Meditation
Patience . . . There is a political message here.
Now before you shout Gah! Fuck New Age evangelism, let me assure you I have no interest doing that, nor in any religion—I’ve got none and am quite happy that way. But what I'm going to write about might be helpful no matter what your philosophical or religious tradition. So take a breath and read Rumi:
Out beyond ideas
of wrong-doing and right-doing,
there is a field—I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase
"each other"
don't make any sense.~Rumi
I really am not a poetry reader; in fact I skip poetry when it appears in the couple of magazines I subscribe to. But this bit speaks to my meditation experience, which is what I want to talk about.
First, let me define "meditation." It's not about asking for anything or even addressing a spiritual entity. It is about clearing away thinking which comprises ego.
It is impossible to maintain your ego if you are not thinking.
Maybe read that last sentence again and let it marinate.
. . . .
Okay, I know not feeling your ego, if you believe that's who you are, may sound scary. I think subconsciously knowing it's under attack is what keeps a lot of people from even trying to meditate. And even if you do meditate, it's what keeps a lot of us thinking—because we kind of dread the death.
I meditate every morning and rarely have a thoughtless mind, but every now and then, I'll get a few seconds.
What is no thinking?
It's getting absolutely naked in the profoundest sense. You can start by repeating a mantra or just by breathing and feeling your breath. And when you hit "no thought," you have hit Rumi's field. It is the sweetest freedom you can imagine. It is Everything.
This Everything is always there and indestructible; it's merely obscured by the ego. So the minute or second you achieve no thought, ego vanishes to reveal that you are as huge as Consciousness.
No thinking inherently means you ARE everything. You don't need another person to tell you that. In fact, somebody can lecture you for your whole life that you are everything and you will not believe them until you feel it. You can have hoards of people screaming how wonderful you are, but it won't last. But the AM EVERYTHING lasts for eternity.
The Paradox
We all are born, in a sense, from and embodying "no thinking." In the best of all possible scenarios, we meet ourselves in the loving eyes of a parent. It is through that mirroring that we develop the wiring to connect to other humans and life on Earth. Not everybody gets this best case scenario.
In the next best scenario, we find other adults who look at us with appreciation and love, and although it can be rough, we still have a chance to develop the necessary wiring and meet ourselves in their love and feel valued.
In the eleventh-hour scenario (mine), we go through youth and young adulthood unplugged, flailing about until maybe we're in our 30s or 40s and finally meet the right therapist or healer or community, and miracle of miracles, we plug in and develop the wiring most people take for granted.
Worst case scenario, that never happens. And the world is so full of stories of such people that I'll leave it there.
However, once we do have the wiring and the healthy ego that's required to thrive, that's when it's most transformative to stop thinking and wire back into where we came from: that field Rumi writes about. We need to have a healthy ego to bust out of it into Everything so that we no longer crave validation of what we already know we are because we experience it.
Why is this important?
A few columns ago, I wrote about being a Servant Leader. Gandhi was one. Jesus was one. Buddha was probably another. And I'm sure there are more. No matter what their tradition or terminology, they all taught the same thing: We are this Everything. And this everything is love. Or creation itself. Or life itself. It is the pulsing that animates life and manifests us for a brief time.
Right now, we are in desperate need of people who lead through service. They don't have to be religious; they don't have to meditate (in fact our crooked Mayor Adams of NYC is a meditator and it's had no apparent effect on his ethics). What our new leaders need to be are people who are mission-driven and therefore leading for altruistic reasons—because they have a sense of the Everything and are more concerned with helping than deriving power or adulation. And we need to learn to recognize them when they appear.
Sending Love,
Betsy
Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright. She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.