If Freedom is our Essence, no path is short enough.

Dear You,

I didn’t have to look far for the subject of this week’s newsletter. Over the past days, I was asked a few times how to meditate. The simplest and perhaps most frustrating answer is “Don’t do anything”. The following is an attempt to remove the frustration and demystify something that is so natural to us. Yes, Us! Every one of Us.

What is commonly referred to as meditation in reality is a concentration technique. And concentration techniques, there are many: focusing on the breath, scanning the body, repeating a word, directing your awareness onto a subject and so on. They are useful tools to still the mind and purify its tendencies to whirl, perhaps even reach a higher state of consciousness. Perhaps even more - I don’t know that.

I’m NOT interested in a state. My recent practice has become far simpler than that. Papaji says that trying to purify the mind is like cleaning a dusty mirror with dust. What you need to do is remove the mirror altogether. So what does it mean to not do anything, to let go of the meditator, to “remove the mirror”? Adyashanti calls it True Meditation:

“In True Meditation, we start from the foundation of letting everything be as it is. In True Meditation, we are not moving toward the natural state, or trying to create the natural state; we actually start at the natural state from the very beginning. When I started to let go of the meditator, the controller, when I sat down and simply allowed everything to be as it was, I quickly realised that the peace and stillness I was trying to attain were already there.

Like most people, when I sat I sometimes felt good and peaceful. Other times I would be agitated, upset or anxious. I felt all the various human emotions. When I allowed my experience to be as it was, and made no effort to change it, an underlying natural state of being started to arise, very simply and very naturally. I would call it a very innocent state of consciousness as it wasn’t derived from effort or discipline.

I discovered that the natural state is not an altered state of consciousness. So many people associate meditation with altered states of consciousness. Yet this is a profound misunderstanding about the potential of meditation, which is awakening.  It’s an unaltered, natural state of consciousness. By comparison, everything else is an altered state of consciousness.”

Adyashanti, “True Meditation”

Give it a try. It is incredibly simple, but not always easy. It takes courage to allow the thoughts to be as they are, the sounds of the environment to be as they are, the emotions we go through to be as they are...eventually, the Peace that We Are to Be as It Is. I feel that there is nothing more fulfilling in this world than an innocent discovery of our true nature, without concepts, without a particular seat, without practices, without techniques. If Freedom is our very Essence, no path is short enough.

With love,

Iri

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