Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Sitting before all else.



I find that a neat way to "trick" the ego (ie. conditioned personality) into sitting, is to promise its desires AFTER one has sat for a small period of time.

Normally, our meditation practice goes through stages and cycles of interest and disinterest, however, it's important to keep our practice going, since it's all too easy to fall back into conditioning which we've been acting out since time immemorial.

The only way we can actually overcome conditioning and the ego's love of focusing on the external world (rather than the inner world and SELF) is to actually sit in formal meditation.

Despite the thousands of suggestions in existence on how to gain "happiness", it is a fact that nobody has come up with anything remotely as effective as meditation and/or contemplation as a way to reduce our mind's conditioning and thereby reduce ours and our world's suffering. 

Psychological work, external gratification, material wealth, intellectual understandings, rationalisation, belief systems, and an endless universe of egoic pursuits have not yet matched the simple results of sitting in silence/stillness/awareness for a period of time. We can all test this for ourself.

The conditioned personality, of course, knows this- and does all within its power to constantly sabotage our spiritual practice in order to 1) frustrate the practitioner 2) give itself power and autonomy through such frustration, and/or 3) failing this, come in through the back door and introduce striving, expectations, ownership and goal objectives into the practice.

One simple way to plant small "seeds" of awareness throughout one's day, and also bypass the ego's attempts at thwarting our practice, is to perform a small sitting before any entertainment or leasure project whatsoever.

The project (or promise to the ego) then goes ahead after the sitting. The ego is satisfied and is OK to wait, and the sitting gets done. The length of the sitting does not matter so much as the actual performance of some sitting for more than 5 minutes. Whether for not the all-important-project still goes ahead later matters not, but the small "seed" of conscious awareness and the introduction of some SELF into one's day can make a subtle, but definite impact long-term. 

This also ensures we are doing what needs to be done, rather than what doesn't need to be done. What do I mean by this? In short, when we are on our DEATH BED, it will not be the computer games, movies, home-projects, after-work projects, friend-catch-ups, or thousand other leasure-pursuits that help us. It will be the accumulated acquaintance that we have with SELF or GOD that ultimately ensures our peace.













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