Pure Meditation

Here's an article by physician and philosopher Deepak Chopra. Many of you know him, I feel safe to assume. I am posting a recent article by him to open the discussion and thought processes among us toward the "goal" of happiness and contentment.

Most of us began meditating or want to become meditators with some form of this goal in mind. For some the desire is merely to de-stress while for others it is to reach a higher plain of consciousness in which suffering does not exist. It's likely that there are endless degrees of similar desire on a spectrum between these two for the world's individuals.

This article discusses the less tangible end of the spectrum in that it brings up the idea of our true nature, being wholeness, and how we might get "there" by the power of our choosing. It is relevant for us here because I have been following the topic of meditation and the "plight" of the meditator for many years and it seems to be a common experience among meditators that we pass through many phases of experiencing ourselves; anywhere from the lowest low of failure to change our consciousness to the highest high of having the most beautiful and blissful of higher consciousness states. Interestingly, there seems to be no linear and stable progression from one phase to another like we might expect while mastering any other activity that we spend years practicing. Any given day and meditation session can be quite different than the previous day's experience!

My meditation teacher taught me from the very start, "the primary understanding of the meditation student is that you are already whole and perfect!" and "If you are not experiencing yourself as whole and perfect, something must have happened that disconnected you from that experience". What could that thing be???

Perhaps the thing is simply that we don't believe it because of the filters that we have inculcated into our belief system. We have simply been fooling ourselves that we are good judges of our and each others' reality. This belief, that we know something, when we don't, can be let go of. It's the process of awakening from our delusions about ourselves and surrendering the role we have assumed for ourselves. This is our path. The goal and the realization is inevitable. However, you'll only know this for sure when you are totally ready to know and have abandoned the arrogance of the ego self and let go of your self as your own guide and teacher. Until then our ego self will lead us on a wild goose chase. The good news? Even the wild goose chase will be used by our Whole Self to help us awaken to Itself.

Can You Ever Choose to Be Whole? Wholeness is considered to be very desirable in many settings from holistic health to whole foods. Where the meaning of wholeness becomes an issue is in terms of inner or spiritual growth. There, wholeness is set as the goal for anyone who wants to get out of separation, duality, the divided self, t...