Most people become interested in meditation because they are stressed out or unhappy. They want relief, escape, or instant relief so they can feel better. This is understandable. When we are uncomfortable we seek relief.
All I would like to make the reader aware of in this article is the fact that relief is not always a good thing. I'm sure you have heard of certain people who lack the ability to feel pain. Such a person could literally have their hand on a hot stove and not realize it. The person feels no pain, while their hand is being burned.
Likewise, any practice that covers up the real cause by eliminating symptoms can cause us to continue to be harmed without realizing it. In physical terms, this is called symptom removal. In emotional terms, it is called reassurance. In spiritual terms it is called deception.
It is like this: suppose a lady is unhappy because she resents her parents. Her unhappiness leads to feeling bad. To relieve her symptoms she goes out with friends and parties, drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana. She temporarily feels better, but the under lying cause of her unhappiness is still there. The underlying cause is the resentment (hatred) toward her parents.
She might try taking pills or she might try reading spiritual books or singing nice music. She might try yoga to find peace of mind. But the marijuana, the drugs, the partying, the spiritual music, or the yoga are all attempts to get symptom relief.
To the extent that any of them succeed, they only keep the real cause buried. Again, in this situation the cause is resentment. The resentment, being a form of hatred, causes her to be separated from love. Being separated from her own ground of good and the love therein, she feels empty. Separated from love, she also has no love for herself, other than the compensations of comforting herself with food, drugs, or other substitutes for real love.
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Now suppose that instead she woke up one day and realized that she was hating her parents. Seeing her own wrong, her discomfort would increase. But suppose she also saw that she had been judging her parents. She realized that her hatred of them was wrong, especially because her parents too were lost. They were doing the best they could; and they too had been hurt when they were kids. No one loved them.
Deeply realizing all of this leads to a change of heart. No longer judging and blaming them, she drops the resentment. She feels bad for her own sneaky hate, experiences remorse, and she becomes a friend of conscience.
Now, a friend of conscience and a friend of God, no longer resenting her parents: a great weight is lifted from her mind. Joy returns. She is free to go on with her life and leave the past behind. Suddenly she has no more need for drugs, marijuana, yoga, music or anything else to distract her. She is a friend of conscience, at peace with God and at peace with herself. She is no longer full of hate.
Now the above example of hating parents is just one of a myriad of examples I could give. You will have to fit the principle to your own life to see what it is that you are running from.
Resentment is at the root of many of our discomforts, maladies, addictions, and unhappiness. We resent our parents, our work, ourselves, God, our husband, our kids, and so on. When we are resentful, we feel ill at ease. No one can feel right about themselves when they are secretly resentful, secretly hostile, or openly hostile.
Even if you resent a phone call or a bill, the act of resentment separates you from the calm, dispassionate state of mind. The resentful person feels uneasy, nervous, tense, unhappy, or angry.
So the reader will ask: why not just let go of the resentment? First of all because many of us are unaware that we are resentful. We excuse our attitude and we keep busy. Many of us serve others, do charity, or work our fingers to the bone--all the cover up and compensate for the guilt of secretly resenting others. But we are so busy that we don't even notice the twinge of resentment when we are called on to do something for another.
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We actually use the resentment as an energy to fuel our compensations. We study and get degrees, engage in spiritual rituals, work hard, or exercise hard all to compensate for our loss of love. All we do is build our ego and conflict with God.
The other reason why people don't give up resentment is because they feel they have the right to resent others. Besides, they sense that giving up resentment (and hostility) would take away their motivation for functioning. Everything they do is resentment based. Without, it, they would have no motivation to move.
Finally, most people are unwilling to give up pride. Resentment and judgment support pride. And pride is the compensation for our loss of love. Most people just don't want to give up the hope of making it big, winning the lottery, being recognized as great or good, or getting our revenge on another.
So you see--what we need is awareness and insight. We need to become aware of our wrong, our faulty attitude, and the mistake of hating others. We need to see the big picture.
All that remains to be seen is if, when seeing the bigger truth, we are willing to have a change of heart and give up our resentments of others. If we are, we become free. If not, we must go on, living a life based on hate, and we will be forced to keep finding ways of not being aware, not facing the truth, not seeing our wrong.
Now that you understand that most people are trying to avoid the truth (that they are wrong), you can see why they look for activities and techniques that lower awareness.
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Don't get me wrong. I'm not against jogging, exercising, going for a walk out in nature, or spending some quiet time reading. Taking a break from our busy lives to enjoy nature or get some exercise is a positive thing. All I'm saying is that a little R & R is nice, but it is not the answer. The real answer is to re-find the objective viewpoint by becoming still and experiencing conscience.
