True Meditation
Adyashanti's approach to meditation has been a revelation for me in the 3 years since I first read his book. Meditation is always good, but where this particular 'approach-less approach' is especially beneficial is for those interested in spiritual awakening. Any form of meditation is excellent preparation for purifying and stabilising the mind and mental tendencies, yet true meditation takes it a step further. Firstly you are letting go of the controller/seeker, the one who is chasing after experiences and outcomes and instead entering a state of effortless allowing, resting as pure awareness. Instead of trying to direct and control your attention and so manipulate your experience, you're surrendering to awareness and allowing it to lead you. Technique is unimportant, for this is essentially an object-less form of meditation. Meditation isn't something you do, after all; it's a state of being.
The second step is adding meditative self-enquiry, which has been perhaps the most powerful spiritual tool I've ever encountered. If anyone is interested, I highly recommend the book which is the most helpful book on meditation I've ever read (It also comes with a CD of two guided meditations). It's really quite beautiful in its simplicity.
Here is Adyashanti's overview of what he calls 'true meditation':
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.
Reply With Quote
Owner & Administrator 
