all the paths you walk are like rivers, abundance from your own core.

Whenever we remember what Gurdijeff calls "constant self-remembrance," what Nisargadatta Maharaj refers to as dwelling in "I am," and celebrating the small, almost invisible glimmer of love in our hearts, we fuel the little matchstick fire that will one day burn down all our walls.

The Indian Beggar
An old Indian tale tells of a beggar who sat on a treasure of gold his entire life without knowing it. Only when he was buried under the tile he had sat on throughout his miserable life was the treasure discovered. The hunt for the sublime begins with the first shovel into the seemingly worthless and the banal.

To know and feel the Luminous Dark Primordial Ground of Life is the goal of this pursuit.

The Diamond Merchant and the Thief
Another Indian folktale tells of how a famous thief and a diamond merchant met on a long train journey. The thief had carefully spied on the diamond merchant and had booked a reservation in the same sleeping car compartment as the merchant. This story was told to me by a local shopkeeper in Main Bazar as we sat on plastic stools under a banyan tree at sunset, sipping masala chai. As with all great wandering tales, this ancient story was now adapted to an India that had become one of the world's largest train nations by the English colonial power... But back to the story... After a few hours of travel, the diamond merchant recognized the famous thief and now feared for the upcoming night.

As night fell and the diamond merchant could no longer resist sleep, aided by a masala chai with a sleeping pill, the master thief began searching for the diamond merchant's diamonds. The thief searched all night but, to his great surprise, didn't find the diamonds. When the two traveling companions approached the end of their journey the next day, the master thief gathered his courage and asked the diamond merchant:

"How did you manage to hide the diamonds from me? It has never happened before that I couldn't find what I was looking for. My professional honor as a master thief has suffered a serious blow." The diamond merchant replied, "I recognized you as the famous thief. That's why I hid the bag of diamonds in your own pocket."

The embodied life of attention is like the diamonds in the thief's pocket. We live in our attentive bodies every moment, yet paradoxically, it reveals itself so close to us that we aren't really aware of it and therefore don't value it. Often, these eternal autonomous bodily repetitions, such as heartbeats, breathing, falling asleep, waking up, etc., are small events.

Nevertheless, within the close-sensed micro-life of the body lies a wonderful key to freedom. Here comes the headline of the first of the wonderful secrets from my own mundane pocket-philosophical observatory: By becoming conscious and attentive to my close-sensed everyday life, hidden by the dulling effect of repetition and lack of recognizing distance, I can transform my indifferent life into equanimity.

"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned to live." - Lin Yutang

The key to knowing, feeling, and being infinitely vast lies hidden and forgotten in the infinitely indifferent. To live Meditation is to attentively and consciously discover and then live both the eternally repeating and thus eternally constant, and that which is too close to comprehend.

The meaningful micro-life
Achieve greatness in small things... In the universe, great actions are made up of small ones.
Tao teh King, Lao Tzu - 63

Every little action we take, however, leaves a trace in our brain.
All the micro-moments of our lives create, like small drops, the direction of our life's wave. If we add up all the time in the small moments where we engaged in procrastination, it actually amounts to several years in an adult life! If instead, during all that time, we had given attentive meditative space to an honest sensing of our body, our brain would anatomically look different!

Every single second of our lives counts. In every single moment, you can spiritually move in two directions: either you come closer to yourself, or you move further away.

Not only our inner bodily attentive micro-life but also what we feel in contact with what lies just outside our skin boundaries play a fundamental, yet almost unconscious role in our lives. Are you currently aware of the sensation of your clothes touching your skin or the sensation of having hair on your head? The next time you go for a walk, try stopping and staring at the ground in front of you. There lies the treasure of gold. It consists of millions of pebbles. That is the eternity you step on daily.

It's only when the noisy refrigerator suddenly stops that we realize that we've actually been hearing it all along. If the primordial ground disappeared for just a second, it would shake everyone with a deafening roar of reality, immediately relativizing our normal lives and turning them into an illusion.

Only those who consciously sense the micro-life within and around them can live in and out of the Radiant Dark Primordial Ground.

Often we only discover how precious it is to live when it's too late. A human is a beggar on a treasure of gold, who, in the most literal sense, only became rich in life after death.
I am a desperate seeking master thief with a bag of diamonds in my pocket when I do not live my inner champagne-bubbling micro-life. Meister Eckhart says that this ignorance is the only primordial difference between a fly and a saint.

Seen in this perspective, the pursuit of the primordial ground is not a process, but a sudden rediscovery, an a-ha! - especially for those who do not crave and search in old books.

Only the hunter who hunts no-thing finds what he seeks.

The discovery that the diamonds one so dearly desired were in one's own pocket all along calls for liberating laughter: Was it really that simple? The treasure of gold was here all the time, overlooked, hidden, and forgotten in the drowsy twilight landscapes of our near-life.

That is why Kabir calls us strange fish, swimming in the ocean, longing for water.

The Living Radiant Darkness and Roaring Primordial Ground
And what do we find here when we leave all the metaphors behind? To experience THAT requires a greater perspective, which can only be found by leaving what we assume as our reality.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
When we return after this experience, we must again put on words and images, but which ones?

When I have seen and felt the roar of the real - which sources should I then quote afterward? Quotes from philosophers, scientists, or New Age gurus can never replace the fallible but fresh words from my own inner source.

