A great video on meditation
I enjoyed and found very practical a video called "Infinite Peace: A Meditator's Guide to Mind and Consciousness," by Swami Tadatmananda of the Arsha Bodha Center.
There are many good things here. The author, explaining slowly and patiently, walks the viewer first through the (so popular these days in corporations) practice of mindfulness meditation, thence to meditation with an object to develop and focus concentration, and finally to the real goal of it all -- recognition of our fundamental identity as consciousness itself. Shining like the sun, eternally detached, yet possessed of a healing light. The source of all.
The explanations and metaphors (I already used one, the sun) are good, and offer the tools to cross the terrible rubicon that turns many aspirants away: how to use your mind to see beyond the mind?
For that is the way, the only way. We must simply begin. We work in a cloud of error, as smoke accompianies fire, and yet something is slowly built.
Many of you think meditation is for those with lots of spare time. Or perhaps, the activity resides comfortably in a "to-be-done" place in your consciousness. You see yourself meditating in the way prior generations of men imagined finally reading those gorgeous National Geographic magazines they collected from 1960 to 1980 and never opened.
Perhaps you are right, yeah? I, contrarian without the logic to back it up, see myself as trying to finally honor the gifts. And this means consciousness, above all. If my betters guided me as I walked sleepily through one existence after another (and I believe they did), then the least I can do is finally lend a hand at the oars of this job. This job which dismays me as the sleepy child is dismayed by the parents driving on, and on and on through the Arizona desert, place of deep night, stars and vaguely frightening radio broadcasts.
So settle into your seat, and build your cloud of error. This will force you to recognize the smallness of you, the near-futility of the whole thing. And yet...
And yet!
Indescribable
You must wonder why I go on. Why through the years do I write about things wispy and insubstantial?
It's because they are real, and more real than the rest.
We spend our lives building the personality. Getting everything "just right." We are granted a few moments where a veil lifts, and we glimpse or imagine that we glimpse something of arc, of cosmos, of words spoken without irony for once.
My work is on myself. These scribblings are tracings, probably more full of error than their author because writing may be like the shedding of a skin. I have no one to hold these ideas, so I have you -- beloved Internet! There is no irony in that statement.
If you really care, I can recommend no better program to get started than "Advanced Yoga Practices" (amazon.com link to the Ebook). It takes you from the first step to the most outrageous excesses, should they interest you. The author's web site is really good too.
I've been at this for about 3 years now. I started with Zen. I took a long trip through Ceremonial Magic. I found how deeply Jesus Christ loves us, and shows us the path of salvation. To die, to die in love and forgiveness. To sacrifice the thing we hold most dear, and so to transcend.
To find gold you dig. And you build subterranean platforms. Soon you are wise in the ways of cave-ins, in the need for fresh air. Your nose grows skilled at picking up the "scent" of truth. And yet time passes...
Yoga is the final platform. The final technical "Bauwerk" for the assault. In truth, the carapace of Mind blocks you from truth, and through Yoga, through Pranayama, through Pratyahara, Dhirana and Dhyana you will finish what you started.
There is a long, long time between perceiving a thing and finding the will to actively work for it. The time from there to the end is very, very short. Perhaps 20 years. Perhaps less, or much more. But it is not 1000 years. This you have already spent.
We are special in this way. This is the wonderful thing: when we lend our own hand to the work thus far done by wind, water and wave, we quickly come to something. It is no longer evolution. It is revolution.
To you -- you ones who will leave a trail in the sky that is picked up by our radios as Hope. The faith of generations will be built on the stairs to heaven that you first imagined, and which then felt your tread, and knew that they were real.