True Meditations Should be Effortless – Are Yours?

“Meditation is a subtle, barely perceptible stream, in which you will experience a radical shift of the center of gravity. The manifestation, limited in time and space, thick and heavy, that you have formerly regarded as yourself, changes into a weightless but ubiquitous point without limits and dimensions. The massive creature, bound to the earth that used to be you, is now free from its bonds and begins to soar.” Frank M. Wanderer

An Effective Remedy for the Overburdened Mind

Our Mind is one of the most sophisticated, most complicated instruments in the world. In this modern, rushing world, however, the Mind is bombarded with information to the extent that it virtually overflows. On those occasions the amounts of unprocessed information whirl in the Mind so fast that we are sometimes afraid of going mad. All the unprocessed information demands our attention, naturally, every single idea may appear to be very important for us. Our body reacts to the rushing stream of our thoughts, and sometime we fall ill because of the stress caused by our overburdened Mind. Is there anything that we may do to alleviate the burden of our Mind, is there a medicine to treat the problem?

Naturally, the remedy exists, and its name is meditation. A good night’s sleep in itself has long been insufficient for our Mind to rest. At night our body sleeps, but the our Mind continues to rush. The enormous amounts of information absorbed during the day are processed by our Mind at night. It is done with the help of dreaming. Thus, by the time our Mind has finished processing the information, our body is awake again, and a new day, full of stimuli begins. Our Mind therefore does not have its due share of rest, and it is soon overburdened. All this leads to a stressful life, and our body may eventually become ill.

We have to consciously find the time for our Mind to have some relaxation and to have an opportunity to shake out all that useless information. We must therefore find the place for meditation in our daily timetable. During meditation, the Mind rearranges itself, it is refreshed and revitalized and rejuvenated.

Active Meditation vs. True Meditation

In your present, isolated state of Consciousness, based upon your identification with your illusionary self, spatial consciousness is not present in your life, so you are unable to experience Consciousness free of forms.

But you have read a lot about this subject, so you wish to bring things beyond forms and shapes under the control of your Ego, in order to stabilize the Ego and make it permanent. You have read or heard somewhere that meditation is the best method to that end, so you have began to meditate diligently.

The Active Meditation

But you are approaching meditation the way you do with other objects of the outside world. You believe that meditation is also an activity of the mind, a concentration on an objects (e. g. a burning candle), or your own respiration or a mantra.

Meditation is therefore something that you perform yourself. Through active meditation you wish to reach a higher state of the Mind, which is expected to give you happiness, satisfaction and enlightenment.

You start to practice meditation as an individual self, as an Ego. You make efforts to tranquilize your mind. This activity may be successful up to a certain level, when you suppress your thoughts and emotions with your willpower, reaching transitory peace in you. That state will be lost immediately, when you stop concentrating, meditating, and no longer sustain the effort, as your mind returns to its usual activities, the old pre-conditioned patterns.

Meditation therefore has not brought you the lasting peace you had been longing for and you had read so much about, the peace independent of your mind that reinforces your existence in the world.

Your personal identity is rooted in your actions and the results of those actions. Your personal history is the chronicle of your actions and achievements.

The idea of being active is therefore a product of your conditioned mind, your Ego. Ambitions to acquire, to achieve something all work as motivations for action in the Ego-dominated mind. The desire to control, to manage are also powerful urges to act.

As you have seen, these very same forces are the ones that spur you to meditate. It is, nevertheless, not a bad phenomenon, as active meditation is the first step towards real meditation. Active meditation consolidates the outermost dimension of Alertness, that, is attention, in you.

The True Meditation

Your attempts at meditation are futile because real meditation is, by nature, effortless. It does not create an artificial quiet, but allows the deeper dimensions of Alertness to surface. This is the deep internal Silence that constitutes the real core of man.

The spatial awareness thus acquired remains with you after meditation, for longer and longer periods of time. You will eventually no longer need meditation, as the deeper dimensions of Alertness are there with you, so every moment in your life will be meditative.

Real meditation is always without object and is never the result of an activity, but Presence in the space of Consciousness. This natural, effortless Presence is meditation itself.

The deeper dimensions of Alertness, the awakened Consciousness, the world of Silence, are beyond the mind. This Silence is not forced upon us by some concentration technique, but the indescribable but experienceable of living emptiness. Conscious existence in the space of Consciousness.

A Simple and Powerful Meditation Technique

Let us take a closer look at that, how are the deeper dimensions of Alertness increase their presence in you, and how are you able to get from the state of consciousness meaning ”I am this and that” to the state ”I am,” how can you replace active meditation with real meditation?

Let us start by observing that in every waking moment you experience that you exist, you are. This experience is, however, so common and familiar that you do not dwell on it too long. Instead, you are preoccupied by “who are you” and “what are you.”

That is how your entire life story is born: ”What was I, what will I be, what I want to become”. The Ego-dominated mind keeps revolving around these questions, creating the psychological categories of time, the past and the future.

The fact that you exist means that you are alert. The fact that you are conscious and alert is the result of the pure Consciousness in you! In the following we wish to experience that pure Consciousness, we want to enable that Consciousness to awaken to its own existence in and through us.

Once you are able to keep your attention on the object of your meditation, now try to divert your attention from it to the space in which the object of your attention appears.

Then a new dimension of Alertness opens up in you. The space thus opening and the Presence appearing in it are now there for you to observe, your attention is able to grab them. You experience that you are Consciousness, sensing the work of the mind.

Now shift our attention to that contemplating Consciusness, to the “I exist,” to the pure Presence. Try to find the core of the Consciousness, the idea of ”I am,” and who the person who has done the meditations before really is.

Submerged into the Quiet of ”I am”

Submerge completely in the feeling of ”I am,” allow it to remain in itself, prevent it from being connected to thoughts and ideas, to the works of mind. Try to find the silence, the quiet of ”I am,” and stay within that.

In the meanwhile, try to locate Consciousness itself. Do not only watch what you are looking at, but also from where and with what intensity you are looking at it? In what quality are you watching? Who are you in the process of observation?

Be in the state from which recognition emerges, be at the source of recognition, where you are able to see recognition itself. Be in Sight itself.

Do not worry about the operations of your mind, just stay in the sensation of ”I am.” Do not qualify, do not interpret! Stay in the sensation of ”I am.”

Whenever your attention wanders away, trying to get into contact with thoughts, trying to be manifested in some story, bring it back to the state of ”I am,” and keep it there.

~From the book:Frank M. Wanderer: The Flames of Alertness: Discover the Power of Consciousness! (This books presents the path from active meditation to true meditation)

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