One of the many miraculous functions of meditation is that it is a portal to a different dimension.
When you go deeply into the meditative state, your awareness detaches itself from the thought-stream. Then your identification with emotion, memory, time and body begins to fall away. You become aware of something very mysterious. Imagine that you had been fast asleep in a small dark chamber and then you suddenly awakened to find yourself floating in the infinite depth of a vast, peaceful ocean. You literally become aware of a new dimension, when moments before you had experienced yourself as being trapped, a prisoner of your body, mind and emotions. When you awaken to this new dimension, all sense of confinement disappears. You feel that you have access to the whole universe and also to that which the universe exists within. You're aware of body, mind, time, and space, but there's another dimension that extends in all directions, unlimited by any of it. Meditation is the portal to this dimension, a door to the realization of limitlessness.
Why is this experience significant? Because the infinite context you awaken to is not just a quiet place inside your own head. It's a deeper dimension of reality itself. Life, death and everything in between, reality as a whole -- the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, all that ever was and ever could be -- is made up of both the manifest and the unmanifest. But most of the time, all we are aware of is the manifest dimension, the domain of time and space and becoming. Meditation will give you the direct, conscious experience of the unmanifest dimension, which is the ground of being itself.
The "ground of being" is empty. It is an objectless, timeless, spaceless, thoughtless void. But everything that exists has come from this no-place, including you and me. Paradoxically, while empty, this no-place is pregnant with infinite, unborn potential. It is the ground we all emerge from, the womb of the entire universe. When something came from nothing, 14 billion years ago, the nothing didn't disappear. That unmanifest, unborn dimension is the ever-present ground out of which everything is arising in every moment. And meditation allows you to know this ground within your own experience. Even in the awareness of the body and the movement of thought, beneath it all, in the state of meditation, you become conscious of a current of stillness that is the echo and the reflection of the ground of being. There is a great mystery there. In the infinite depth of that emptiness, there arises a knowing, a pure knowing itself that seems to answer all our questions and relieve us of all our existential doubts.
Whenever we journey far enough beyond the conditioned mind -- beyond thought, beyond form, beyond time -- we will always discover this same mystery. That is why we meditate, so we can awaken to the instantaneously liberating nature of the ground of being. The more profound is our experience of the ground of being, the more we begin to emanate that mysterious knowing which is enlightened consciousness itself.
Andrew Cohen is a spiritual teacher and founder of the award-winning EnlightenNext magazine. His new book is called Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening. Click here to learn more.
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Gabrielle Bernstein: My Meditative Memoir
Each petal quietly and slowly opens one after the other until the flower's heart, the corolla is revealed Such is what you term meditation -- that calm watchfulness without yearning and without any objective. The rest is commentary, the movement of shadows and the whispering of insensate voices and the rambling of lost words while the flower's pedals have faded into dust.
SEEING
Most of my seeing
is an illusion
because I see with two things
my eyes
and my mind.
Objects appear to me
to be real
as my mind sees them.
Soul sees the spaces between things.
My mind does not.
A synonym for ignorance is unawareness. A definition of this Isness, which is the source of all that is; is awareness i.e. infinite awareness, which reveals itself to our consciousness as emptiness.
Unawareness is the stuff, indeed the very necessity for life, as we know it. Without our unawareness there is no us; just Isness and we can call that Isness God.
Our original ignorance is when the infinite Oneness became/manifested the many.
Our uniqueness as a evolving soul is dependent indeed a necessity of our level/degree of awareness, which had its beginning as our original unawareness. Creation demands unawareness meaning our original ignorance.
Once we eat from the tree of knowledge which all souls must do, we perceive ourselves in our unawareness/ignorance as no longer innocent as we reveal our ignorance, then of course as the Buddha and enlightened Hindu’s realized our suffering has its origin in our ignorance.
The more aware we become in our consciousness; the more we see our innocence, indeed the original innocence of our created unawareness. This ability to see innocence is the very foundation of compassion. To state this in religious terms, that in God’s eyes God only sees our innocence.
The fallen human status of original sin is 180 degrees in error. It is our original innocence that makes every soul unique in an evolution of consciousness process which every soul must “evolve/unfold†as a dynamic expression of this infinite Oneness most call God.
