The Steep Descend

You know lately I have been seeing, hearing, reading a lot about Meditation. I have been meditating hardcore too. Well I use the word hardcore lightly, if you think about it with the common connotations, that are wrong. What is meditation anyway? Is meditation sitting in awkward positions until you don’t know if you’re hurting from siting wrong or from boredom? Is meditation being wacked over the head with a bamboo stick if you fall asleep whilst practicing? As it’s the case of Monks. If you ask me, them” Monks just need to get laid. I promise you they’d see the light alright. What is meditation? By definition, Meditation is the practice of turning your attention to a single point of reference. The definition goes on saying a lot more bollocks. Which is irrelevant. This is meditation. That is it. No buts, no “ifs”, no bullshit. -Turning your attention to a single point of reference. This can be your breath, a single point in the room, my lady yogis will recognise this sentence from class, “awink, wink”. I had you meditating and you didn’t even know. But yes, any single entity, and this is the trick. One single point. Breathing meditation takes some practice, it shouldn’t be your go to point if you are new to meditation, because the breath is too big a content to “laser” focus on. So, with that in mind, ba-dum-pss, no pun intended, if that qualifies as one, you can say you are meditating whenever you are fully engaged in an activity, say involved in your hobby. Why do we find activities that require our full attention “therapeutic”? Be it cooking, sewing, making shit out of boxes, like I do. Whatever it is, when your full attention is engrossed this way the mind does not wonder, because both mind and body are performing in harmony. When the mind does wonders during such activities you will most definitely make mistakes; you’ll burn the food, you’ll prick your finger, (prick giggidy lol), you’ll cut the wrong side of the box, so on, this is normally a cue for you to turn your attention to the task at hand, and you quickly do so, abandoning all the chatter, pictures and stories in your head. This is what makes your hobbies so relaxing, satisfying, even nourishing, if you pay close attention. I for one can go for hours and hours recycling boxes and not be hungry. This is meditation. Now meditation has various purposes; to quiet the endless chatter in the mind, is the mostly readily available resolve. And this is the starting point, to become aware of all the nonsense noises occurring inside one’s mind. It also serves as a tool to facilitate pin-pointing neuroses, through Self-Inquiry meditation, in order to, in the words of Carl Jung, not erase/get rid of it, nor judge it, but to let it heal us, fix the mental debilitation/instabilities that are bothering us, which most often than not we don’t know or understand why. Because we don’t have a clear mind, we lack Clarity when we haven’t comprehended yet the busyness that goes on inside, when we haven’t grasp the immensity of the constant flow of irrelevant thoughts. A neurosis is like the mistake you make during your hobby when you lose concentration. It’s the mind’s cue, telling us to turn attention to what matters. A Neurosis itself isn’t the problem, but the result of it. There are thoughts, thoughts processing, cognition, beliefs, opinions, plans, worries, concerns for the future, memories, other people’s variations of ideas etc, etc, etc. I use etc, not because I don’t know whatever else is there, but because the very limited list of things I do know, is already extensive. All of this goes on at once, yet the mind cannot do two things at the time, therefore, in comes the tiredness, the overwhelming feeling of exhaustion, for no apparent reason. How do you feel after a busy day, a serious busy day of working, tidying, cooking, looking after the kids, dusting, hoovering, feeding the cats, walking the dogs, meeting with friends, catching the last train, running for the bus, driving the car in traffic? -“(etc)” -Now imagine you must do all that AT ONCE. No seriously, ALL AT ONCE. Could you do it. The short answer is NO. Even if you are a multitasker master. So, what do you do? You prioritise. You obey the already set schedules, say for your work, and surely you can’t meet up with friends for drinks whilst driving your car, although that could provide some entertaining, in my mind I have you driving down the road with a pint hanging out the car window while your mate walks besides you. That would be funny. The point of meditation is to help filter all the muck out of the thought stream. There are, if you noticed, a lot of noise, imagery and even voices in your head, this isn’t a sign that you are crazy, it’s the way it is. It’s the way the mind and brain work together, it produces such fallouts. There is in fact the so called “monkey mind” as it is described, my monkey mind goes to the extent of saying stuff like “Blah, blah, blah. “Seriously he is pissed, off his face. And this acts as a distraction. But a distraction from what? Even if we are, with meditation, trying not to get deceived by false input, we must understand that in the midst of it all the “True Voice” is also there to be found. What is the “True Voice”. It’s what you know to be true. What you truly know to be the truth, your truth. What you know you are, what you know it’s best for you. What YOU know. “Deep down”. Down where? Down “the rabbit hole”. Down the steep descend. What you find there, it’s your “True Voice”. Like the nugget of gold that hides deep in the muddy waters. Your “true voice” is the gold, and the “monkey mind” the murky water. Your job is to know what you are going to listen to, through meditation you are simply shifting attention to a particular thought, one at a time, not all at once. Then you must question everything that comes in, and request evidence that validates that precise thought. The thing is, you have no choice but to do this in a very honest and candid manner or you will end up misleading yourself. Using the Socratic method, for instances, is a way to do this, which basically is the questioning of questions with more questioning, until you end up with no more questions and one true answer. That you decide to take at whichever value you very well fancy. If you catch yourself asking the same questions over and over, through the course of your life, even when you think you have found the answer, this will cause a negative cycle, the neurosis will persist, because the problem hasn’t been solved. This is because you haven’t yet found your truth. The true answer. Meaning you are still deceiving yourself, probably hiding from yourself. We don’t always like the answers we are left with. So, more honesty from you in the process is needed. But then you are confronted with the hardest task of them all. Accepting it. You can choose not to, but there’s a price. -Insanity.