Sagehood - The Meditative Path

Enheartenment / Sagehood / The Meditative Path

Meditation can be simply defined as a dualistic disembedment process resulting in the transcendence of our mental body aspect that allows us ‘room’ in our consciousness to be able to gradually allow the Nondual Aspect of God, which has always been an intrinsic aspect to our being, an ‘entry’ into our conscious world. Again, the ultimate goal of meditation is to find the meditator and subsequently find that the meditator can’t be found. It is based on the mechanism of mindfulness, which can be described as a focusing of your attention upon the moment between the experience of an experience and the thought-based registration of that experience as an experience. You learn to linger longer and longer, in other words, between the having of an experience and the realization that you are having that experience.

Traditional Buddhistic vipassana involves three stages of ever-deepening mindfulness, watching the dualization mechanism of your mental body so assiduously and for so long a time you actually learn to watch it operate in slow motion. As you do, you begin to experience the previously unconscious underlying governing dynamic of its operation rather than just its conscious effects.

The first stage to learn to first become hyper-aware of the external ‘hard’ dualisms imparted to you by the five senses. Doing this is much harder than you may think. It takes years to really get adept at it, given how many years you’ve spent taking the dualizing mechanism of your mental body for granted and not noticing how much it affects how you experience and thus react to life in gross and subtle ways. Some teach this first stage as a function of watching the breath, allowing yourself to notice all other in-streaming internal or external data you may be experiencing but not giving it much mind.

It’s important to note that true meditation is never about trying not to have thoughts or not be in touch with in-streaming data through the five senses. Trying to resist either will never work. Only by going further into, or becoming hyper-aware of your experience, will cause it to one day run down and leave you with the experience of the not-experience of the personal self. This becoming hyper-aware is like hyper-inventorying all the data streaming into your consciousness you’ve effortlessly learned how to effectively tune out since you were an infant so you could get on with life without being overwhelmed by everything your dualistic consciousness is recording. In this effort, you learn to de-repress your mental data-suppressing reflexes so you experience far more of the life-data you repressed before.

The second stage involves developing the same kind of mindful hyper-awareness of the more internal ‘soft’ dualisms of your sixth sense: thoughts, images, and feelings as they arise in your mental body in reaction to and along with the dualisms imparted to you by your five physical senses. This is a far more subtle task than hyper-inventorying the external data coming in through your five senses, which is why you need to do that one first, to build up your one-pointedness muscles of concentration.

Another way of saying this is that your mind is like an incandescent bulb, giving light out in all directions at once. One-pointedness in these first two stages of meditation is like turning that inefficient incandescent bulb into a laser beam that works for you very, very efficiently. You need all the concentrated sunlight you can get to illuminate all the tiny, tiny ways your internal dualization system, which collectively comprise your experience of what your mental body imparts to you as an ego or personal self, only arises in relation to either external five-senses-mediated stimuli or internal thought-image-feeling-mediated stimuli. You need a laser beam of awareness to target these tiny ways, as the incandescent bulb is not directed or intense enough to do so.

In other words, mindfulness meditation is about learning to watch how any internal stimuli in the form of thoughts, images, feelings, or any external stimuli such as sights, smells, noises, tastes, or touches, has a beginning, a middle and an end, endlessly arising and dissipating, over and over again. Then you begin to watch not the thought arising, blossoming and dissipating, but the gap between the end of one thought stream and the beginning of the next.

Gradually, as you focus on that gap between arising thoughts, the gap gets bigger or longer. The more you focus on the gap, the more you are then beginning to identify with the gap-space more than the thought-stream that arises. As you get adept at this, you then begin to notice that your experience of these temporary effervescent arisings and dissipations actually define what you have been calling an individual ego in that what you have been calling your personal self only arises in direct relation to these temporary effervescent arisings and dissipations of thoughts, images, or feelings in reaction to external environmental stimuli. As said, this makes your sense of personal selfhood a temporary effervescent arising and dissipation thing as well, tied irrevocably to object relations of all kinds.

The third stage of vipassana is simply the gradual ‘absorption’ or jnana of what you call your personal self into and as Nonduality. More exactly, Nonduality either gradually or suddenly breaks through the dam of your dualizing mechanism of mental body-mediated selfhood you’ve been slowly deconstructing through meditation and radical self-inquiry.

So in the beginning of vipassana, you watch thoughts and feeling-reactions arise as they fill the space of your watching, a seemingly never-ending stream of content. As you deepen your practice, the time between the arisings of thoughts and feeling-reactions grows longer and longer until thoughts and feeling reactions become far less prevalent than the time between the arisings. The time between becomes a kind of an empty content of its own that you continue to watch in the same way. Eventually you and the empty content begin to merge. When this stage is reached, the repetitious radical self-inquiry of all the levels of Isness, Oneness, and Notness you have been doing all along in concert with your meditating move ever more deeply, the combination creating a growing disquiet about the nature of what you have been calling ego or self, until the terror of self-annihilation grows.

Theohumanity also offers another kind of meditative practice called Avrassana. Avrassana differs from vipassana in that you are not trained to watch impermanent thoughts and feeling reactions arise, blossom, and dissipate from within you. Instead you learn to experience these impermanencies as falling from ‘above you’ and ‘burning up’ before they land and register in you, in the same way meteors from space fall into the earth’s atmosphere and burn up before they hit the ground. Depending on your temperament, Avrassana can often help you arrive at an inner stillness place much more quickly and able to hold that stillness far longer than vipassana. Overall, using a combination of both at different times is very helpful.

In summary, the aim of Sagehood practice in accessing the Nondual Aspect of God is to discover in your own personal experience that which the mental body never touches. A true awakening to this Aspect of God clings neither to dualistic forms nor to transcendental freedom, and is attached to neither attachment nor non-attachment. The motive for true Sagehood practice neither can be to seek liberation from any wheel of rebirth, nor to transcend the illusion of ego, nor to attain serenity or deep existential insight. There can be no sense of an outcome state or goal in your motivation base for practice. There can only be a processorial motive, to heal the fear of the loss of your sense of and identification as, a personal self or ego, letting the outcome of that healing be what it is, an unknown you can’t hold in any form or shape without quality, just as it for any other future moment.

In the Way of the Sage, no human can define themselves from within themselves any more than the eye can see itself. The loss of that which creates the sense of all withins and all withouts is the only means to know that the mental body can never know anything except that which falls within its governing dynamic, imparting to you a world circumscribed by its dualistic operational parameters, and screening out to you That Which pre-exists your being and your inability to ever fully know the Mystery From Which the essence or existence of your being arises. No manner of simple introspection or extrospection will liberate you from your yoke of mental body slavery, because both modes of inquiry are part of that which must be lost to ever know that which you do not know.

Thus, every moment becomes a beginner’s mind of not knowing, every breath a beginner’s breath that knows not if the next breath will come, each emergent moment the tender seed of a future blossom that aches to push through the soil of its birth to an unknown destination into the air and the light.

Here is where you see nothing and everything as the same, experience Reality as not a Unity of connected pieces, but as a constantly emergent arising of Itself, where you feel sorrow and joy as identical, arise from your bed and go to sleep in the same moment, are born, die, and are reborn in the same breath for all eternity. In that way, you finally embody an experience wherein That Which you cannot hold holds you, That Which you cannot know Knows you, and That Which you cannot ever be, lives as your truest Being.