Meditation comes in waves. That’s the way all meditations work, whether the folks practicing various brands of meditation know it, or not. Everything happens in waves. The entire universe is waves. Everything in sight, everything you know, everything you feel, sense, touch and bump into, happens in waves.
You have direct experiential experience of this. Waves of nausea. Waves of heat. Waves of exhaustion, punctuated by “catching a second wind”. Waves of hunger. Waves of excitement. Waves of joy, sympathy, exaltation. Birthing a baby happens in waves, good and bad luck happen in waves.
When you get into an exalted “high” state, it also happens in waves. You ride the energy downstream toward entropy, then bounce back almost to the top of the wave, then it repeats and repeats until you run out of energy entirely.
When you traverse the Bardos, things happen in waves. When you surf…ah, there’s a great example of how meditation really works, and how you can actually accomplish its aims.
As a surfer, you would first wax your board, then take it out into the surf, lie down on it and paddle your way OVER the waves, barely touching them as you ride the swells against the current, until you were just short of where the waves first break on their way toward the beach.
You’d turn your board around rather rapidly, avoiding the cross-current drag of the waves, then head more or less toward the beach, but at just the right angle so that the wave I catch will take me diagonally, for a longer ride.
Okay, I catch a wave. Now I want to stay with that wave. I don’t want to head right into the beach, but I also don’t want to spill over or lose the wave by allowing it to pass under me — a result of too wide an angle.
If I do happen to lose a wave, I have to learn how to wait for the next wave. There’s a whole lot more to this than a casual glance at surfing might suggest. In the Ashram, there’s a surf area where you can learn this without having to actually go to the beach.
Meditation happens in waves, don’t forget that point, as we delve into the subject. Not only does meditation NOT happen continuously, but meditation can be directed or undirected.
Undirected meditation doesn’t mean that it has no direction, just that the meditator isn’t directing it or looking to go somewhere in particular.
Directed meditation has a purpose, a point and a destination.
Seated meditation requires a full dedication of the body/mind toward seated meditation. You can’t get up, wander around, sit back down, rub a knee, scratch an itch, start thinking about business or personal worries, none of that. You’re expected to reflex, rebound and toss away any distraction to your perfectly clear meditation.
Undirected meditation isn’t really undirected, it’s directed unknowingly by randomized thoughts, emotions, urges and demi-urges, meaning that the meditation is like a kayak that’s continually banging against the rocks and getting caught in swirls and eddies of the rushing river rapids.
- Moving meditation takes into account that your body is in motion.
- Walking meditation is a common practice among many gurus and philosophers.
- Working meditation can be performed during ordinary tasks.
Working meditation allows one to meditate in any situation, no matter how active. Even in the midst of an upheaval, it’s possible to maintain one’s meditation.
Let’s take a moment to define meditation. There are several kinds of meditation that you might want to know about, such as STATE MEDITATION, the kind I teach.
In State Meditation, you learn to change your state. At first, it’s just emotional, mental and physical states that you’ll be changing, but then eventually, it leads to changing your mind, changing your body, changing your world, changing your universe, and ultimately, changing your destiny.
State Meditation starts off small, easy, simple, and eminently do-able. Your first lesson will be to achieve a single second of inner peace and harmony, a state of “All Quiet Inside”, a common goal of most beginner meditation techniques and, yes, meditation has to be learned.
Real meditation isn’t something you’d be likely to stumble into on your own. There are a number of guided State Meditations that you might find interesting and rewarding:
- ALL QUIET INSIDE
- ALL-CENTERS BALANCE & HARMONY
- HEALTHY WELLNESS
- STRENGTH
- WILLPOWER
- CONFIDENCE
- SELF-ESTEEM
- CHARISMATIC MAGNETISM
- CLARITY
- WISDOM & UNDERSTANDING
- FORGIVENESS
- LOVE
- CARING
- HIGH ATTENTION
- PERFECT MEMORY
- BEAUTY
- RADIANCE
- HAPPINESS
- HEALING POWERS
- JUST PLAIN LUCKY
- COMFORTABLY NUMB & PAIN-FREE
- BREATHING WELLNESS
- CHANGE OF SPACE
- TIME-BENDING
- REPAIR THE PAST
- DEBT-FREE KARMA CLEARING
- LIVE LONG & PROSPER
- HIGHER REALMS
- EXTRA-UNIVERSE VOYAGING
- CHANGE SCALE OF EXISTENCE
- CHANGE LEVEL OF LIVINGNESS
- WAKING STATE
There are other goals and purposes of directed meditation, and you’ll undoubtedly come across them or be introduced to them if you pursue the aim and make some serious efforts along this line of inquiry.
Of course, it isn’t about you — it can’t be about you. It’s about all beings everywhere, and that’s the real key to it all. You can’t reach the key, grab the key, find the key, beg, borrow or steal the key, but when you accept responsibility, when you begin to work for the benefit of all beings everywhere, not merely hoping for, but working for, their benefit in a real way, not just wishing them well, then you’re handed the key.
