Meditation
Taking the unknown and making it known is the human experience. We do this through our labeling process which comes from the process of comparison that we have been talking about; the purpose of any meditative technique is to reverse or undo this process, to take the known and make it unknown (putting your attention equally on every point of awareness {masculine} or retracting your attention completely and dissipating into the energetic movement that is created as each point let go moves to find its counterpart {feminine}). This is why most spiritual teachers will insist that enlightenment is a process of letting go as opposed to finding or grasping as grasping is the human experience we are attempting to undo.
It is important to recognize that there is no right or wrong in any of this and we are simply identifying with two halves to a whole (known and unknown), unfortunately we have been conditioned to fear this process as the undoing of the known looks dangerously similar to death and we of course fear death above all. We have been taught that life is the whole of who we are and everything that is not life is death, thus undoing life is death. Life = the known and Death = the unknown.
With this in mind we can see how beginnings and ends are such a significant part of life and death and we therefore create the material world in this fashion or we couldn’t understand it, everything must have a beginning and an end or we could not relate to it from the witness perspective. Even though we can proposition ourselves with the prospect that we have eternal life after death we never really feel it, we hope for it to comfort ourselves in the face of the fear of the unknown but we don’t really feel it in the core of our being and this is because we think we have a beginning. We think that we were born and this is where life begins but as the seed of the tree carries with it the entirety of the lineage, so does every cell in our bodies through DNA. Our bodies are a product of the attention of two networks of relationships that are our parents and are sustained by the play of attention between our idea of self and our environment.
Just take a moment and imagine the difference between knowing intellectually that when someone dies, life carries on. You probably know someone who has died and yet here you are, their death certainly didn’t cause the end of the world as you know it, you probably feel as if a piece of you died and in a way you are right, a piece of attention that helps suspend your position is gone and something that used to have a piece of your attention no longer has substance, you can bring that person back to life when you bring them into your conscious attention through memories, at least for a while but even the memories fade in time. But no matter who or what dies you know that when you die it will be different, things will end as you know it in a much different way and this is something you can never know from your current position. So as long as you keep holding onto life, you can never know death as death is the unknown… or can you….
Everything is a play of opposites as you may have already gathered so it is not this realization that we are trying to point out here, it is developing ways in which identify these relationships. I have said before that the human experience is the labeling process of converting the unknown into the known to give it substance, I use this as an example to display the relationship we have to creation using this play because it is one of the easier descriptions to identify with, but as you will soon see there is a distinct pattern that is generalizable to any and all things.
When something is unknown it is in itself complete and we cannot see it at all in any way but we feel that it’s there because there is something always pulling at us, luring us out to describe it. The first part of the process of identifying anything is to see it as separate from us, in order to do this it must be separated from itself or witnessed this is done by saying what it is or isn’t but it is immediately solidified by taking a position on it through opinion expectation or intention. This process is essentially becoming the opposite of what is being witnessed, your position can and will change but you cannot be both its negative and positive or it would cease to exist altogether.
Now we must not be so short sighted to think that in order to see black you must be white but to realize that black and white are already products of billions of these operations via the functioning of the relationship between the mind and the brain. You may think that it sounds incredibly complex and your brain may be aching at the thought of breaking down billions of operations to understand your relationship with a dog but it is quite the opposite. I will go into how we are conditioned to see things in our environment later in the book but for now we are going to discuss how to identify with the very nature of observation.
I am sure that you can agree that we can break existence into two parts, the witness and that which is being witnessed, as in most spiritual practice we will identify these opposites as the Masculine (witness) and Feminine (that which is being witnessed) it will be quite clear by the end of the book why these are characterized as such but for now we will say that the feminine is life force and if it were an energetic river the masculine would be the banks of the river directing the flow.
The confusion of existence is feeling as if we are being pushed and pulled between the masculine and feminine and have little control over any of it, this is frustrating and makes us susceptible to handing control over to someone or something else in the form of religion or government, this makes it so we are not accountable for our actions as our fallback position is “it isn’t within our control” so we should stop trying to understand and
just submit to the pressures. Unfortunately this is the most unnatural state of being as we instinctively seek to balance so we self medicate with drugs and alcohol or overzealous attention on someone else’s vision or attention (born again Christians etc…) anything to distract us from the reality of the situation. We can only do this so long before it all breaks down and physical death relieves us of the pressure of trying to find distractions.
