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WHAT IS MEDITATION.DK
What is meditation?
One answer I could come up with is to be n a state of awe. What Einstein
writes about art and science includes in my view also the phenomenon of
meditation:
"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
Once, sitting with two very close friends, I wanted to express the
profound connection between enduring hardships and attaining deep
realizations. By what I can only describe as a divine slip of the
tongue, I said:
"The higher
you fall, the deeper you fly."
Later, I came across a quote by
Meister Eckhart that resonated deeply with me:
"...for the
deeper the valleys go,
the loftier the heights that rise above them,
the deeper the well, the higher too:
for depth and height are the same thing."
So, what is meditation? It is
the process of transforming your failures into gateways to higher
understanding and transcendence.
That is why Meister Eckharts
states:
Man has to seek God in error and forgetfulness and foolishness.
Meditation is an eternal spiraling repetition towards wisdom.
Take it for granted—life will bring you through almost endless cycles of
error, forgetfulness, and foolishness. This is why there will be many
repetitions 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 might be true for knowledge
or information, but wisdom 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 realizing that God is a projection field of what we do not
understand in ourselves.
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
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