How to Meditate by Lawrence Leshan Flashcards
Why We Meditate
Why Meditate? We meditate to access our Human potential, to be closer to ourselves and to reality, to open more of our capacity to love and zest for life and enthusiasm, or our knowledge that we are a part of the universe and can never be alienated or separated from it, or our ability to see and function in reality more effectively. An adult can be called a, “deteriorated child.” In other words, it can also be used to “come back home” to who we were as a child. A common thing for most to experience is that when they enter adulthood, they feel that they lost something precious. Almost as though they had lost life itself. They find that they had it right when they were young. Meditation is a way to get back to that place, exactly! As I always say, I do not believe that it makes sense that our existence would fundamentally be unpleasant by nature. Therefore, meditation will get me back to my original (child) state. :( People who “grow up” and use meditation as a way of “going home” described meditation and its use to us, “We are all in a widowed state and our task is to remarry.” (HOW SAD! I WILL TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO BE THEMSELVES). Many serious explorers of the human condition have come to the conclusion that human beings have a great potential for being, for living, for participation, and expression than they have ability to use. These explorers then developed training methods to help people reach these abilities; meditation is one such method. All of these methods, I will add, have much in common.Through meditation you will receive the knowledge that you are already, everything that you are working toward, in other words, you are already there, you are snapping out of it? Or it has been 10 years, you are realizing that none of that was real (in my mental state I noticed my awarenesses of it all) so you are coming in to what to do next??? Putting it all into perspective? It is coming INTO, perspective?? Slowly? In any case, SOMETHING is happening. Your own growth and becoming is a serious and important matter, worthy of working well for. The point of meditation and mystical training is personal development. If intelligently and seriously followed, it will provide growth and bring you further along toward your goal of the vision you have of yourself. Thomas Merton says, “the Westerner retires to the cloister in order to become MORE involved in the world (this is my motive! ), not to retreat from it (as most mystical society members traditionally do).Meditation is concerned with helping you reach a state of being that is not common for the general population. Abraham Maslow says, “When we are fully realized under the term ‘human,’ transcendence experiences are common.” After you are awakened fully, you can experiment with Meditation and have fun. You can pick ones that go with your mood, try different types, you can do guided meditation, listen to classical music, etc.
The Way of Learning to Meditate
Just as a person who works out inveterately and has immaculate hand eye coordination, form, and proficiency, you will become comfortable and confident with ANYTHING that you decide to master, use simply have to use repetition to build up your strength. As you do repetition to master a thing, you are building that muscle :) , in the very same way you build a muscle when you repeatedly lift a weight. Something to note, when you use repetition, and you are on your way to learning something, remain consistent and steadfast until you reach your goal, from beginning to end without a break in your effort. The law of Cause and Effect affords you the knowledge that if you are working toward something, Cause, you will get the Effect, which is, your goal attainment. To use the exercise analogy again, you may or may not “suddenly” pop out with a full muscular physique. You could simply gradually progress and gain a better physique as times passes. **Of course, radical paradigm shifts are possible as well.In the past, admittance to esoteric schools took 3 to five years to locate and another few year to gain admittance. To work with a Sufi teacher, would take that long. They were underground and hidden. Meditation is the fusion of a disciplined mind and a creative Spirit. Meditation heightens sensitivity! (Scientific proof!). **Some mystics alternate between contemplation (thinking) and meditation.
What is Mysticism?
Mysticism, from a historical and psychological viewpoint, is the search for and experience of the relationship of the individual himself and the totality that makes up the universe. The results of this attainment are a capacity to transcend the painful and negative aspects of everyday life and to live with serenity, an inner peace, a joy, and a capacity to love greatly. In Western tradition, there are 3 paths to mystical development, ascetism, illumination, and meditation. Asceticism is fasting, self-flagellation, and severe self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons. Illumination, the sudden tremendous change in personality integration and understanding. Meditation is the tool that you can most easily use. *Note, I already fast :) . **Yoga is a type of mystical training. The major mystical and meditation training schools are Yoga, Zen, Sufi, and Gurdjieff. 9. Mystical schools strive to give you greater efficiency in everyday life and comprehension of a different view of reality than the one we ordinarily use. By “comprehension”, we mean an emotional as well as intellectual understanding. Mystics, people involved in the occult, are realists. They deal with solid reality. They face life, which is a natural attitude.
How to Meditate
1When you meditate, do it in a relaxed manner. Do not put pressure on yourself about it. Enjoy this time to be with yourself and whatever else you encounter during that time :) .
Duality in Physics
In physics, the principle of complementarity states that understanding fully some phenomena would require it to be approached from two different viewpoints (polarities). Each viewpoint, solely, would tell only half of the truth (it would be a half of a whole).
Breath Counting Meditation
a type of meditation is called, Breath Counting. It is designed to teach and practice the ability to do one thing at a time. It can have immense psychological and physiological benefits. Do it for fifteen minutes. You can stand, sit, whichever you like. Look at a clock so you can see when you have reached fifteen minutes. Do not move your head. Count, in your head each time you breathe out. Count up to four, and then begin again at one. If your thoughts stray away from the counting, bring yourself back to the counting. The goal is for you to never think about anything else but you’re counting. Stop once you have reached fifteen minutes on the clock. 9. Used in Zen Training. It is structured of the Outer Way.
Your attention is allowed to be on counting only. Count each exhalation you make. Count up for the length of the exercise.