I was at my friend AHA’s house a while ago with a couple of close friends and we were doing a group meditation when as I was letting go into the beautiful unity of the energetic movement I all of a sudden began to question why our bodies were the center of the sphere of self that expands outward to include its surroundings as part of its being and what role the death of our body has in our release. I have always thought that mind and body are synonymous and keeping the body in good health was paramount in keeping the mind healthy and free of distortion. Gregory Phoenix laughed at me and told me that the body sustains the point of departure to give us the illusion that we are going somewhere, a vehicle in the going. The truth is the body itself wishes to die the very moment it is born, otherwise it would be self sustaining, it wouldn’t need to be fed or nurtured cared for or protected, its natural state is the same as everything else seeking to unify with its counterpart. We use it as a vehicle as long as we feel we need to go somewhere or do something and like a vehicle if we keep it well maintained we can go further and faster and more efficiently. It is synonymous with the brain not the mind. This is why we submit to the cravings of the body even though it takes us closer to death, it is our way of satisfying the urge of the mind to be unified with its counterpart as the body is tangible whereas the mind is fleeting and intangible.
The body wishes to die the moment it is born or it would be self sustaining… this gave me such a different perspective on life. I could always represent to myself intellectually the importance of meditation but I didn’t really know it until that moment. Life is simply a mirror and although you cannot be both the object and its reflection you can know one by completely embodying or resting as one knowing the other is everything you are not in that moment. You can know the feminine completely by resting in the masculine (witness) and knowing that the feminine (life force) is everything you are not in that moment and vice versa. This is why we are going to examine the two fundamental meditative techniques to get an idea how to identify with the masculine and the feminine.
Before we get into the specifics about the types of meditations I think I should touch on one of the most important aspects of both types of meditations and that is the breath. I think that most people have a misunderstanding of the breath in most cases as they don’t separate the breath itself from its function and power as a tool. The breath itself has no more validity in spiritual practice than the heart beat unless you can develop your relationship to it through the very same conditioning that forms the world around you. The breath is the biorhythm that conditioning conforms to; you take the information from the environment in with each inhalation and then change it with each exhalation. The ideal position as with everything is for the inhalation and the exhalation to be one and the same. I have a funny story to illustrate this, I came to this realization when one day as a child of maybe 11 or 12 I was doing my chores and as I was vacuuming I started messing around a bit, I decided to put the vacuum hose in my mouth and open my nostrils to let the vacuum circulate the breath through me without any effort. I was blown to pieces as I sat there in awe of this feeling of connectedness, my body didn’t even try and breathe amidst the flow of air, there was just stillness as the moment arose complete unto itself. This was the first of many of these kinds of experiences that I would have over my life but it was the points of my attention that would become my vacuum from then on.
I am not suggesting that everyone go and stick a vacuum hose into your mouth but I would like you to imagine that with the inhalation of the breath we bring in all the points of our attention into this reference point we call I (here and now) and then there is a point between the inhalation and exhalation that we change everything just a little through opinion expectation and intention, then we exhale into the environment creating this change. The changes are a simple changing of position from negative to positive or positive to negative or remaining the same on billions of points of attention that come together in clusters that we then label as the material world. The power of the breath is infinite and we must first be able to learn to give the breath out through the exhalation in the same way it is taken in through the inhalation, free of any attachment, then we will be able to feel the points of our attention start to move towards their counterparts creating a current that I refer to as love. Then after much practice, this process becomes (as all conditioning) subconscious and as you breathe in your everyday life you are in a state of meditative love that can be felt just by being in its presence.
Masculine
There are about as many forms of meditation as there are people in the world, although each person has different ways of relating to the world and meditation has a common theme of ridding our minds of clutter, thought, or activity, each person’s means of accomplishing this is unique to their way of communicating with themselves.
First we will be examining the masculine meditation or the “Witness” position. Most commonly known forms of meditation adhere to this paradigm, it is what we see the monks doing on TV and in movies and is what most of us envision when we hear the word meditate. Sitting quietly in the lotus position in one place for a prolonged period of time staring at a wall (or with eyes closed) in contemplation trying to still the mind by emptying our thoughts into the world.
