NON-DUAL MEDITATION
Non-Dual Meditation
Q. Some great non-dual teachers say that a meditation discipline or regular sitting practice of meditation is missing the point and not necessary, because meditation is the presence or stillness which we are already. They say that doing a practice is creating an object, and dividing us from the real state of meditation. Or something like that! What‘s your take—to meditate or not to meditate?
A. The view that there are two aspects: ‘meditation discipline’ and ‘meditation itself’ is not wrong. If you listen to this truth over and over and can internalise it, there is nothing I can offer to gainsay this.
However, for most people, it is enormously helpful in a busy life to be able to take time out every day. The practice periods enable you to see the working of the mind, and to experience first-hand something of the stillness or tranquillity which underlies it. This way a body of actual experience is built up and extends well beyond those short periods. It becomes intrinsic to your way of being, and the periods of meditation practice are seen for what they are—training, refreshment, stabilizers; anchoring motivation, and creating a foundation for the rest of the teaching, because meditation practice is only part of a bigger picture.
The other advantage of formal meditation is education; by the regular practice with its ups and down, you have educated yourself through observation and direct experience, and are thus in a position to guide and help others according to their particular natures, because you know the elements. I can offer you a pie when you are hungry, but if I teach you how to make one yourself, you may not go hungry again.
Q. It sounds like a slow process though! The other objection I’ve heard is that if you take this ‘progressive path’ you are making meditation into an object, separate from ‘yourself’, and may never be able to cross that gap where you become ‘one’ with it. Like you’ve been conditioned by the practice.
A. Yes, the practice is a conditioning, but conditioning loses its power when you become aware of it as conditioning. We are never in fact prisoners of our conditioning, but we know this only from a position of true seeing, and it’s this true seeing or insight which meditation practice develops.
In the long-term, deep silence, space, or joy alongside the pain (boredom, time-tabling, frustration etc) of practice opens the whole experience of ‘meditation’. It’s not a race; there is no finish-line; but the pool which is called by the name meditation defintely has depths and shallows........