Your Mental Lack of Discipline
During your meditation journey, you may be surprised at how disconnected we are from ourselves. You may notice some lack of discipline in areas, where you refuse to do as you desire. For instance, in the Counting meditation, you may notice yourself diverting to other topics in your mind, as opposed to doing the exercise. The fact is it is YOUR mind, and nothing else. You pretend at freedom by behaving in an undisciplined manner (an action that most humans commit). To put it plainer, you say that you want one thing, and then behave in another manner. Or you have certain feelings, and act out another. You must live honestly in every moment. So, what is behind this behavior? Must it simply SINK IN to my head that, all I have to do is live honestly at every moment (this is in order, by the way), never lying about my experience to myself or anyone else? Why do we humans do it? Only when one is free of the tyranny of the whim of the moment can you be called truly free. When you are free in your whim some states.15. Excerpt from the Bhagavad-Gita, a long poem with much to do about meditation and mysticism written in India between the second and fifth century: “The wind turns a ship from its course upon the waters: The wandering winds of the senses cast man’s mind adrift and turn his better judgment from its courses. When a man can still his senses I call him illumined.”
Do Not Expect Miracles
**NOTE: Leshan, says that major psychological break throughs are not possible with psychotherapy or with meditation, you will not have “magical enlightenment moments”. He says that you may simply understand, and that is all that happens. I do not believe that life would be unsatisfying, of course, but there could be something to what he is saying here. What I am working at is that we ARE ok. We have so far, as human beings, been getting into our heads concerning “not being ok” because of… etc. and it isn’t true. Then we snap out of it with a sober realization that, “I was ok all then time”. This is true! However, how are we able to “get confused about being ok” in the first place? More is to come on this :) .
How Does Meditation, Feel?
Leshan says that meditation does not “feel” like anything is happening and that is common for people to look for heightened sensation in meditation and if they do not receive it, they give up. The meditational experience HAS to feel like something and be an experience of itself or else you would not know that you were meditating in the first place.
The Line of Logic is Challenged in Physics
The Michaelson-Morley experiment demonstrated that there were situations in which 2 plus 2 does not make 4! Out of the pressure created by this paradox, physics developed a new way of perceiving reality (as we have said meditation will do for us). The crucial aspect of this history is the fact that a paradox forced a new way of understanding reality into being. The concept of perceiving the world as working on a different metaphysical system than the usual mechanical view had been stated in physics for a long time. It remained for Einstein to generalize it to ALL of reality and to demonstrate that it was a valid way of conceptualizing what is.
The Simple Act of Doing will Reward You Deeply
A psychological effect that grows out of meditation is prompted by the work itself. It is not so important how well you do at meditation, how effectively you are doing at not thinking of anything else for instance, but rather how diligently you work at the job. It is the steady work where one gently and firmly and consistently brings oneself back to the task at hand that strengthens (and brings to light) the Will, Purpose, goal-oriented behavior, ability to bar distractions, make choices, etc., and facilitates the personality reorganization that is part of **our growth toward maturity. It is also the consistent work that increases our ability to give ourselves whole heartedly and completely to whatever we are doing at the moment and increases our competency. Experience has shown that those who stay with this kind of work have increased competence and confidence.
Take Programming Out of Your Being
Arthur Deikman, a psychiatrist knowing a great deal about meditation, sees it as leading to “de- automatizaiton of perception and behavior.” Automatization is the process in which the repeated exercise of an action or a perception results in the disappearance from consciousness of its intermediate steps. De automatization is the undoing of automatization. This is done by reinvestment of action and perception with attention. It is not a regression but an undoing of a pattern to permit a new and more advanced experience. The crayfish sloughs its rigid shell when more space is needed for growth. In the same way, the mystic will shed the shell of automatic perception, of automatic affective and cognitive controls to perceive more deeply, reality. One can see from this definition the reason for remarkable freshness and clarity of perception. Things seem to have more “suchness.” Red is redder. Water is wetter. We see with fresh eyes the things that lacked our attention. There is a “cleansing of the gates of perception.”
Oneness
We are all unique unto ourselves and special, and at its polarity, we are all One. Everything is linked together in an intimate web and related to one another. From a scientific point of view, everything in the Universe IS connected, there is nothing that is not related to everything else. Therefore, everything DOES effect everything else.**It is the large things that give our life the meaning it is to have, not the mechanics and details. The meaning and validity of our lives is given to us by the Oneness. Be careful when applying hard, fixed form to things- or structure. When you are in tune with the Oneness of all, you act as though everyone and everything is holy and treat them as you would yourself.
Learning to Care for the Self in Meditation and PsychoTherapy
In all good psychotherapy and in meditation, there is a therapeutic factor which is rarely mentioned. It is the careful paying attention to ourselves at our “best” and “worst” that we train ourselves to be concerned with our total being, this involving our best possible relationship with ourselves and others, which we realize is a deep need of ours. In learning to take ourselves seriously we learn how to garden and cultivate our being, and therefore, the being of others . I am learning to truly be myself or remembering to, for meditation is giving me maturity, self-responsibility, and effortless authenticity of self (being myself).
Physiological Effects of Meditation
Meditation seems to produce a physiological state of deep relaxation throughout the body, coupled with a wakeful and highly alert mental state. Central to the response to meditation is the lowered rate of metabolism, which breads the **lowered rate of oxygen use and production carbon dioxide, in effect. During meditation we are focusing and doing one thing at a time and in this case, the signals we are giving our body as to how it should respond are simpler and more coherent during meditation than at any other time. Throughout our daily lives, we are telling our body to physiologically do many things, all at once. Meditation is where we are sending out one signal at a time. The effect of this is physiologically positive and there is a strong tendency to normalize reactions, to behave physiologically in a more relaxed and healthy manner. Where tension and anxiety usually dwelled, there is an increase in mental awareness and alertness and a decrease in physiological tension such as increased heart rate and metabolic response.