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In the light of truth we will see our errors, and we will be able to effortlessly change course. More importantly we will wordlessly realize that God exists and that He is much smarter than we are. We will see, in His kind light of truth, that we have been guilty of playing God. When we stop doing so, the door is opened for God to enter our life and change us for the better.
People talk about consciousness raising or having a higher consciousness. But believe me, most of the time they have found a way to believe in their own goodness. They have found a way to feel good about themselves and to be oblivious to their wrong.
If anything, such persons (who claim to have found a higher consciousness) are more prideful and more unaware of the humbling truth about themselves. Their peace of mind is a false one--based on smug contentment and obliviousness to reality.
They have found peace apart from God.
In this sorry state, their ego might expand to feel one with the universe. They might even think they are God. But this only because they are separate from the awareness that would remind them that they are not God.
Symptom removal is to remove the evidence of wrong. And when we can't remove the evidence of wrong, then we want awareness removal, so that we can have the symptom and also be unaware of anything wrong with our attitude or lifestyle.
That is why we are quick to believe when someone calls alcoholism a "disease." That way we can have our attitude and character issues neatly excused. We are glad to have something diagnosed. We can even accept a lesser truth such as that we were selfish or out of control, and still neatly avoid the bigger truth, that our pride is built on hate and indwelling evil.
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That way we can put a label on our issue and stop our search for what we might have done to get ourselves unhealthy in the first place.
Most people don't mind raw knowledge because it is nonthreatening. We want to have knowledge about our disease, knowledge about our condition, and knowledge about our discomfort. By intellectually knowing, we can avoid experiencing the higher realization of why we have fallen so low. Even religious knowledge is not threatening if it does not lead to awakening.
Perhaps now you can see that there are two types of meditators. The insincere (common) and the sincere. The latter is the (rare) type who really and truly yearns for truth, even if it is humbling and brings pain. Such a person can benefit from the meditation we teach here at the Center For Common Sense Counseling, which assists the sincere seeker in becoming more aware.
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Remember, the sincere person is willing to know the truth, even if it is uncomfortable at first.
But most meditations are just more sophisticated versions of whatever will lower awareness. Instead of escaping awareness through smoking marijuana, partying, or drinking, the insincere meditator finds a way to have peace apart from conscience and peace apart from God through the false meditation.
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Unfortunately, other centering exercises, support groups, bio feedback techniques and so on, (though helpful in stopping negative behavior, and though having some good real insights) do not address the ultimate issue: separation from God.
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Some techniques, frankly, have too much of the hand of man in them. They are not from God and leading to God.
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How can anything be truly beneficial if it leaves God out? And if you are sincere and perceptive, you will also see that any practice that talks about all paths being equal and all leading to God are tempting us to embrace a seductive appeal that loves us just the way we are (wrong).
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It is the wrong god who accepts you just as you are and who "saves" you from the real God.
And anyone who claims that we can become God or that we are God is another pied piper leading the glory seeking away with a seductive idea.
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Likewise any nature worship in whatever form is just the same old error of making something else into a god and worshipping it.
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The same thing can be said about religion. There is a true religion and a false religion. Many people are religious in name only. They go to meetings, sing songs, chant, perform rituals, give money to charity and so on--but it is a veneer of religiosity covering up a nature that has not really changed. It's an external or cultural thing.
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Therefore, these types have given religion a bad name. When a minister does a bad thing, or when so called religious people are hypocrites, it causes others to reject religion. Those who are hypocrites are not really true Christians. If you have rejected what such a person had to say, you weren't really rejecting Christ or true Christianity. Any guilt you feel (which makes you feel condemned) is most likely for having resented the false one. Simply drop your resentment and you will be free to see what is true.
Another variation of this is that many of us were pressured to accept God, Christ or some teaching. The wicked pressure monger, who pressures you with something that is factually true, can have the horrible effect of causing you to reject the truth through your resentment.
Many of us who are perceptive ended up rejecting the truth because we resented the pressure monger. Some of us, on the other hand, resented, and the guilt for resenting made us feel inferior and may even have made us give in to their sort of pressure for guilt relief. But no truly good person would ever pressure you to do anything, least of all religion.
Similarly, many people can't read or do math for the reason that they were pressured as kids. They resented, rebelled, and developing learning blocks.
