By Ace Remas |
Meditation is not what you expect. It brings no outer benefits. You will fail at your first attempts. Adding meditation to your full schedule appears to complicate life, not make it simpler. You have enough to do already without sitting down and doing nothing.
Though you sense that meditation offers an important potential, you will not be able to explain why it is important, either to yourself or to someone else. But you are attracted to it because meditation has a good reputation. People you admire practice it. Nowhere can you find a polemic condemning it or revealing its dangers. The prescription to meditate comes without warnings on the label. People you know who don’t meditate say that they want to.
There is a prodigious library of resources declaring its universal benefits. It costs hardly anything, if at all. The time it takes is such a small part of your day there is no significant commitment to make. You can be casual about it, not serious. There’s nothing to buy, nowhere to go, and nothing to do.
Nothing of your true self will be revealed to you, either in all its glory or all its horror. No angels will alight on your shoulders. No devils will whisper sinister inducements in your ear. Tomorrow the sun will rise. The tides will ebb and flow. Taxes will be due. The price of gasoline won’t go down. You’ll get no inheritance from a long lost relative. Everything in your life will be as it was before. You won’t suddenly become wiser and kinder than you are now. Rude people will still irritate you. Your worries will return to haunt your thoughts. The small joys of your life and loves will enlighten you from time to time. Even as a devoted meditator, the years will pass, you’ll grow old and weak, and then you’ll die.
Of course, all of these things will happen to you even if you don’t meditate. Looked at in this way, what is all the fuss about? Nothing on the outside is changed just because a person meditates.
Exactly. Meditation is about the inside. The reason any of us have a thought about meditation is because we feel some absence or lack on the inside, no matter how full our life is on the outside. A life constantly devoted to the outside is tiring. It makes us feel empty and restless. We suspect there is more to life than the next meal, paycheck, movie, or partner. Somewhere in this busy mess is me; I just have to find it to be happy, we think.
Most of the time we presume we are finding me in the clutter of our lives. We focus on what we like, thinking our tastes and inclinations define us. But we can’t continue in this way because over time this tendency grows stale, even ugly, and we don’t want to find that kind of me. We may think we will find ourselves in our work, art, hobbies, skill, or relationships. But even these worthy endeavors become shallow and false.
In the end, after all of life’s detours, after all its thrills and chills, after exploring all the outer nooks and crannies of our life, we may long to know really what we’re made of when it becomes obvious that our outer world does not define us. Looking outside in our external activities does not reveal who we are in the inside. So we need to look there.
This is the reason to meditate. Simply, quietly, without fanfare or too much outer resolve, we close our eyes, sit in a quiet place, relax the body, and just take a peek inside. There we are—whatever we are. And it is completely unexpected, what we find.
For more info, call Ace Remas at 415-760-7300.
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