Meditation and A Course In Miracles:
The Fish In The Ocean Is Not Thirsty
Be still an instant. Come without all thought of what you ever learned before, and put aside all images you made. A Course in Miracles Copyright 1993, by P.T. Mistlberger, All Rights Reserved
Our Western mindset has, generally speaking, a somewhat murky grasp of what meditation actually is. Consult your average dictionary, and definitions such as thinking, contemplation and other such things are offered. We have only to remember the time spent in our educational institutions, with the shadow of Rene Descartes entrenched credo cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) cast upon the halls of learning, to realize just how much we are conditioned to believe that we are, in fact, nothing but our intellect. Fortunately, in Reality this is not the whole picture.
What A Course in Miracles calls the Christ in you, what the Hindus call Atman, what the Buddhists call shunyata, all refer to the same essential thing (even if pointing at it from different angles), a state of Being that is our real nature, and is itself not defined by thought. In fact, until we go beyond both deluded thought and clear thought, we cannot awaken to our real condition, i.e., realize who and what we really are.
The art and science of transcending thought is best known simply as meditation. The essence of meditation is awareness, or consciousness. This should not be confused with concentration, which has a much narrower focus. Although some traditions that teach meditation, such as Rinzai Zen or Theravadin Buddhism, employ concentrative techniques, most often meditation is best defined as "choiceless awareness", unique in its broad, all-encompassing vision, always stretching to see everything in its greater context, as part of a unified whole.
The essence of intellect is that it divides, analyzes, compartmentalizes. The essence of consciousness is that it simply sees what is. In fact, it just is. Any moment that we are able to just be with what is, without resistance, without the need to figure it out, is a moment of meditation. There is an extraordinary misperception, particularly in the Western world, around this basic understanding. Meditation is often somehow equated with "zoning out", or even worse, a Narcissistic self-absorbed oblivious state that is disconnected from the here-and-now. Ram Dass did a great service when he wrote a book on meditation called Be Here Now , which is, in fact, the most accurate definition possible. What the ancient seers of the East understood, and certain Christian mystics such as St. John of the Cross, is that it is thought itself which veils us from fully accessing the here-and-now. All 365 lessons in the Workbook of A Course in Miracles are designed to guide us into a state of being, dis-identified from thought. As such, the Workbook is entirely about meditation in the purest sense of the word.
A Course in Miracles refers to the here-and-now as the Holy Instant. Time, like spatial dimension, is, strictly speaking, a function of the ego-mind. Thus all guilt is of the past, and all fear is of the future. The ego is essentially nothing other than the perception of being isolated, cut off from the greater whole (Source, or God) and its living current of Energy (Spirit, or Holy Spirit). This Divine Energy exists only in the here-and-now, for the simple reason that only the present moment is real at the level of Ultimate Reality. Time, thus, is an artificial creation of our minds, but a necessary one, because in the awakening process (what the Course calls the Atonement, or correction of perception) we must be led out of our dream world in a sequential manner, step by step. Thus the paradox: there is a direction and linearity to our growth, through space and time, but our Real nature is trans-dimensional is beyond space and beyond time.
Meditation is the practice of gradually (and sometimes suddenly) awakening to our Real nature. In the practice of meditating certain sensitivities often develop. If these sensitivities (visions, extraordinary dreams, leaps of intuition, extra-sensory perceptions, etc.) are used properly, they can become potent avenues toward the enrichment and expansion of our Being. If, however, they become sidetracks, diverting us from the true purpose of meditating, they become what the Zen masters called makyo, impediments to the awakening process. And, they are particularly tempting impediments, because they have the power to create the illusion that we are further along then we really are. Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan master, used to call this spiritual materialism, and defined it as the most subtle and difficult of all ego-attachments to let go of, it being the belief that "I am somehow better than you because I am more spiritual". In ACIM language this is simply another form of specialness, and must be seen through as well.
There is a wonderful line in ACIM: "You need do nothing". To our Western "just do it" conditioned minds this line can be very enigmatic, if not frustrating. And yet, it is the heart of the Awakening process, of meditation, and of what may be termed spiritual maturity. In the ancient Taoist teachings of the Chinese mystic Lao-Tzu, considered by many to be the purest of all spiritual philosophies, the term "wu-wei" (non-doing) stands as a testament to the one essential condition of Awakening, paralleled by the Sufi mystic's Surrender to God, and by the teaching in the ACIM that "all suffering comes from believing that God's Will and yours are separate". Thus, actual Awakening does not involve a struggle of will at all. A discipline of some sort is required, yes, because our minds tend toward laziness, but that discipline is designed to bring us to a state of realization that nothing actually is required of us, beyond being who we really are, a condition which by its very nature is effortless once we are in it.
One of the effects of meditation is an enhanced sense of inner spaciousness. With this comes a natural desire to let go of struggle, to begin to disengage from everyday insanities. This does not mean, however, that one "loses touch" with things. "Inner spaciousness" is not the same as "spaciness". On the contrary, when meditation is being used properly one actually becomes more grounded and more in touch, and, at the same time, less interested in those little meaningless or destructive things that on a typical day can occupy so much of our awareness.
The end goal of meditation is, like the end goal of every spiritual method, a state of unity with the Whole. This has to begin in humble ways, however, because of the degree of belief we all carry in our separation from the Source. The function of all great Teachers, such as Buddha or Christ, and their legacies, such as Dhammapada or A Course in Miracles, is to remind us powerfully of the illusory nature of this separation, while at the same time guiding us gently step by step.
There is a parable from the Buddhist tradition which beautifully illustrates the necessity of this step by step humbleness in the Awakening process. It involved a man who meditated for years in a desperate effort to attain Enlightenment. But he was missing something. After awhile he began praying to a certain Bodhisaatva (a Buddhist saint) whose essential quality was compassion. For years this prayer went unanswered, until one day the man was walking along a road and came upon an injured and dying dog. This was a poor society he lived in, so what he was witnessing was nothing unusual. And yet this time he stopped, knelt down, and opened his heart with compassion to the animal. The legend has it that in that moment the dog transformed into the Buddhist saint, and bestowed Enlightenment upon the man.
The end of meditation or any spiritual effort is always a place of ordinariness, the realization that nothing ultimately is special -- intensely unique, powerfully meaningful -- but not special. Understanding this helps us shed the anxiety, craving, or thirst of always thinking we should be somewhere else, or anything other than what we are -- or, worse, that we are dependent upon someone to prove this to us, or to approve of who we are. We begin to wake up to the Presence of our true beingness, which simply is, independent of "outside" confirmation or approval, and which has always been there.
There is a lovely expression of this realization in Zen: "When a person begins their spiritual journey, mountains are just mountains and trees are just trees. Once their journey intensifies, a whole new world opens up, vivid and intriguing, and mountains are no longer just mountains, and trees are no longer just trees. Many people get stuck at this place. However, if you persist, one day you realize that once again mountains are mountains, and trees are trees. You, however, are no more the same, and yet you have come to accept life." Or, as Kabir once wrote, "The fish in the ocean is not thirsty."