This quote will be confusing to most readers. Nothing can come from nothing: period! 0 plus 0 will always be 0 no exceptions. Atheists believe something can come from nothing so at least you agree with their materialism. Sorry my idea of humor.
That unmanifest unborn "dimension" is not nothing, it is not a paradox, it is Isness; the pure infinite awareness that cannot be defined as it is infinite without boundaries. Once we attempt to define it; we limit it as we attempt to put boundaries on this Isness; the Source of all that is and will ever be.
That nothing you write in this quote is everything, i.e. all and all, the absolute, etc.
Anything we think of as a paradox is simply something we lack understanding of. Paradoxes exist because of our lack of awareness, so we call it a paradox.
To a Christian a paradox is that God is unconditional love but yet its creation suffers. So of course they believe somehow they are to blame so they take credit for that suffering as a fallen human status. I.e. ego guilt thing.
Always enjoy reading your articles.
Five years ago, David Lynch set up a foundation to teach TM to "at risk" children and convinced the old guru to set the group rate for instruction by more than 50% of the normal rate. When individuals learn TM, the instructor takes 50% and the international organization takes 50%. When a group learns under the auspices of the David Lynch Foundation, the instructor takes the entire fee. So far 150,000 or so kids have learned TM via the David Lynch Foundation, and the city of Rio de Janeiro is said to have put all 1 million of its school kids on a waiting list to learn TM.
Long term TM practitioners, including RIngo Starr and Sir Paul McCartney have donated their time to help raise the funds for the kids to learn. You can be cynical all you want about the financial motivations of the various TM organizations, but all of them are either not-for-profit, or are owned by the not-for-profit organizations.
In India and other developing countries, where there is reverence for spiritual teachers, a more token payment of some fruit and flowers is sufficient.
I cannot see good philosophical justification for asserting that "The 'ground of being' is empty." Tillich referred to God as the "ground of being" - I don't think that God is empty. In pantheistic systems, the universe is the ground of being -- and it is not empty either.
Furthermore, I cannot possibly understand asserting that "In the infinite depth of that emptiness, there arises a knowing, a pure knowing itself that seems to answer all our questions and relieve us of all our existential doubts."
Knowing, knowledge, depends on something. Ignorance is emptiness. Unless you see "pure knowing" as the Eternal "Duh" (which I don't), emptiness does not lead to knowledge. Experience does. Experience is borne from activity, from engagement, from interaction with the outside world.
Meditation might be good for relaxation, building strength to continue engagement and learning. But the Eternal Duh of an "an objectless, timeless, spaceless, thoughtless void" is meaningless.
So with regret I confess to a clueless non-NewAgeyness. The descriptions above mean nothing to me. The Eternal Duh never has. I deal in the world of the known. I put things aside to rest, or meditate on a few things in isolation so as to gain better understanding. But then, back in the real world, I practice focusing on the things that matter so that I am less aware of the irrelevant clamour.
Cogito ergo sum.
A little quote sums up Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's view on scientific research on meditation:
Spiritual and Material Values
"Every experience has its level of physiology, and so unbounded awareness has its own level of physiology which can be measured. Every aspect of life is integrated and connected with every other phase. When we talk of scientific measurements, it does not take away from the spiritual experience. We are not responsible for those times when spiritual experience was thought of as metaphysical. Everything is physical. Consciousness is the product of the functioning of the brain. Talking of scientific measurements is no damage to that wholeness of life which is present everywhere and which begins to be lived when the physiology is taking on a particular form. This is our understanding about spirituality: it is not on the level of faith --it is on the level of blood and bone and flesh and activity. It is measurable."
-Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
The lack of objects of attention while remaining in an alert state (pure consciousness) can be explained by a temporary change in the processing of thalamo-cortical loops, aka mental and sensory processing: the process of TM tends to set up an inhibition of sense-based processing, both external and internal, which leads to a quiet, but alert state of the brain. In this state, the brain remains active, and continues the only activity it ever does anyway: optimization of the connections between the individual neurons. One could call pure consciousness a state where the brain fine-tunes its own idling state. This fine-tuning explains all the improvements of physical, mental and emotional functioning documented by research on TM.
Thank you.
Currently our Community Alliance is training our Sponsor-Advocates and Team Leaders in various forms of sitting and moving meditations so that our injured warriors and their families can experience the 'natural state of Mind.' http://jerryvest.pages.qpg.com