The effort is not in finding the key, but in being deserving, becoming worthy of the key.
Meditation is not a cure, it’s a method of travel TO a cure, if “cure” is the right word for the action of liberating yourself from the clutches of the organic world.
Liberation isn’t something that just happens, that you stumble upon, that you find while looking for your wallet or your keys in the top drawer of your dresser. Liberation is something you earn by doing things that lead to liberation without concern about your personal liberation while on the way there, see?
Meditation happens in waves. Once again, at risk of offending some folks by talking about potty-potty butt-butt, remember what happens when you have a difficult and reluctant potty workin’ at your back door. I know, it’s a little gritty, but the relationship of this example holds up really well, and in later life, you’ll appreciate knowing how to work a stool out the gentle way.
The trick is to know about peristaltic movement. If you don’t know about peristalsis, you’re behind the game. Peristalsis causes the stool mass to move through the intestines. It’s a muscular wave that pulses along the intestinal tract, encouraging the stuff to move toward their Final Destination.
Of course, that’s their own interiorized view of the situation. We know that they have much more of a journey ahead of them — the toilet bowl, the drain pipe, the sewer or septic tank, or in an open field or clutch of trees, an open pit or a clump of grassy weeds and eventual recycling through the whole water and solids program built into the organic world.
As the stool material works its way out of the body, it’s important to work with it, especially in later life. It’s fruitless to grunt and push when the peristaltic impulses are not strong enough to help push the material through.
You wait, breathe slowly and as naturally as possible, working against any pain or acute discomfort that might be happening as the stool hangs in place for a few minutes — yes, minutes.
As in childbirthing, the waves of peristaltic movement can be timed — they’ll usually run about every 60-90 seconds which, under the stressful circumstances, can seem like an hour.
If you can’t pass it easily, you might break out in sweat. If you have to walk around for a while, to give the body a chance to work it out a little more before you try to pass it, you might find yourself in a panic state, a state of high anxiety.
About 99% of all “Anxiety” patients suffer from chronic intestinal disorders. It isn’t well known by doctors, but merely taking a dump and knowing that the body reacts to difficult stools with anxiety symptoms could cure most anxiety cases, probably permanently — it’s just a case of recognizing the source of the anxiety and working with the peristaltic impulses to clear the temporary intestinal blockage.
Back in ancient Egypt, I was widely regarded as a healer, and I could openly practice my healing arts. When there is no medicine, only doctors and pharmacists, healers cannot practice, and this is the case today.
I’m not allowed to tell you which foods are good to eat for spiritual path development, but I do anyway.
I’m not allowed to indicate to you which supplements might work for your body, to bring you into a higher state of personal vibration, to assist your spiritual attainments, but I tell you about them, anyway, because you need to know.
Why Western children aren’t taught to learn to work with the natural periodic waves of peristaltic movement when passing a stool, is beyond me. What a ton of suffering for no reason at all, just for lack of information about the simple workings of the organic body, and why?
Because some folks are crushingly embarrassed about the human body, that’s why, and they tend to impose their views and prejudices on others, if given the opportunity. Never put yourself in the way of an arch-conservative with a severe case of body-shame.
In birthing a baby, the mom has to work with the waves, the contractions, which come every five minutes, then four, then three, then two, then one, then the baby crowns, and you do your breathing as the baby works its way through the perineum and into the Earth’s oxygen & nitrogen rich atmosphere.
JOKE ALERT:
Oxygen is addictive. Doctors know that. They’re part of the Oxygen Conspiracy. Just try doing without oxygen for a couple of days, and see how long you last. Oxygen addicts have it tough, because you’re surrounded by fellow addicts, making a cure almost impossible.
Anyhow, meditation works the same as taking a dump, to put it crudely. You catch a meditation wave at the top, and ride it down until it deposits you on the beach or in the bubbly surf right next to the beach, where you’ll find tiny buckets, shovels, driftwood, and the occasional sea shell.
So at every finish point, you “lose” your meditation, and must swim back over the surf to your pickup point again, and you must do this every single time you surf.
You’ll never find the Perfect Wave That Lasts Forever. Every wave has its downfall, its point of diminishing returns, when it runs out of energy and can’t take you any further.
Think of the universe as a sort of playground for a very advanced race of beings who consider a lifetime the way you’d consider going around and around on a carousel or roller coaster or spawning your character or avatar in an online video game.
In the case of a roller coaster, you can’t get off until the ride is over and the car has come to a complete stop. When you do get off, you can change rides. Normally, you can’t do that in mid-ride, but changing waves when you’re surfing, although difficult and dangerous, can be done.
In this sense, meditation is like life, the universe & everything. It all happens in waves. So don’t be disappointed when your meditation falls apart periodically. Just paddle back out there, catch the next big wave, and do it again.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby