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MYMEDITATIONCAVE.COM
A b o u t M y M e d i t a t i o n C a v e
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I have found the metaphor of a meditation cave to be a very useful focusing tool for successfully dealing with the
challenge of living in the normal world of everyday life while at the same time trying to develop a deeply profund
meditation practice. Let me describe what I mean. Imagine yourself far away from your everyday concerns and hidden somewhere in a distant and tranquil mountain retreat. Your mind is relaxed and open to the grandeur and peace of nature which now surrounds you. You are sitting comfortably at the entrance to a spacious, rocky mountain cave and you are looking out upon a vast natural panorama. You see the wide expanse of the earth extend in every direction all the way to the horizon. The sky above is infinitely deep. Calmness pervades your entire body and you feel a profound and joyful sense of connection with everything that exists. Then at some point your mind begins to feel the pull of a particular situation that's been of some concern to you. Because you are concerned you start to think about the situation and as you do so you gradually begin to immerse into that situation: like watching a movie and identifying with the main character who is grappling with the details and issues there you slowly begin to center yourself, your sense of who you are, within the variables of the situation. Soon that is only where you are, in that situation. Like someone who has fallen asleep and started to dream, the situation and it's various emotionally charged issues now surround and define you. Then, because you believe that those issues define you, you experience significant anxiety about that situation. Quickly this anxiety riddled dream becomes "your life".
According to Zen the above stressed and anxious "situation based self" is not your true self. Zen therefore suggests that rather than continuing to buy into that illusion you should instead return to who you truly are. And, in order to return to who you truly are you must first withdraw from who you are not. This withdrawing from who you are not is of course a psychological event. It occurs when you can free your attention from the constant flow of thinking about the situations in your everyday life. When you can properly disengage from this internal stream of preoccupation you will discover that you have returned to the meditation-cave-like peacefulness and deep sense of connection to the surrounding grandeur of nature. You will realize that wherever you happen to be when you do this, that is your meditation cave. This re-awakening from your stressful dreaming brings a deeply joyful sense of freedom that revitalizes you right down to your roots (since you're now starting to recover your true identity) and the positive nature of the world once again comes back into focus. However, to actually disengage from those situation driven preoccupations you will first need to understand their captivating attraction.
According to Buddhist psychology a situation based self arises from the mistaken core belief that you are somehow fundamentally flawed. Believing that you are flawed, that you are not good enough as you are, you naturally want to overcome this deficiency by adding something more to yourself, to make yourself greater than or more than you are right now. Wanting to be more than you are creates a compulsive tendency to judge everything in the world around you as either good because those things, people or events are helping to increase your sense of worth, or as bad because they are diminishing your sense of worth, or as irrelevant because they simply have no real impact upon your sense of worth. When you judge things in this way your judgment separates you from the the world around you by moving the focus of your attention away from those actual things, people and events and instead centers it within the turbulent "thinking and emotional environment" that you've created by your judgments. When your attention disconnects from the world like this you separate from the actual experience of the here and now and this separation from direct experiencing disables your ability to feel fulfillment. Like someone who's living in a wonderful garden that contains all sorts of delicious food your attention remains trapped behind the mind-made filter that you've created and superimposed upon that garden. The good news is that this filter that you’ve placed upon the world can be removed. Removing the filter simply requires practice. In Buddhism this "removing the filter practice" is called meditation.
Buddhist meditation rests upon the following points:
● Believing that you are fundamentally flawed is a profound mistake. ● The point of the meditation is to immerse your awareness into the present moment in order to discover the truth about this flaw-belief for yourself. ● To actually enter the present moment you must first suspend the compulsion to judge because judging creates the filter which separates you from the actual experience of things.● When you do suspend the compulsion to judge and make that direct connection to "what is" you will discover for yourself that you're already enough, that in fact you are and always have been inseparable from the whole universe. You will realize that this already existing interconnected wholeness or "universe experience" is actually your true self and it will be clear to you then that this self certainly does not require any kind of psychological support system such as "I will only be ok if..." or "I am now ok because..." ● All Buddhist training therefore aims at actualizing that true self.In Zen your true self is called a Buddha where
a Buddha is a perfectly balanced blend
of Wisdom and Compassion.
Since your compulsion to judge everything is a deeply habitual tendency, an addiction in fact, it will require a sustained personal effort to remove that filter and connect directly to things-as-they-actually-are so that you can discover the reality of your true self. Since sustained effort means regularly scheduled practice Buddhist discipline involves creating and maintaining a daily schedule of "Being a Buddha" training (i.e. meditation).
This emulation-actualization/realization training is usually done systematically through three phases
of increasing difficulty:
world and looking deeply into profound Isness of the environment around you.3. As a result of practicing the previous two exercises you will gradually become less impulsive in how you react to what other people say and do and a peaceful pause will begin to occur before your usual knee-jerk responses to others. When this pause appears in your flow of consciousness is the practice of meditating while interacting with others._____________________________________________________________________________________
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C o n t e n t C o p y r i g h t : D W H a y e s . A l l R i g h t s R e s e r v e d
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