FAQ's Meditation
One Approach to Divorce Meditation
This is offered for anyone who wishes to relieve some of the energetic distress over their family law circumstances, and who has an interest in spirituality or Buddhist psychology. Adyashanti's widely circulated meditation article is, for me, an extremely pin-pointed reminder for how to quiet one's self, particularly when we are facing the insanely "busy mind" that naturally results from divorce crisis and its related trance.
Even experienced meditators fall into the trap of making meditation into
another form of "doing", and doing forces us to spin, spin,
and spin. I feel that his article gently captures the essence of how to
release the fisting grasp of our egoic need to control circumstances that
clearly we cannot control. That release can be a grand relief.
Adya speaks in terms of his teachings as being a 'seed or a bomb.' I hope
this his article, and this website, is a "bomb" for you - but
seeds work quite nicely too!
I have participated in over a half dozen of his silent retreats over the past eight years or so, and they've been some of the most important, eye-opening, experiences of my life. At the risk of exposing myself too much, here is an Amazon Review of Adya's "Spontaneous Awakening" Cd's, for what its worth!
Click the Amazon advertisement at the bottom of the page, if anything here resonates for you.
True meditation has no direction, goals, or method. All methods aim at achieving a certain state of mind. All states are limited, impermanent and conditioned. Fascination with states leads only to bondage and dependency. True meditation is abidance as primordial consciousness.
True meditation appears in consciousness spontaneously when awareness is not fixated on objects of perception. When you first start to meditate, you notice that awareness is always focused on some object: on thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, memories, sounds, etc. This is because the mind is conditioned to focus and contract upon objects. Then the mind compulsively interprets what it is aware of (the object) in a mechanical and distorted way. It begins to draw conclusions and make assumptions according to past conditioning.
In true meditation all objects are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to manipulate or suppress any object of awareness. In true meditation the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness (consciousness) is the source in which all objects arise and subside.
As you gently relax into awareness, into listening, the mind's compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Silence of being will come more clearly into consciousness as a welcoming to rest and abide. An attitude of open receptivity, free of any goal or anticipation, will facilitate the presence of silence and stillness to be revealed as your natural condition.
Silence and stillness are not states and therefore cannot be produced or created. Silence is the non-state in which all states arise and subside. Silence, stillness and awareness are not states and can never be perceived in their totality as objects. Silence is itself the eternal witness without form or attributes.
As you rest more profoundly as the witness, all objects take on their natural functionality, and awareness becomes free of the mind's compulsive contractions and identifications. It returns to its natural non-state of Presence.
The simple yet profound question "Who Am I?" can then reveal one's self not to be the endless tyranny of the ego-personality, but objectless Freedom of Being -- Primordial Consciousness in which all states and all objects come and go as manifestations of the Eternal Unborn Self that YOU ARE.
© 1999 Adyashanti. All rights reserved.