The following is a summary of a talk given by a school member during the course of a School of Meditation Open Day in October 2006.
The School of Meditation exists to make available a method of meditation which has been developed and nurtured in an Indian tradition which goes back thousands of years. This tradition is Vedanta, a philosophy developed from the Vedas - insights into the nature of creation and man’s place in it, which were passed on orally until being written down circa 2500 BC.
The particular school, or branch of Vedanta that this method comes from, is Advaita Vedanta whose chief exponent was Shankara and who lived in the 8th century AD. “Advaita” is a Sanskrit word meaning “not two”, for this philosophy maintains that the individual self and the ultimate reality are indivisibly one. This is, of course, not something that is uniquely Indian. Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who famously said that you cannot step into the same river twice, also said,
“The One is all things, all things are one”
The German theologian Meister Eckhart wrote:
“More than this, love God as God is,
A pure, clear One
Who is separate from all twoness.”
More recently, British physicist Dr David Bohm has written,
“Quantum physics is tending to confirm what the sages of old always knew;
creation is a seamless unity in which we can say, not two . . . but all of a piece.“
The teaching and guidance we received from this tradition holds that the apparent separation of a subject and object, spirit and matter, is an illusion. Coming to a full understanding and realisation of this leads to liberation from illusion.
The philosophy can be appreciated at the level of ideas and concepts but, for full understanding and realisation to take place, a practical method is required. This practice needs to work at the level of mind for, as Shankara said:
“The mind is both the cause of bondage
and the means of liberation.”
This was echoed by our own John Milton who wrote:
“The mind is its own place and can, of itself,
make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven.”
The practice of meditation has been prescribed since time immemorial to work on the level of mind and to help the individual find an authentic level of existence. In the great religious and philosophical traditions there has been a thread suggesting that a man needs a deeper understanding of himself than is usually found in the inherited and conditioned dispositions of the personality. The Cistercian monk and writer Thomas
Merton wrote:
“Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person; a false self.”
Albert Einstein described it thus:
“...a human being . . . experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
The delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires
and affection for a few persons nearest to us.”
The Indian teacher who gave guidance to the School of Meditation for many years said:
“in order to be what you are, you must first come out of what you are not.”
Another Indian teacher, Nisargadatta Maharaj, echoed these words thus:
“To know what you are, you must first investigate and know what you are not.
Discover that you are not body, feelings, thought, time, space, this or that –
nothing concrete or abstract can be you. The very act of perceiving shows
that you are not what you perceive.”
Thus the whole aim of meditation is to help us discover and identify “those things that we are not”. We must admit that we are all conditioned - by our genetic inheritance, our upbringing, education and life experiences. thus the “I” that we are referring to whenever we speak about ourselves comes with a lot of baggage accumulated over the years. This is the false self that Merton is referring to, for the great religious and philosophical traditions all maintain that we are more than this.
Our essential nature (called in Advaita, “the Self”) is said to be pure, pristine awareness. It has always been there, it is just that our attention is caught by the movements of mind. We are aware of the floor-show but not of the person observing it. This, being who we truly are, or finding our real self is a process of observing the events unfolding before us in the realisation that we are the awareness that is watching these events.
Now this sounds simple enough but our attachment to the moving contents of consciousness if very strong and deep-seated. meditation, real meditation, is the letting go of our attachments and their in-built filters so as to experience reality as it unfolds. The practice of meditation is practising letting go of these attachments and resting in the stillness of observation without getting caught in the emotional entanglements that thinking and imagining bring up.
The practice of meditation throws into relief those aspects of ourselves that we normally consider to constitute “me” or “my personality”. This is not always a comfortable process as there are aspects of our personality that we repress as perhaps being unacceptable - what Jung refers to as “the shadow”. What becomes clear after a time is that all this is part of our conditioning, what Advaita Vedanta refers to as “that which you are not”. But it is important to remember that we were told to “come out” of what we are not, not to reject it or get rid of it, but to cease identifying with it. It is by letting go of what we imagine ourselves to be, letting go of our thinking, our attempts to control the world, that we come to our essential nature which is pure, pristine awareness, knowable in the moment it is experienced but impossible to encapsulate in concepts. The Vedas express it thus:
“That which does the seeing cannot be seen;
That which does the hearing cannot be heard;
And that which does the thinking cannot be thought.”
So, what we are saying is “that which you truly are is not something that can be separated into an object by the conceptual mind; it is what you are and cannot be viewed from outside.” (The eye cannot see itself.)
From the point of view of the discursive mind therefore, the true self must remain something of a mystery and seem full of contradictions. This is why mystical literature refers to “Teachings” as “fingers pointing at the moon” - our minds can only circle the mysteries of existence, never encapsulate them in theories and concepts.
There are certain errors and misunderstandings that one can fall into if one takes oneself seriously - as entering “The Way” or “The Path” - and continues to think in dualistic terms. One can easily get caught up in a world of “enlightenment” gurus who hold the keys to spiritual teachings which will lead us to a serene and trouble-free existence. This is to create an imaginary spiritual life above and beyond our mundane existence. This is certainly not Advaita because this view posits two worlds, one here, imperfect, and another, to be attained, which is infinitely better.
Shantananda Saraswati who gave us guidance for so many years told us that what is required is a “change in the centre of understanding of unity”, a shift in our way of seeing the world - nicely expressed by French writer Marcel Proust:
“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves,
after a journey which no one can make for us,
which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view
from which we come at last to regard the world.”
This life, as it is now, is where we are, we could not be anywhere else. Our personality and our conditioning are part of us and do not need to be changed or got “got rid of”. What is vital is our awareness of these things and our ability to to avoid living on automatic pilot, ruled by our reactions to events and to people. Being oneself, or being who you are is acceptance of your conditioning, your “hang-ups” and your insecurities while appreciating that they are part of a much wider picture and that, what you are in reality, in truth, is this greater, wider awareness.
The American teacher Richard Alpert, better known as Ram Dass, was once asked if his meditation had got rid of his neurosis. He smiled and replied:
“No . . . but I have become a connoisseur of my neuroses!”
He went on to give a lovely analogy (which no doubt originated in the East) and said:
“If you keep a wild animal in a confined space you are asking for trouble.
But if you give it a prairie to roam in, then it won’t bother you too much.”
If we live our life as small, separate conditioned creatures, life’s circumstances will oppress us, but if we acknowledge that what we really are is an awareness that is far more spacious, our mundane experience will be transformed. We will come to a place where we no longer feel the need to apologise for ourselves or justify ourselves, but rejoice in the joy of simply being ourselves.