By Noura. Follow: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
Meditation is the art of living with what is, without condemnation, judgments, fragmentation, or covering it up with ideals. When we see directly without the screen of our judgments, we don’t compare or fragment. We can then understand totally because we give our total attention. We see the whole picture, and we see directly without any distortion or illusions. There’s no conflict in our perception because we don’t have any images or judgments that we compare against what we’re seeing. Meditation is the art of living without illusions or distortions so the mind is free of the conflict that arises between the image (illusion) and reality (fact).
Meditation is about moving away from a dualistic way of looking at life to seeing the whole flow of it, not to fragment and say one part is right or wrong in comparison to another. We look at life as one process that connects everything through relationships. When we look at a puzzle, we don’t take one piece and say it’s right or wrong. A piece by itself has no meaning; it has meaning only in relation to other pieces in forming the whole picture. Similarly, we can only understand ourselves in relation to the whole of life.
The purpose of meditation is to build self-awareness by making the unconscious conscious so that we can be aware of how our state of mind affects our interpretation of what we see. If we’re not aware of our inner burdens, they could affect our decisions in ways we may not always recognize. Meditation is about turning our attention inward so we can be aware of any interference that get in the way of clarity, removing the interference by seeing how it arises and operates, and then looking at the world from this place of clarity.
In order to have clarity, we need to get ourselves out of the way so we can see the difference between a fact and our interpretation of the fact. The fact is what happened. The interpretation is the story we build around the fact based on how we see ourselves. If we have an investment in seeing ourselves a certain way, that motive is going to distort our perception so that we’ll see what we want to see and we won’t see what we don’t want to see. In other words, our perception becomes selective, and we’re easily deceived. We should observe with an attitude of skepticism. This means we neither agree nor disagree. We should observe without a motive or an expectation of a particular result. If we observe without a motive, we won’t be disappointed, blindsided, or surprised when our expectation doesn’t occur.
In order to get ourselves out of the way, we need to be aware of ourselves, we need to be aware of our minds. The mind is the sum of all the beliefs and values that we use to run our lives. It’s a world of ideas and thoughts. It’s a system of thought that we use to organize our lives. We observe the mind and find the purpose that’s in it by observing its effects in our lives, which are our thoughts, the way we think, the way we interpret information, what we do with the interpretation, our behaviors, our habits, our beliefs, our values, our hopes, our goals, our sorrows, and so on.
The mind is the programming that we express in the forms of our lives by the way we think, act, and so forth. It’s the foundation upon which we build the structures of our lives. If the foundation is weakened by the strain of carrying false beliefs or negativity of any kind, the entire structure will be instable. We’ll become mentally exhausted and confused because the mental energy we need to look at life and understand it is being diverted to carrying our mental burdens.
Looking our minds is about observing what’s going inside us. This involves being aware of the following:
- Source: What state of mind are we starting from?
- The lens through which we look, the programming or conditioning we use to interpret what we see. This also involves observing the darkness within, because this darkness is like a dot on the lens of a pair of glasses that distorts our perception by showing up on everything we see.
- What we do with the interpretation.
The tools we can use to investigate into our minds are the following:
- Looking without judgment and without excluding anything in particular
- Inquiring into the purpose of everything in our lives, including the obvious
- Being open to hearing an interpretation of life that’s different from ours, not accept or reject, only listen
Being aware of our state of mind allows us to begin the process of understanding how and why it comes about. Seeing this process, gives us the power to change it. If we can choose our state of mind unconditionally, we don’t have to control the externals to be at peace.
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