Realize this: your guilt (and all the various resulting negative symptoms) is for resenting the pressure. Simply let go of the resentment against them, against yourself, against everything, and you will be free. (It will be easier to let go when you realize that the person who pressured you was doing to you what was done to them). .Then meditate for objectivity.
There is also the type of person, who I can help, who is a Christian, but not Christian enough! In other words, a good person can get caught up in studies and external things, and not know how to experience the real thing. All that person needs is a little guidance about how to become still by separating from thought and observing thought. In this still aware state, we are able to realize, intuit, and make contact with understanding.
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External study and rituals tend to interfere with internal realization and inner delicate promptings. When such a person discovers the proper meditation, they are relieved to know that they are not bad for having doubted or been confused by things they were told. When they become still and begin to see for themselves, they are glad to discover and intimately know the truth, without external interference.
The true meditation is from God, given to us through inspiration, to help the sincere seeker to find Him. But a false meditation or any other false practice is designed to cater to egos--giving people what they want--which is peace apart from God, so they can continue in their lifestyle without guilt or pain. You can't blame the drug dealer, the bartender, the lying lover, the pharmaceutical company, or the false religious leader. They are giving us what we want: to feel good about ourselves. In exchange, they get power.
Most practices are hypnotic, leading us into an emotional rapport with some external direction. Our awareness is lowered: we believe, we follow, and we receive reassurances.
The true meditation is anti-hypnotic. It teaches us how to come up out of the imagination, to face reality, realize the truth and ultimately find the God of conscience.
The true meditation leads to God by way of repentance. The false meditation leads away from God and sustains us in pride.
In most meditations, we are encouraged to fantasize, to imagine, to let go and float away with our dreams. But just remember that we are escaping from reality, and from the God of reality.
Some meditations have the person fixate on some object or on their breathing. This is an exercise in exercising will, which keeps the ego trying and focusing. Therefore it is just another version of what we do all the time: fixate, focus, try, and control. The true meditation teaches us to de-focus and defixate. It teaches us to remain anchored in the present.
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Some meditations have the person try to blank the mind. But if the thinking is blanked or stifled(by humming or chanting some word, for example), then there is no awareness of what is going on, and no inquiry for true answers. Instead, there is oblivion, mindlessness, or fixation.
Only the sincere person can use the proper meditation properly. If the person is not ready to face reality or wishes to hang onto pride, or is using the proper meditation just to feel better, it won't work because of the insincere intent. Instead it will become hypnotic and just another exercise in ego preservation.
So it all boils down to whether the person wants to discover God or discover himself as god. Whether she wants to know God or know herself as god. It depends on whether we want to see our wrongs and admit them so as to live rightly, or whether we want to be the right.
It says in the Bible, "Be still and know that I am God" (and you are not god). In fact, there are so many things nowadays that pull us away from awareness that it is the author's opinion that the sincere seeker must practice our awareness meditation. We simply must learn how to be still. The energy of our own striving pulls us from stillness and involved us in thought stuff. Even the effort to still or blank thought is another involvement. The soul itself must be still, apart from thought.
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When we try to focus or try to do anything, even quieten thought, we end up struggling and become fatigued. Struggle and trying are themselves an error. After tiring, it is just to easy to float away with daydreams or slip away in some comforting music, alcohol, drug or distraction fix.
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We also make the mistake of trying to deal with our own guilts, which only strengthens them and makes us weary. You cannot forgive yourself. You need God's forgiveness and guidance. But you cannot find these in daydreams or external words or rituals. Nor can you find them in manipulation of thought.
You discover them when your soul is still and aware in the Presence in the present. Go to our virtual homepage to learn more about our awareness meditation and perhaps listen to it. It is free with no strings attached.
..It often takes the person who deep down loves God a long time (years or decades) before they are ready to meditate in earnest. And when such a person will be ready, I cannot say. But when such persons find the truth they have been searching for their whole life, they experience great joy and relief.
Often something will try to prevent you from starting. You may have a sense that you are doing something wrong. But it is only the wrong spirit (that has been misleading you your whole life) that fears your meditating and coming to God. It fears that it will be realized out of existence.
Best to just get started and meditate. You can listen to or download a version of the meditation at our website.
The meditation is marvelously self correcting. The sincere person may begin with the right attitude and make great progress, only to get stuck. Usually it has to do with something they are not yet ready to face, or perhaps a subtle change in motivation. Therefore beware of a voice in your mind that says you are beyond this sort of thing, that you don't need to meditate anymore, etc. Fortunately, the meditation will somehow make you aware of what has happened, and once you become aware of (for example) your wrong intent, you will be able to meditate properly again.
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