What is meditation ?

[china]

Most dictionaries define the Western (Jewish, Christian, Islamic) meaning of the word "meditation," but usually do not describe the Eastern (Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist) concept of meditation. The most appropriate dictionary definition I could find reads as follows: "If you meditate, you give your attention to one thing, and do not think about anything else, usually as a religious activity or as way of calming or relaxing your mind." This definition very subtly implies that meditation means thinking about something, be it religious or mystical in nature, and that a constant thought process goes on while one meditates. The purest Eastern definition of the word 'meditation' means not thinking at all, but rather focusing the consciousness on the cosmic whole, "the all and the everything", without thought, judgment, or distraction. Defenition of the word 'meditation' here is an art of consciousness becoming aware of itself on the grand and cosmic scale. Meditation cannot honestly be called a science because any real science requires objective testing, which is not currently possible for the practice of meditation. The real art of meditation is beyond thought, beyond society, and beyond time. Why / or should we meditate ?

 

[AmberEyes]

I meditate daily. While there are many reasons why somebody would want to meditate, I do it simply to organize my thoughts before and after my day. I use it as a calming exercise for when I'm stressed or upset. I also use it to organize ideas and promote my own creativity.

 

[hermanntrude]

Origami is my meditation

 

[jimmoyer]

To create different brain waves as measured by an electro encephalagram EEG (if you want to)
you repeat a nonsense syllable over and over again. You do this quietly without moving
your mouth. You think this nonsense syllable as if you were saying it over and over.
This is often known as a mantra. What it really is ---a nonsense syllable void of meaning.

This does one of several interesting things.

1. it's induces a lightness and rest and mental brain waves as REM sleep does.
2. it lowers your heart rate over time to that of a race car driver's who have been known
to have better rhythmic lower heart rates than most other athletes. Lowers your blood pressure.

3. Most interesting to me, is that this method is the only time you are conscious
and thinking of nothing specific. Don't confuse that with distraction or lack of focus
or rambled thoughts. Even if rambled dis-connected thoughts then you have fallen
off track repeating the mantra (nonsense syllable).. And so when you start thinking of
actual thoughts it is recommend to gently go back to the mantra.

THAT is an unsual state of mind, often made fun of,
but rather it is a interesting physical and metaphysical state.

-----------------------------
Do this 20 minutes in morning. I never can.

And 20 minutes before supper. Which I do.

This is called TM.
Transcendental Meditation.

Started by Maharashi Mahesh Yogi.

30 years ago a girl approached me for $35 dollars to buy a mantra
on the idea that we in the West value only those things that cost money.

Cheap trick.

 

[jimmoyer]

What ?

No pre-meditators around here ?

 

[El Barto]

I had anexperience but not like yours. I started to get into alot of spiritual things mostly reading, but mainly meditation. I would light candles lay in bed and do relaxation exercise. After many tries something happened I woke up grasping the sides of my matress as if the bed was opening up and falling through the otherside . I was scared or shocked. The next night samething but it was different. For what seems both a flash of time and an eternity all at once. I was as if before time began before the big bang. No sensation of space or history or conscience . Just totally nothing...It was more than words can express , even the memory of it is deluded.
That was a long time ago at a dark time of my life.
For a long story short I was initiated as a shaman and saw my indian guide only to send him away without knowing what was going on. It was as if it closed doors for me. I was capable of doing so much more before. Just don't know what to do.

__________________
No time for wisdom when your too opinionated
Originaly posted "how I became Ohkwai"

 

[selfactivated]

Meditation is finding the inner silence.

 

[hermanntrude]

I've never really taken it that far. I feel the job is done once i've sorted through all the noises before the silence. What is the benefit of remaining in the silence? I usually fill it up again

 

[selfactivated]

I've never really taken it that far. I feel the job is done once i've sorted through all the noises before the silence. What is the benefit of remaining in the silence? I usually fill it up again

Thats the point......to be emptied and then refilled.

 

[china]

Meditation brings a sense of fullness and completion and is the only permanent source of tranquility available to human beings. All other forms of serenity are temporary and dissolve into conflict and chaos over time. The euphoria of drugs quickly lead to misery and self-destruction. The wholesomeness of love, so beautiful and ethereal, is a relatively short lived and fleeting experience. Meditation brings order and that order is the order of the universe. It is irrevocable and doesn't depend on anything." Meditation is the eternal essence of nature taking on conscious form within the mortal human frame. Meditation is also an adventure of self-discovery. How can you live without knowing who or what you are? If someone asks you who you are during the day you may state your name, as if a temporary label actually means something important. Ask yourself who you are when you are in deep sleep, unconscious and without even a dream to prove that you exist at all. Ask yourself who you were ten months before you were born and who you will be just one moment after your body dies. Meditation increases awareness of the natural phenomena that is actually going on behind your own eyes. Self-knowledge has intrinsic value, even without the indescribable bliss nature generously unleashes in those who practice meditation with sincerity and patience.So ,what is /how to meditate?

