It is only human for us to think we will find happiness someplace “out there.” We think, “If I could just get the right job, then I could be happy,” or “If I just had someone to love me, then I could be happy,” the list goes on and on, and our thinking minds continue to lead us down the path of seeking outside ourselves for happiness.
The problem with this strategy is anything that arises from external circumstances is impermanent, it is bound to come and go, to arise and fall away, then what happens to the happiness that comes with it? That too is impermanent, it comes and goes, arises and falls away.
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation. We will be sitting from 7:30 to 11:00 PM Eastern Time. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you. Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers, who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
Sangha Co-hosts for meditation are:
7:30 - 10:00 Ooooh and davehouck
9:30 - 11:00 thanatokephaloides
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There is a natural place of peace and wellbeing which resides within each of us. We can each find it by taking some time every day to allow our thinking minds to relax and uncover that natural peacefulness within by performing some sort of spiritual practice, meditation, centering prayer, Hatha Yoga or Tai Chi, for example. We do this because once we’ve become familiar with that natural state of peacefulness and wellbeing within, we find the peace, spaciousness and stillness within preferable to our normal head driven awareness.
The more we practice, the more proficient we become at allowing that natural, spacious awareness to come forward more easily, even when we are involved in day to day activities. Finally one day, either suddenly or bit by bit, that spacious awareness, that inner wellspring of peace and happiness, establishes itself as our continual state of consciousness, that is called awakening, or sometimes self-realization.
People are waking up all over the place, it is a silent revolution. However unless we are a part of a spiritual community, or sangha, in which the potential for awakening is illustratively and immediately present, we can excuse ourselves for being unaware of this.
Another reason we may be unaware of the potential to awaken right now is because we have only been exposed to Eastern sages, or have only read or heard about awakened sages. We may have heard stories about sages like Ramana Maharshi, or Paramahansa Yogananda and feel like we are so far removed from their saintliness that it would be egotistical to believe we, in all our ordinariness, could attain that.
In my own experience, awakeness or liberation has always been described so euphemistically and metaphorically, I would not have recognized it had hit me over the head. One phrase I remember in particular was the description, “It is like being in meditation all the time.” I’m not even sure if when I first heard that, I had ever had any real experience of the stillness and peace within. But that’s IT, when that stillness, that spaciousness, that peace establishes itself in our normal awareness, that’s the dawn of awakening.
Sometimes our own expectations of what an awakening should feel or look like hinder us. Awakening happens differently for different people. In Stephan Bodian’s book,
Wake Up Now he describes the awakening experience of several Westerners. He describes one person’s awakening as “a sudden forceful stripping of the veil,” another’s as “penetrating the illusion of a separate self in an instant.” While describing other experiences of awakening as “a gradual dissolution, like ice melting into water and emerging with the sea.”
Also from the book Wake Up Now, I love the instruction below:
My teacher Jean Klein occasionally advised his students to “find yourself behind,” in the back of the head, rather than in the “thought factory” of the neocortex, located in the forehead. By this, he meant to shift your identity from the thinking mind, the self-image, the personality, to the awake, aware space behind you, the one who gazes out through every pair of eyes.
It is better, I think, if we know that awakening is possible, right now, in this moment for each one of us. Perhaps I should also mention that after an initial awakening it might take years for it to reveal its depth and substance, it doesn't mean that we will be walking around omniscient and isolated from the experience of life.
Consider this, what would it feel like to open ourselves to the possibility that awakening isn’t necessarily something that is meant to happen in some distant future, or even in some future lifetime? It is possible, even for Westerners, to wake up in this moment, right here, right now. It isn’t matter of practicing harder for longer, it isn’t something we can earn. It happens through grace, it happens through our openness to grace, through surrender…and maybe also through happy accident. The most important thing for each one of us to know and be open to, is any of us could awaken right here, right now.
Finally, since we are meditating on Memorial Day, a day of remembrance, I'd like to offer a prayer or intention that more and more people will awaken, that we will recognize and elect enlightened leaders so that instead of the first reaction, war will become if not obsolete, at least the last resort.