3/18/2010

Some thoughts about Meditations

Seize the mountain spirits.
Make them divulge their spirits.
Only with strength is there discovery.

The scriptures say that the mountains contain the answers. Generations of seekers have gone into the wilderness and have encountered spirits both benevolent and terrible. Though the possibility of great discovery is mixed with the threat of misadventure, we must all go into the mountains to seek these answers.
We should understand that these mountains represent the unknown aspects of our own minds. Meditation is a process of discovery, of slowly exploring how you function as a human being. Through walking in the vastness of this land, you can resolve the problems of you psyche and seek the treasures without comparison anywhere in the world
People ask, "Is meditation necessary?". If you want to explore the innermost parts of your mind and ascertain who you really are, there is no more ideal method. Mere introspection is not deep enough, and psychological counseling will not necessarily bring you face to face with all parts of yourself. Only the depth and solitude of meditation can help you learn everything. Discoveries are there. We need only enter the mind to find them.

The Tao

 

3/13/2010

Leading from Within

Most people create their primary identity when they are not meditating. When you are not meditating, you are sort of on "cruise control", unconsciously following a program called, "fulfilling your identity and doing things that identify you as so-and-so...".

Doing inner work helps you become aware of that and also helps you pick up things that are further away from your attention yet extremely important to you. If you do not work on yourself, then you operate in what Charles Tart would call a consensus hypnosis, unconsciously fulfilling impersonal cultural tasks and goals.

 

1/23/2010

System Entropy

The best metaphor I've found about this situation comes from the biological world again. It's the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. If you see the old system as a caterpillar crunching it's way through the eco-system, eating up to three hundred times its weight in a single day, bloating itself until it just can't function anymore, and then going to sleep with its skin hardening into a chrysalis. What happens in its body is that little imaginal disks [as they're called by biologists] begin to appear in the body of the caterpillar and its immune system attacks them. But they keep coming up stronger and they start to link with each other. As they connect, as they link with each other, they mature into fully-fledged cells and more and more of them aggregate until the immune system of the caterpillar just can't function any more. At that point the body of the caterpillar melts into a nutritive soup that can feed the butterfly.

I love this metaphor because it shows us why, first of all, we who want to change the world are co-existing with the old system for a while and why there's no point in attacking the old system because you know the caterpillar is unsustainable so it's going to die. What we have to focus on is "can we build a viable butterfly?" A butterfly that really can fly, because that's not guaranteed. "

- Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.