Success in meditation
comes through consistent practice and nonattachment.
– Patanjali
Often
attendees at a meditation workshop will ask me, “How can I make my mind be
still?” This usually happens after I
have spent some time introducing and training them in an approach to practice. It seems we all want a magic pill. We want quick and easy results. Sometimes we do have sudden breakthroughs,
moments of grace when the mind becomes still and we marvel at the joy and beauty
of pure being. Then we “come down” and
it’s back to the grindstone. Many times
I have had people report feelings of extraordinary peace, tingles of energy
moving through them, or some such. Then
I don’t see them again.
It’s
not so much that I wish to keep them as students but I suspect that they go
back to their regular patterns of stress accumulation. The truth is that we’ve got to keep at it, be
committed to spiritual practice for it to “work.” Remember the old self-growth cliché? “It only works when you do.” As Swami Satyananda once put it, “I can teach
you a method in a few minutes but it might take years for you to realize the
results.” Dammit, we might need to
develop qualities which are increasingly vanishing in our society, like patience
and perseverance. It might be fun to fly
to the top of a mountain and enjoy the view but is something different to
experience the journey step by step. The
only we can sustain progress in terms of psycho-spiritual development is step
by step.
Patience
is profoundly important. Our minds have
a tendency to keep rushing forward into an imagined future, sometimes with hope
and sometimes with fear. Hope and fear
are like addictive drugs that we were born exposed to. Patience means attending to what’s happening
right now. The crazy thing is that we
are imagining some other state, some other time when we will experience reality
when it is unfolding right before us.
Abhyasa means attending to practice in the moment, recognizing and releasing
the thoughts that get in the way and opening to pure being. Through consistent practice we continually
ground ourselves in true reality. It is
the reality of the Self.
Abhyasa
doesn’t mean attending an occasional class or workshop. It doesn’t mean practicing for a few minutes
each day, although this is a good place to start. It means turning our daily lives into a
constant practice of mindfulness. This
is the only way that we a chance of overcoming the powerful habitual patterns
of our minds. We all know about
addiction and addicts who have become victims to substances or behaviors that
take over their lives. On a deeper level
we are all addicted to samsara.
Recognizing this helps us open to compassion. Conventional reality is also a bad habit,
something we, as spiritual practitioners need to overcome. Our conventional reality is often one of
stress, alienation and spiritual blindness.
Effort is even more essential when we are embraced by and embracing the
status quo.
Vairagya,
or nonattachment is the counterpart to practice. It means letting go of our habitual mental
and physical objects of security and pleasure, separating ourselves from our
habitual patterns of desire and aversion.
During meditation practice we encounter the desire mind operating all
the time. We might think of something
we’d like to eat, purchase, or someplace we’d like to visit, someone we miss or
would like to have sex with. We might
also be occupied with thoughts of worry and anxiety, thinking of all the things
we don’t want or are afraid to lose. As
long as we are in the mode of attachment other people are also objects, things
which we seek to satisfy our own needs and desires. It is only when we are nonattached that we
truly relate to each other as conscious beings.
In
the Bhagavad Gita Krishna teaches: “When
a man thinks of the objects, attachment to them arises; from attachment desire
is born; from desire anger arises. From
anger comes delusion; from delusion the loss of memory; from loss of memory the
destruction of discrimination; from the destruction of discrimination he
perishes. But the self-controlled man,
moving amongst objects with the senses under restraint, and free from attraction
and repulsion, attains to peace.” (2:62-64)
The
insanity of attachment-desire can be readily seen in our world. A recent article tells of an incident in
which a young man was murdered for his iphone.
This is not an isolated occurrence, it is part of an international
phenomenon known as “apple picking.”
Whenever new products come out there is a rise in these types of crimes
as people all over the world are willing to do whatever they can to acquire
them.
I
am pretty sure that none of my readers would kill for an iphone 5, still it
might be good to for us to observe our attachment thoughts. Our consumer oriented media create cravings
for new products. If we can detach
ourselves from our impulses briefly we can question whether we really need or
even want the product. Why? Do we really believe it will make us better,
happier, more complete as a human being?
These “products” serve to distract us from looking inward, developing
ourselves or making actual intimate contact with each other. We don’t really need a special app to help us
meditate or connect with each other, disconnecting from our devices works
better.
Nonattachment
doesn’t mean that we can’t own, use or even appreciate anything. It is more about our minds and our emotional
investment in things, in our pride, greed, and desires. When we use other people to serve our needs
and desires without respecting them as fellow conscious beings we objectify
them. As we progress along our path we
come to realize that we are attached to forms and all forms are
transitory. We realize as well that we
are attached to our world view, our interpretation of the way things are. When things don’t turn out the way we want or
expect them to we are prone to anger or depression. Nonattachment means realizing that the world
is “a passing show.” The only permanent
reality is the eternal witness within us.