Words from my source, however, cannot quench your thirst. At best, they can make you long - long to find your way back to your own source. For everyone should drink water from their own source and then have the courage to speak and act their own words.

This does not mean that we are alone. If each of us follows our own individual life source's winding course to its origin, we will one day meet on the Radiant Dark Primordial Ground's slopes.

This day is also now.

Meditative Quantum Shamanism
Most of the thoughts brought into play in these sections are well-known building blocks in their respective scientific and/or philosophical architectures. In this way, there is nothing new under the sun...

The question, however, is whether these mundane building blocks can be assembled into a new temple architecture, where the modern meditating person can be inspired to recognize themselves in new self-narratives, where religious experiences do not need to fight the traditional battle against reason.

For the free thinker, there are no binding religious scriptures. Instead, there is plenty of inspiration to be found - from the New Testament to the Upanishads to modern quantum physics cosmology.

I attended a lecture by quantum physicist Holger Bech Nielsen. Although I did not understand everything the ecstatic quantum shaman conjured up on the board, I was struck by the metaphorical muscularity in his words. I experienced him as a pure tribute poet who unknowingly praised the state of blissful empty fullness that can be experienced in meditative moments.

During this sublime seance, my meditative self-narratives began to dance with timeless photons, which, cheerfully 3rected by Bech Nielsen's ecstatic arm swings, flew through microcosmic wormholes in eternal pendulum travel between past, present, and future.

In deep meditative glimpses, it is not unusual to experience what I can now, with the help of my new cosmologist, call time-nullifying retrocausality.

My family karmic grandmother's inherited sin admonishing index finger fell, along with several other causal narrative realities, like a depleted rocket part back to Newton's Universe.
For here stood this exalted cosmologist, conjuring up wormholes where Meditation on new fantasy-winged self-narratives could now fly.

The Hindus' and Buddhists' notions of this world's sufferings, where only liberation from the bondage of rebirths was the ultimate goal, were dealt a death blow by the quantum priest's proclamation of miracles in the form of ejected particles traveling through time-nullifying wormholes and hitting themselves on the way out, and therefore not entering the wormholes that caused them to hit themselves.
This was better than a Marx Brothers film and, at the same time, as short-circuiting for the otherwise eternally dominating intellect as a Zen koan.
With or without Holger Bech Nielsen's blessing, I experienced a genuine Satori when the photon under his skillful quantum throw hit itself.

I am eternally grateful to him...

A new narrative began to take shape.

In the brain's consciousness universe, which curves into itself in a galactic annulment of time and space, on its way towards the unrecognizable primordial ground's rebirthing tunnel center, we stand as shining stars, through which the universe sees itself and laughs... in fact, it is about to die of laughter.

And that's just my little story... With Wittgenstein's concept, it is true enough, sufficiently true... for me... here in space... now.

In this narrative, the intellect is not an enemy - nor a master - only a good servant who has Socratically overcome itself by the aid of itself.

And maybe tomorrow - guided by my serving intellect - I discover that my story was not sufficiently true. Maybe I had forgotten an important chapter in the Bible, the Upanishads, or the Quran... Or maybe you, dear reader, pulled my babbling narratives out of the cozy suit.


But it doesn't actually matter that much. No faith or doubt drama in my universe... For my narratives are only by-products. There is no pot of gold at the end of my religions' narrative rainbow. All my meditative narratives fade in the light of the phenomenologically mystical experience that created them: the shivering awe over the ever-expanding not-knowing that grows in introspection:
When attention is turned towards itself, there is a sensation of not-knowing.

When it is turned outwards, what can be known is created.
Nisargadatta Maharaj

The same shivering awe can be experienced on a starry night when you look up at the galaxies in the sky. This is how I imagine Einstein was inspired to the following quote:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein

These quotes by Nisargadatta Maharaj and Albert Einstein emphasize the importance of embracing the mysterious and the unknown in our lives. They remind us that there is much more to learn and explore, both within ourselves and in the world around us. By fostering a sense of wonder and curiosity, we can better appreciate the beauty and complexity of existence and continue to grow in knowledge and understanding.

Intellectual understanding is a wonderful by-product
If you have read the previous sections, you will know that everything written here on www.Meditation.dk serves only one purpose: to be a form of spiritual entertainment.

It is NOT necessary to have an intellectual understanding to become Meditated.
As the Indian sage Papaji said: There is nothing to understand...
Meditation.dk, however, is aimed at those who wish to understand why there is nothing to understand. After all, Socrates says that he knows that he knows nothing. When words know that they know nothing, they become wonderful servants in your house.

When words believe they know, you are a servant to a city boy.
Meditation requires no prior understanding. The capacity for meditation is a natural, endogenous, genetically wrapped gift that is just waiting for the day to be unwrapped by you! ... This day is your spiritual birthday...

All you need to do is pull the gift ribbon. Then the recessive meditation genes that have slept a sleeping beauty sleep side by side with several other wonderful abilities in your quantum biological consciousness's infinite space will awaken.
When you wake up someone who is sleeping, you don't need to read a thesis to them first. (That's a better strategy at bedtime) Just a gentle touch is necessary for the person to wake up.
Light is kindled by light
And afterwards you ask, astonished, with large pupils in the morning light:

How did it happen?

And so Meditation.dk began...



The blind monks examining the elephant