This is an attempt not to rid your mind of thought in the implied sense but to rid yourself of your participation in these thoughts. To observe everything in its natural state free of opinion, expectation, or intention and allow yourself to be moved with the current that you thought was thought.
I once sat in front of a white wall for around eighteen hours, in the beginning I found myself very fidgety because we are so use to binding the energy passing through us in an attempt to hold on to it, or store it for later reference, it usually finds its own way out when you are not looking but when you are looking right at it, it becomes quite a task just to stay still. If you want to try something to relate to this energy just sit in a chair looking at a blank wall completely still and in silence while concentrating on just your breathing, you will soon discover what I mean; you will feel the energy build up, it is what you causes you to fidget.
After about ten hours I was about to explode! The whole time I found myself gathering each thought and filing it away in the proper category in my minds library for efficient extraction at a later date but the thoughts would come faster and multiply and I had to file faster and faster until it was almost unbearable, thoughts started slipping away from me and I would try to catch them only to lose the ones I had already caught.
Without the distractions of the world in front of you all the time, the thoughts start to become harder to bury and more and more emerge into your conscious attention. It was like a floodgate had been opened in my mind and the thoughts were coming so fast it was more and more difficult to file or hold on to them until finally… It felt like an explosion out the top of my head and then calm.
I then sat and watched the thoughts move in and out of me so fluidly that I could not even see them long enough to call them thoughts. It was the most beautiful experience I had ever experienced. I spent the next eight hours or so in this blissful state, simply observing life force, love and light as it flowed through me.
Even when you meditate on something specific in search, it is when the images enter your mind prior to thought that we find Satori, when we observe ourselves as part of an already active energetic movement. The process of stilling the mind is separating yourself as much as possible from an active role in creating the world around you so you may observe your spontaneous nature free from expectation, opinion, and intention.
Feminine Meditation
Most perspectives on meditation have a feeling that inactivity is the only means by which to still the mind, while an equally effective paradigm is often overlooked that is highly active. The feminine form of meditative practice is more commonly practiced in everyday life by regular everyday people without their knowledge.
The feminine, in contrast to the masculine, is of course that which is being witnessed, it is life force, the active energetic movement of the Universe. The idea of forgoing your participation in thought is still the common theme to all meditative technique but is achieved spontaneously by dissolving or letting go into the current instead of observing it as it passes through the funnel of your living organism.
How do we identify with this form of meditation? Every time you have a bad day and you sit down, turn your favorite music up, and let it take you away from your thoughts for a while. When you spontaneously laugh uncontrollably and you have to remind yourself why you are laughing only to break down in laughter once again. When you are dancing to beautiful music and you can feel the music move your body, you let go of all thought and allow the music to move your arms and legs in purposeless dance. Or when you take a walk through the garden and you find yourself feeling more beautiful because of the flowers all around you.
These are some examples of how a movement outside of your living organism can lure you unexpectedly into thoughtless bliss. Although these are effective because of their spontaneous and unintentional nature, we can still achieve a state of perpetual bliss by orchestrating the healing and insightful properties of this meditative technique.
Go dancing, turn your music up loud so you can hear nothing else and let it take you away. Feel the music instead of listening to it, breathe to its rhythm, go for a hike to the top of a mountain and just look at the wonders of creation. Do it while listening to music!
There are teachers that demonstrate the power of focusing such meditations. Osho Sri Rajneesh with highly active techniques such as the Dynamic Meditation includes fast deep breathing with emphasis on the exhalation while moving quickly to rapid drums. Then there is the merging of both masculine and feminine meditations such as the Kundalini meditation that starts by vibrating and dancing to music then sitting quietly in contemplation thereafter.
There is no circumstance that we cannot find ourselves in a state of connection by means of meditation be it active or inactive. It is simply being in tune with the environment to allow yourself to connect with the universal flow of energetic movement. Dance like nobody is watching, sing, let the music steal away your thoughts for even a moment and bask in the warmth it creates.
You will soon see that just recognizing the points in your everyday activity when you naturally find yourself in thoughtless bliss will bring you into deeper relationship with your Beingness. Notice when silence and inactivity brings you there and when dancing and music become your vehicle. You will start to feel that the masculine and feminine embrace you and you will start to see why we constantly run in circles.
