On Meditation

On Meditation. Though there are many different types of meditation I would like to share some quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love”.

I’m sure many of you have had difficulty with mastering one form of meditation or another. There is a particularly poignant and humorous difficulty with Meditation that Elizabeth Gilbert mentions on pages 94 to 97. However, here I would like to share a successful meditation as well as other mystics of all religions experiences also outlined by Gilbert.

She mentions previous to this that the mantra "Ham-Sa" means “I am That”. Which in a Christian context is interesting because when Moses asked God what his name is translated he said, “I am that I am”. So from this point of view one is through both mantra and meditation one is acknowledging oneness with God. By acknowledging oneness with God the real experience of this naturally follows. However, for me it is a lot like jumping off a cliff and never hitting the ground. It is bound to take ones breath away for awhile.

I should mention that Elizabeth Gilbert at this point in the book is practicing meditation in an Ashram in India near Mumbai for a month with people from the United States, India and all over the world.

Begin quote page 141, "Ham-sa In Sanskrit it means "I am that"

The Yogis say that Ham-sa is the most natural mantra, the one we are all given by God before birth. It is the sound of our own breath. 'Ham' on the inhale,'sa' on the exhale. (Ham by the way, is pronounced softly, openly, like 'hahhhm', not like the meat you put on a sandwich. And 'sa' rhymes with "Ahhhh...) As long as we live every time we breathe in or out, we are repeating this mantra. I am That. I am divine, I am with God, I am an expression of God, I am not separate, I am not alone, I am not this limited illusion of an individual. I've always found 'Ham-sa' easy and relaxing. Easier to meditate with than (my mantra) Om Namah Shivaya, the---how would you say this---"Official mantra of this Yoga. But I was talking to this monk the other day and he told me to go ahead and use 'Ham-sa' if it helped my meditation. He said, "Meditate on whatever causes a revolution in your mind.

So I'll sit with it today.
Ham-sa
I am That.

Thoughts come, but I don't pay much attention to them, other than to say to them in an almost motherly manner. "Oh, I know you jokers---Go outside and play now--- Mommy's listening to God."
Ham-sa
I am That
I fell asleep for a while. (Or whatever. In meditation, you can never really be sure if what you think is sleep is actually sleep; soemtimes it's just another level of consciousness)When I awake or whatever, I can feel this soft blue electrical energy pulsing through my body, in waves. It's a little alarming, but also amazing. I don't know what to do, so I just speak internally to this energy. I say to it, "I believe in you," and it magnifies, volumizes, in response. It's frighteningly powerful now, like a kidnapping of the senses. It's humming up from the base of my spine. My neck feels like it wants to stretch and twist, so I let it, and then I'm sitting there in the strangest position--perched upright like a good Yogi, but with my left ear pressed hard against my left shoulder. I don't know why my head and neck want to do this, but I'm not going to argue with them; they are insistent. The pounding blue energy keeps pitching through my body, and I cn hear a sort of thrumming sound in my ears, and it's so mighty now that I actually can't deal with it anymore. It scares me so much that I say to it, "I'm not ready yet!" and snap open my eyes. It all goes away. I'm back in a room again, back in my surroundings. I look at my watch. I've been here--or somewhere--for almost an hour.
I'm panting, literally panting." End quote page 142 end of Chapter 45

Though on one level I should end it there to give your spirit a chance to take all this in I'm also drawn to share the beginning of Chapter 46 on page 143. Begin quote
"To understand what that experience was, what happened in there(by which I mean both 'in the meditation cave' and 'in me') brings up a topic rather esoteric and wild--namely the subject of 'kundalini shakti'.

Every religion in the world has a subset of devotees who seek a direct transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine. The interesting thing about these mystics is that, when they describe their experiences, they all end up describing exactly the same occurance. Generally their union with God occurs in a meditative state, and is delivered through an energy source that fills the entire body with euphoric, electric light. The Japanese call this energy 'ki', the Chinese Buddhists call it 'chi', the Balinese call it 'n/um' (their holy men describe it as a snakelike power that ascends through the spine and blows a hole in the head through which the gods then enter). The Islamic Sufi poets called that God-energy "The Beloved", and wrote devotional poems to it. The Australian oborigines describe a serpent in the sky that descends into the medicine man and gives him intense, other-worldly powers. In the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah his union with the divine is said to occur through stages of spiritual ascension, with energy that runs up the spine along a series of invisible meridians.

Saint Teresa of Avila, that most mystical of Catholic figures, described her union with God as a physical ascension of light through seven inner "mansions' of her beings, afer which she burst into God's presence. She used to go into meditative trances so deep that the other nuns couldn't feel her pulse anymore. She would beg her fellow nuns not to tell anyone what they had witnessed as it was 'a most extraordinary thing and likely to arouse considerable talk.' (Not to mention a possible interview with the Inquisitor) The most difficult challenge, the saint wrote in her memoirs, was to not stir up the intellect during meditation, for any thoughts of the mind-- even the most fervent prayers--will extinguish the fire of God." Endquote bottom of page 143.

My personal experiences with the meditative state is that I prefer to live there. Now you may say this isn't possible. However, I have found that if I have the 'Leisure to Practice' and so if I am not plaqued with the workaday world that much I can stay in a meditative "Dream Yoga" state 24 hours a day. In this dream yoga state I notice that there is a quality of both dreams and reality merging. Now you may think this odd but I find it very natural. What is merging is the divine and the mundane into one Holistic 24 hour a day experience. What I'm finding is that less and less do Any disturbances whether they be physical or on any other level interfere with my ongoing union with the Divine.

I think as a young person one might have difficulty with understanding what the divine actually is and therefore believe that only the physical is real. In actuality the physical is only one of many levels of reality and is in actuality one of the least real of those actual levels. There is a saying, "Don't believe everything you hear." Well, in regard to the physical "Don't believe everything you See!" However, learning what actually is real takes a lot of time and a lot of testing. That is why you don't see fully actualized enlightened children very often.