What is a Lover’s Meditation?

December 16 2002

What would meditation for lovers be like? The trend would be to encourage attachment, passion, involvement, longing, emotion, and desires. I know from experience - in my meditation and that of thousands of my students - that the current of passion then carries you deep into the inner world, and you go beyond the motion of emotion to rest in the heart.

Do the kind of meditation that works for you, that works for and with your type. Whatever that is. You are not doing anyone any favors by doing a meditation that does not work for you.

Most people have several major archetypes active in their lives. We move from our day jobs to socializing with friends, to family life, to our hobbies, to resting. At any given moment, to get through the day or night, we may need to channel the energy of the Warrior, the Lover, the Magician, the King, the Queen, the Healer, the Diplomat, the Farmer, the Craftsman. These are modes of your being, ways that the instincts and energies flow, and ways of adapting to the outer world. When you meditate, these energies will also serve to be your guides to the inner world. That is why you do not want to try to shut them up.

When you meditate, above all you want to accept all of who you are - the parts that are tired out and stressed from working, from being your ruling passions, and the parts that ache from lack of use and neglect.

Most of what you will experience in a half - hour meditation will be the interplay of these parts as they integrate themselves into the wholeness of your being. This is why people with active, complicated lives feel such complexity of experience when they close their eyes to meditate. There is a lot to integrate. But don’t worry. If you get used to accepting everything and not resisting, then the longing for peace will carry you into inner silence.

Monks, Knights, Lovers, and Queens

December 15 2002

For much of recorded history, human societies have been organized in some variety of Feudal System, with Lords, Knights, Ladies, Monks, Queens, slaves, serfs and Guildsmen. Even today, in the modern West, the feudal system has enormous allure. Part of what makes Kurosawa movies, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Ring so hypnotic is that they are set in feudal societies. People in feudal societies are always taking Vows of Fealty to their Lords, and groveling before them. Then they turn around and inflict as much suffering and humiliation upon their inferiors as they can.

I will leave it as homework for you to look up the various definitions of feudal. Be sure to toss in additional search terms: “Fealty, Star Wars, knights, monks, slaves, vows, chastity,” and so on. If you want to go further, explore the ways that some corporations are feudal, and some movements that call themselves “religions” are trying to re-impose a feudal system on us all.

The technology of meditation has been preserved by monks of the feudal systems of India, Tibet, China, Japan, Burma, Europe, and other places. They have done a magnificent job - there are thousands of ancient texts that have been preserved for millennia. Many of my teachers have been monks, and I revere them. My life has been immeasurably blessed by the yogis and lamas I have studied with. When I criticize the practice of people who have jobs and families in the modern world naively imposing the rules developed for recluses in India in 300 A.D., I am not criticizing monks, OK? I have never had a bad experience with a monk. I am talking about the appropriate use of a technology. I am critiquing our misuse of these ancient forms. It is an odd kind of laziness to NOT revise the sacred teachings to fit our actual lives. Also, we are in a way dishonoring the teachings of Buddha, Padmasambhava, Shankara and Patanjali when we apply them to our lives in a way that is klunky, pathetic, and inept.

A monk is someone who has taken a Vow of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. The Obedience is to their spiritual order, its rules, and their superiors in the order. When monks meditate, above all the meditation must serve to kill out their ambition, kill their sexual desire, and kill out any uppitiness, ego or individuality. The over-riding intent is to make the monk a docile, obedient member of the feudal system. For a monk, meditation is part of a war on nature, an Opus Contra Naturum. All this suppression is in the service of a greater good. It is part of the sacrifice.

When you open most books on meditation available today, they are a combination of useful techniques any human being can do, with some flavoring or superstition left over from the monastic traditions. Everything is permeated by the smell of mothballs. There is usually some evidence of a bias against attachments, emotions, desire, sexuality, aggression, ego, enjoyment, freedom, spontaneity, individuality, and rebellion. If you are not a monk living in a monastery or ashram, the anti-life teachings may poison your life and weaken you.

Meditation For Monks

There are people born on earth whose craving is to kill off their cravings. They are disgusted by the idea of gaing through life having one craving after another. They want to just crave God or Enlightenment. Sometimes these people become monks or nuns in a religious order.

