More on Meditation
Meditation, it seems to me, to be a personal journey in
which I am seeking inside of me a sense of something that is sacred, an abiding
energy which is always there. By that definition, that abiding energy, that
sacred something must be present in every life and everything.
During a guided meditation with “Thay” on “Sitting with the
Buddha”, the words he suggests for helping to focus are: “I am sitting with
the Buddha; I am breathing with the Buddha”. I found myself asking “Who am I?”
and also “What is that I?”
If I ask myself: “Who am I?”, the answer I get is: “I am
an impermanent historical entity made of several elements which came together to
make this body with life and those elements will go back to nature when the
body is gone”.
If I ask myself: “What is that I?”, the answer I get is that it is that sacred
abiding energy which is at the base of this “I”, and of all the “I”s and of all
there is in this Universe.
In the epilogue to his famous sloka called Manisha Pancakam,
Adi Sankara relates to body, life, and the abiding energy (spirit) as follows: “Oh
Lord, in the form of the body I am your servant. In the form of life,
I am part of you. You are within me and within every other life in the form of
soul/spirit.”
More questions on
Faith
“Thay” says: “Do not try to be peaceful. Just Be Peace”
“J.K” says: “Do not try to be yourself. Just be that You”
Buddha, Sankara, Jesus, Ramana and other realized souls ask
us to have faith in our inner self and experience the Divine within. Is it
possible to have faith in oneself without getting arrogant and self-righteous?
Those Divine figures could do it. Can we, ordinary people, do it?
If we cannot reach that level of experiencing the Divine in
oneself and yet stay humble, like they did, our faith is more likely to lead to
intolerance and harm to others, and even to oneself. This is one reason given
in the Vedic Hindu tradition to stay with and learn from a Guru, an enlightened
one, so one can learn humility in addition to knowledge.
Putting our faith completely on an external source is also
not without its problems. It is not conducive to growth since we lean on others
and do not think on our own. It may also be dangerous as we have seen over the
centuries with faith-based wars. But it is an easier path. And, if things go
wrong, we have someone else to blame!
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