Why should I meditate?…for the sake of a better future for us all

We are now up to the last class in our five-week course of ‘Living Enlightenment’ and it’s been a tremendous journey for all of us. In the first class we looked at where we are as a culture generally, and a lot of our conditioned beliefs, and in the second where we are attempting to go on the path of Evolutionary Enlightenment. This means going from a post-modern ‘world centred’ perspective to one where we know we are the cosmic process itself and in no way separate from it. The last part of the course (classes 3-5) really look at the ‘how to’…the path itself.

A major part of this requires us to look at our own experience in a really new and radical way. It requires us to look at ourselves, and what’s motivating us, through the lens of the authentic self, and the lens of the personal and cultural ego. When we identify with these different perspectives, and really break it down together, we can see that how we see and relate to the world is always influenced in an essential way by the nature and quality of these perspectives. We went around the class and honed in on what’s it like to ‘be’ the authentic self. There is no fear or self-consciousness, losing a sense of time or any limitation, a burning desire to create something new and positive and ecstatic drive to really do it. We all could relate to this experience for sure. We all had our own flavours of it, in different talents and interests for example, but the drive to create, for example, was fundamentally the same. And then looking though the lens of the personal ego we all shared the view of limitation, a sense of unease, subtle (or not) victimisation, and their being a problem with life and us in general. The more we talked and looked together through these lenses in this way, the more clarifying and fascinating it became.

When we started to became more aware of these different parts of the self as cultural structures and cosmic forces, the next part of the teaching makes if clear that we, as an individual, choose which part of our self that we put our attention on, and in doing so, manifest as ourselves. It does take time to set this context, but this is essential for us to know why we meditate. It becomes much clearer then what we are doing and why we are doing it. After going into these distinctions together, and knowing the absolutely overwhelming power of our conditioning, we can see then how important it is for us to be able to consciously not respond to our experience when we choose to. This is why we meditate – to release us from the grip of ‘being’ our experience unconsciously, and to gain more and more space and (some degree of) of objectivity about it. And it is a subtle thing to get, because we have been trained to make it all about us and how we feel. Everything is drawn back to ourselves as a post modern person, how we are doing, how we want it to feel, and what this means about us. This point is a big one! And we then started to see that our ability to do this in mediation directly relates to us being able to let go, not respond from unwholesome motives we can now see clearer, and take responsibility for ourselves in life at all times – and this is creating a new culture in real time!

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