 

[jimmoyer]

had anexperience but not like yours. I started to get into alot of spiritual things mostly reading, but mainly meditation. I would light candles lay in bed and do relaxation exercise. After many tries something happened I woke up grasping the sides of my matress as if the bed was opening up and falling through the otherside . I was scared or shocked. The next night samething but it was different. For what seems both a flash of time and an eternity all at once. I was as if before time began before the big bang. No sensation of space or history or conscience . Just totally nothing...It was more than words can express , even the memory of it is deluded.
That was a long time ago at a dark time of my life.
For a long story short I was initiated as a shaman and saw my indian guide only to send him away without knowing what was going on. It was as if it closed doors for me. I was capable of doing so much more before. Just don't know what to do.

------------------------------Posted by El Barto---------------------------------------------------

I'm going to have to ask you, El Barto, to desist from plagiarizing or outright expropriating
from stellar Simpson episodes.

 

[darkbeaver]

I like the Central American traditions of meditation, lots of good stories from that region as well.
Carlos Casteneda wrote a series of seven or eight books back in the sixtys that bear reading if you like to explore the shamanistic stuff. I found them very interesting and a good read. There is a large body of acedemic stuff as well. Power plants , the short cut to enlightenment and a must for some.:wave:

 

[jimmoyer]

I'm not into the supernatural stuff or for some special eureka moment of enlightenment.

Mediation's physical properties are what interests me the most.

 

[El Barto]

had anexperience but not like yours. I started to get into alot of spiritual things mostly reading, but mainly meditation. I would light candles lay in bed and do relaxation exercise. After many tries something happened I woke up grasping the sides of my matress as if the bed was opening up and falling through the otherside . I was scared or shocked. The next night samething but it was different. For what seems both a flash of time and an eternity all at once. I was as if before time began before the big bang. No sensation of space or history or conscience . Just totally nothing...It was more than words can express , even the memory of it is deluded.
That was a long time ago at a dark time of my life.
For a long story short I was initiated as a shaman and saw my indian guide only to send him away without knowing what was going on. It was as if it closed doors for me. I was capable of doing so much more before. Just don't know what to do.

------------------------------Posted by El Barto---------------------------------------------------

I'm going to have to ask you, El Barto, to desist from plagiarizing or outright expropriating
from stellar Simpson episodes.

PMSL:laughing7: :laughing7: :laughing7: :laughing7:

 

[darkbeaver]

I'm not into the supernatural stuff or for some special eureka moment of enlightenment.

Mediation's physical properties are what interests me the most.

No such thing as the super natural exists IMO the concept itself is a product of the natural mind. Similarly you cannot concentrate on the physical without going through the mind eh.:wave:

 

[china]

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Sans Serif]You have burnt yourself in politics, your problem is not only to break away from society, but to come totally to life again, to love and to be simple. Without love, do what you may, you will not know the total action which alone can save man, we aren't really simple. Why? Because you we are concerned with reforms, with duties, with respectability, with becoming something, with breaking through to the other side. In the name of another, you are concerned with yourself; you are caught in your own cockleshell. You never pause to look at a tree, at a flower, at the flowing river; and if by chance you do look, your eyes are filled with the things of the mind, and not with beauty and love. "Again, that is true; but what is one to do?" Look and be simple.[/FONT]

 

[china]

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Sans Serif]The craving for experience is the beginning of illusion. As you now realize, your visions were but the projections of your background, of your conditioning, and it is these projections that you have experienced. Surely this is not meditation. The beginning of meditation is the understanding of the background, of the self, and without this understanding, what is called meditation, however pleasurable or painful, is merely a form of self-hypnosis. You have practised self-control, mastered thought, and concentrated on the furthering of experience. This is a self-centred occupation, it is not meditation; and to perceive that it is not meditation is the beginning of meditation. To see the truth in the false sets the mind free from the false. Freedom from the false does not come about through the desire to achieve it; it comes when the mind is no longer concerned with success with the attainment of an end. There must be the cessation of all search, and only then is there a possibility of the coming into being of that which is nameless.[/FONT]

 

[china]

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Sans Serif]What is important in meditation is the quality of the mind and the heart. It is not what you achieve, or what you say you attain, but rather the quality of a mind that is innocent and vulnerable. Merely to gather, or to live in, experience, denies the purity of meditation. Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end. The mind can never be made innocent through experience. It is the negation of experience that brings about that positive state of innocency which cannot be cultivated by thought. Thought is never innocent. Meditation is the ending of thought, not by the meditator, for the meditator is the meditation. If there is no meditation, then you are like a blind man in a world of great beauty, light and colour. Wander by the seashore and let this meditative quality come upon you. If it does, don't pursue it. What you pursue will be the memory of what it was - and what was is the death of what is. Or when you wander among the hills, let everything tell you the beauty and the pain of life, so that you awaken to your own sorrow and to the ending of it. Meditation is the root, the plant, the flower and the fruit. It is words that divide the fruit, the flower, the plant and the root. In this separation action does not bring about goodness: virtue is the total perception.Can we maditate ?
[/FONT]

 

[El Barto]

either I'm brain dead or I have to go asleep but can you dumb it down for us andf give it a step by step cha cha cha aproache

 

[L Gilbert]

I've meditated a couple different ways. I rarely meditate anymore, though. When I do, I allow stillness of my mind. There are several things I do that are meditative and allow me to forget everything but what I'm doing, though. It sure comes in handy when driving and working to be able to think strictly about driving and working and nothing else.