NEW & SELECTED TEACHINGS

Meditation is an attempt to connect with a deep part of our being that is not defined by the narration of the mind. Nor is it defined by the turbulent emotional waters that one sometimes meets in meditation. In its deepest sense, meditation is an encounter with the silence of your being. This is the heart of meditation: it is a willingness to be with silence.

Silence is not a big part of our cultural conversation. Instead, we are sold ever-better ways of distracting ourselves and convinced that we cannot do without our gadgets. Notwithstanding the practical uses, technology can become another means of creating chaos and disruption. If we are on social media, the room around us may be quiet, but we are not in a place of silence.

Silence can be disquieting for a lot of us. It can feel strange if you are not used to it, which is ironic, because so much of the activity of nature—of which we are a part—occurs in silence. That is why people like to go for a walk in the woods or somewhere else where they can get away from the hustle and noise of human life: it is a way of entering silence. Meditation is a focused way of doing this. The challenge is that when you start to pay attention to the silence within, that is when you hear the noise, and that is where many people engage in a subtle or overt battle with the chaos of the conceptual mind and with the images of the past or future. However, meditation has nothing whatsoever to do with controlling your mind. As a teacher of mine once told me, “If you go to war with your mind, you will be at war forever.” What would it mean not to be at war with our minds, with our feelings, and with ourselves?

If you are not careful, meditation can become a spiritual competition—not with someone else, but between the desire to be still and the movement of mind. To be in competition is not meditation. To try to constrain all the disparate thoughts in your mind through concentration is not meditation; it is concentration. Meditation is a deep state of listening. That is the heart of it: listening to the quiet places, but as you do so, trying not to assert your will or make your mind conform to a certain pattern, whether to quiet it or to force thinking or not thinking along certain lines.

In meditation, what you are doing is letting go of all forms of conflict and allowing every single part of experience and every single perception to be exactly as it is, because it already is right. We feel the way we feel, we think the way we think, and our internal environment is the way it is in any given moment, so we might as well come into alignment with it. In that sense, meditation runs against the grain. Sometimes we think, If I could figure my problem out, then I would not have a problem. But sometimes trying to figure out your problem is creating another problem. To listen to the quiet spaces inside, you must allow every part of your experience to be the way it is. If you do not, then you are in some form of conflict with it, attempting to control how you think or feel. Meditation is the relinquishing of control, not the perfecting of control.

Try looking at it from a subjective point of view: a thought arises and then passes as if floating down a stream. If we are focused on the stream or whether there are thoughts or are not thoughts, then we are engaging in controlled, willful thinking. “Willful thinking” means intentionally engaging the process of thinking. There is a time to do that, but meditation is not that time.

The depth of your meditation depends on your capacity to listen, and most people are not listening when they meditate. They get stuck in whatever technique they are using, caught up in trying to meditate correctly or what they imagine to be correctly, and trying to quiet their mind. There is an unspoken, sometimes unacknowledged agenda that you can carry into meditation, and if you are not careful, that agenda will become your meditation. In other words, you will be meditating on your agenda, whether that agenda is for a quiet mind, or to be at peace, or to feel bliss, or whatever it may be. Meditation is the relinquishing of agenda. It is the natural rhythm of thought when you are not consciously adding to it or trying to take anything away from it, when you are not trying to make it happen or stop it from happening.

There is a soft quality to meditation, a fluid quality, because your experience is constantly changing. It is all movement; if you try to stop the fluidity, you go against the natural flow of consciousness. In this sense meditation is about nonopposition, as it is the most subjective form of practicing nonviolence and noninterference. When you are trying to change things, or trying to stop something from happening, or chasing after what you hope will happen, that is a subtle form of violence or control. Meditation is the relinquishing of that attitude, and you cannot let go of what you do not acknowledge. So first acknowledge any desire to control and any conditional effort to control; see it and watch it play out.

Meditation is seeing all of this. It is coming to know the nature of your mind and experiencing when your mind tries to dominate itself, when there is a thought that says, I must stop thinking, which is itself a thought; it is seeing thought as thought. It is not necessarily evaluating thought, it is not measuring thought or distinguishing the good from the bad or the useful from the useless, as that is for another time. Meditation is about seeing the whole nature of experience. As you watch your mind, you start to see that trying to control it tends to add conflict, and being too rigid about it sets up an even deeper groove of rigidity in your mind and in your body.

When the watching of the mind grows profound, what Buddhists call “one pointed,” then the quality of our awareness begins to allow us to access a deeper state of consciousness and a deeper state of silence. In essence, meditation is like getting into an elevator and taking it to the ground floor; it is a sinking down into your conscious experience of being. We do not have to know how to make it happen, because there is no “how.” It is not what we do that allows us to access great depth in meditation. It is as much what we do not do and what we let go of doing. Meditation is the art of letting go of doing.

Excerpted from The Most Important Thing.
© 2019 by Adyashanti. Published by Sounds True.