As I get
deeper and deeper into mindfulness meditation, and as I start sharing this with
others, my silence meditation is also getting deeper. In addition, I realize
few more things.
Learning about meditation is different from
learning meditation. In learning about meditation you have made it into a subject of inquiry, an
objective field of study. That will be good to give you knowledge and will be
useful if you are taking an examination on that subject. But, it cannot help
you meditate. For meditation to become part of you, you have to practice,
experience it.
This is true
of other aspects of life and learning. It is true to about philosophy. You can
learn about philosophy. But, ideally you have to make it a way of life. This is
what Pierre Hadot emphasizes in his book on Philosophy as a Way of Life. This
was what ancient Greek philosophers did.
In India we call it sanatana
dharma, a way of life. According to Hadot, philosophy became an object of study
in the west when it became a “maid-servant of Christian theology” after the
period of St. Thomas Aquinus.
The other
important insight about mindfulness showed me that our perceptions of the world
and actions are based most commonly on our desires and fears. Our brain is made
for those basic drives in its amygdala and hypothalamus and hippocampus. So are
the brains of animals. But as humans we have the higher regions of our brains
and language (prefrontal cortex, insula, speech and language areas) which make
is possible for us to develop values. We need to develop these values to live
the full potentials of being human. If we do, we will not be driven always and
only by desires and fears. Now I can see why both western and eastern
philosophers said that living without fear and desires can lead us to bliss in
this life.
We need spiritual exercises and reflections to
develop these higher values. That should be the purpose of daily meditation. Meditations
should be spiritual exercises, inner dialogues, thought exercises to locate
ourselves in their proper place in nature – alone and together, a wave and an
ocean at once, real in one sense and ephemeral in another (mithya of Sankara).
Pierre Hadot points out that spiritual exercises should "involve the entire spirit, one's whole way of being". To me, the words "one's whole way of being" should mean my physical body and the mind in their individuality as a person (the I) and in the totality as part of the Universe, in space and in time, in their historical dimension and cosmic dimension, in all their inter-connections and inter - dependence and also as they appear to me and as they truly are. That is a tall order.
Pierre Hadot points out that spiritual exercises should "involve the entire spirit, one's whole way of being". To me, the words "one's whole way of being" should mean my physical body and the mind in their individuality as a person (the I) and in the totality as part of the Universe, in space and in time, in their historical dimension and cosmic dimension, in all their inter-connections and inter - dependence and also as they appear to me and as they truly are. That is a tall order.
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