One side effect of the great job the monks have done is that we know a lot about “meditation for Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian monks,” but not very much about “meditation everyone else.” If you look through all books on meditation and all teachings on meditation for the last 2000 years, more than 99% of the teachings are by and for monks in a feudal society. There have been a few spectacular women who have written of meditation, for example St. Theresa of Avila, but they make up less than 1%, and Theresa was a nun.

If you study meditation with someone who has taken vows of Poverty, Celibacy and Obedience, you may want to be aware at all times of the difference between the monaastic path and your own. Otherwise may just wind up Broke, Lonely and Docile, but not necessarily Enlightened. Basically, you don’t evolve by pretending you are someone else, or by abandoning your real path and taking up a path that seems more glamorous somehow.

Meditation for Everyone Else

We do not know as much about “meditation for . . .” women, men who are not monks, lovers, warriors, Queens, Kings, and magicians. So again and again in meditation-land, you see odd situations such as a modern woman, say a working mother who lives in New York, studying and practicing meditation techniques that were designed to shape the individual to fit into a 12th Century monastery. She gets some peace of mind, but becomes passive, pale, and unenthusiastic about her life.

Every day I talk to people who have a deep craving to meditate, and have been doing so, but they have been thinking they have to squeeze themselves into a feudal box. They try to make themselves devoted to some icon, or better at groveling, try to block out their thoughts, and obliterate the impulse to jump up.

This has been changing in the last 40 years. There are more and more books on meditation by women, and by men who are not trying to be monks.

Meditation For You

When you study any teaching on meditation, do not just think of monks, think of Knights and Wizards and Queens, oh my! Ask yourself, who am I? What are the archetypes I want to flavor my meditation? The warrior, the lover, the farmer, the mother, the father, the King, the Queen. The Magician, the Dancer, the Skateboarder, the Artist. You may even have an inner nun or monk as part of your mix. The question is always, what works for me? What is the best arrangement of my inner attributes so that I can give and receive the most from life?

The most exciting new knowledge about meditation is coming as people break the rules, adapt the techniques to fit their needs, and evolve really juicy, life-affirming meditations that are in the service of life. What is meditation for Mommies? What is meditation for teenage boys? What is meditation for athletes?

Egolessness and Detachment

December 21 2002

Meditation has been associated with the religious traditions of the world, such as Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, for thousands of years. Religious thinkers tend to see virtues as things you impose on yourself from the outside, a discipline. The “meditative” virtues are supposed to be egolessness, detachment and serenity. So these become qualities you are supposed to paint yourself with, so that you appear to others to be detached.

There are several problems with mistaking the side-effects of meditation for virtues to practiced. One is that this whole approach is stultifying and false, and deadens the very senses you need to be activated in order to have a powerful meditation. Exercising your ego, pursuing your passions, and experiencing your attachments is what makes you WANT to meditate and have the energy to go WAY into your inner world in meditation.

Detachment and egolessness are NOT virtues for most people. They are actually slightly dangerous side-effects of the large perspective on life that meditation gives you. Meditation is the direct experience of the vastness of life. This experience is accessible in every breath. When you expose yourself to the immensity of life, of course your little plans seem unimportant by comparison. Many meditators find themselves feeling slightly drunk for a year or two, because everything they previously thought was so important now seems so fleeting and vain.

If you find yourself feeling detached, encourage the opposite, attachment and involvement. If you find yourself feeling egoless, develop the opposite quality, which may feel like selfishness, all those energies of “I want this,” “I want to go there,” and “I don’t want THAT.” This could be called your preference structure, or your passion.

Balance IS a virtue. Attachment and Detachment, Ego and Egolessness, are two of many paired opposites that need to be balanced in your life. In meditation, your body and mind will spontaneously work to develop that balance, unless you interfere. And it is not up to you, or to your friends, to decide whether you need your ego reduced or not, any more than you should arbitrarily decide that you need your thyroid levels reduced, your blood pressure reduced, or your brain waves slowed.

By the way, detachment and egolessness ARE virtues for monks, nuns, and other professionally religious people. Look around you: if you are wearing robes, and live in a convent or ashram, then ignore what I am saying. Also, if you do not meditate, or do not meditate enough to really immerse your being in infinity, then go ahead and cultivate attitudes that make you seem as if you have been meditating. There is no harm in it.