I have given a few meditation workshops here in Vancouver, BC and I find myself repeating one thing. I am always talking to people about Milarepa’s famous meditation quote. He states: “my religion is not deceiving myself.” WOW. What a religion. That’s it eh? Well I’m intrigued!
My seven year meditation journey so far has been a constant shedding and moulting of bullshit. To backtrack a bit, I took a bunch of upper level social psychology classes in University without knowing that they would not contribute to my degree. Village idiot for hire. Synchronicitously however, these courses were some of the most valuable for my life so far. To be honest my attendance in University was terribly poor but there was a girl I dreamed of asking out all the time in these particular social psych classes. In terms of learning, I remember that in terms of communication, we are not as smart as we believe and we are not as effective as we believe. Social scientists are finding that we as a species make a number of “mistakes” with regards to perceiving and understanding each other. Paradoxically, we are also incredibly agile internally and able to deceive ourselves even to our own surprise. Sometimes we have no idea what we want or intend to achieve until the coin is in the air. At least, this is absolutely true for me. To speak like a punk: we’re fucked, but it’s chill. Even if this sounds grim to you, we are meditators, we believe anything can be changed.
To relate this quote to meditation, the practice here would be alignment. In life, we practice self honesty and at day’s end ask if we really walked our talk. In meditation, we witness things in our being that are not in alignment with what we believe. To further complicate things, often times we don’t know what we believe. Things might seem a bit more fluid and malleable in meditation. Our sense of identity might begin to loosen if the anxiety decides to leave us. So we just keep watching. We watch for patterns and constructs of mind that lead us to true freedom. We watch for abstractions and systems of mind that no longer serve us. In meditation, we don’t push, we don’t pull. We witness. We metamorphosize. Nature just is.
