From last week's meditation session, something clicked.
I'm struggling with just exactly what is the meditative state that we are supposed to reach with meditation. No one seem to have a precise answer. The instructor said there's no failure, as long as you tried, it's all good.
But one thing caught my attention. While we were meditating, there were especially loud noises coming from the gym next door. Afterwards when we talked about it, many mentioned how distracting that noise was. But I didn't find the noise distracting at all. I can hear the noise, just chose not to pay attention to it. The instructor seemed to think that was good, not being distracted. But being oblivious to my surroundings seemed to come easy to me. I've been referred as the "space cadet" and probably the "absent-minded professor" type. Isn't being mindful supposed to bring your attention to your surroundings? I guess there is a difference between aware of something while not letting it bother you and not aware something is happening at all. But there seems to be a fine line between these two...
Since during our meditation sessions, we tried focus on different things, usually starting with the breadth. I asked the instructor can we just focus on a single thought? I have thought that maybe when I was in deep thought of one thing, I was achieving the same state as during meditation when my attention is focused only on one thing. He said no, the goal is not to have thoughts. Then it suddenly became clear to me. This must be (maybe ;) it:
Our mind is capable of doing many things. Or maybe just two: thinking is one, perceiving is another, aka paying attention. Reasoning, daydreaming, etc. probably can be grouped into one or the other.
I was always confused about how to empty one's mind in order to meditate, for it seemed impossible for me not to have my mind be doing something. But now it becomes clear: clearing/emptying one's mind means to free one's mind from thoughts, it doesn't mean that your mind has to go into some suspended state, that your mind is stopped from working. The modern life style has inundated our minds with thoughts, and thinking has become the dominate thing that our minds do. Meditation is about stopping/slowing this overused function of thinking, while strengthen other functions of the mind.
It seems the simplest/easiest way to stop the thoughts is to use/strengthen the function of perceiving. It wasn't obvious to me before, but now I can see that perceiving must be different from thinking. You need the awareness of the mind to pay attention, you/one could perceive/pay attention without generating thoughts to accompany this activity. Our sensory organs receive/generate inputs, we use our minds to perceive them.
The mind is also capable of doing more than one thing at a time, meditating is to let the one function, paying attention, to be the one thing performed by the mind, or to overwhelm/dominate all the other functions/senses of the mind.
But why, what's the benefit of doing that? I think
1. It gives the mind a chance to rest. The mind was filled with the chatters of thoughts like in a busy urban street, meditation/excise of focused attention puts the mind in the peaceful country side.
I think that's why people find meditation has the effect of releasing stress and removing negative emotions such as depression, anger, frustration, etc. from the daily lives.
However, perhaps more importantly,
2. after meditation put our minds in that quite spot of serenity, the mind is freed to perceive more. More of what? More of what we don't usually realize that we can perceive, more from the place where inspiration and intuition come from. And this is what I hope to achieve with meditation.
In the book "Yoga - yoga, tantra and mediation in daily life" by Swami Janakananda, this is called "going deeper", going deeper inside oneself, into one's mind. I believe this is the same as the meaning of reaching a higher vibration in other context, getting "high".
Normally, there is a very narrow opening or narrow band through which we can get in touch with higher vibrations, such as opening a gate way to the spiritual energy field or intelligent infinity (to use Ra's term). I believe meditation helps widens this opening/bandwidth. According to Swami Janakananda, this meditative state of mind is a quite state between being awake and falling asleep. The key is to hold your mind there without falling asleep.
I believe this meditative state that connects us to higher frequencies is also what being "in the present" is about. I was never sure what being in the present/living in the now means. But apparently thrill seeking is in fact a form of living in the present. Thus I conclude that putting the mind in such as state where perceiving dominates thinking is trying to reach the same state as meditation.
It is also said that when we see something grandiose for the first time -- such as seeing the grand canyon for the first time -- that overwhelming sense of wonder we experience is also living in the present. It seems to be this state that some people can achieve though meditation as well.
Meditation seem to be training our mind to tune to the access frequency of the intelligent infinity. Either it can focus the mind or create/widen the opening. Ra said drugs can create an opening to the spiritual energy field, but in a uncontrolled way which can negatively affect a person (6.1). Apparently marijuana can help some people reach the higher frequencies in a more controlled manner.
Here's my hypothesis of how meditation works using the analogy of radio tuning. Usually our mind is either tuned to the noisy FM95 with thoughts blaring left and right, or the sleepy FM92 when we sleep. The mind is like a wave itself, operating within a frequency range. When it is at the noisy thoughtful range of 95, it actually modulates the frequency 94-96. When it operates at the sleepy frequency of 92, it actually modulates the frequency 91-93. Therefore we may refer these state of mind as broadband.
But there are intricate and faint broadcast that our mind can receive/perceive at the narrow band of 93-94, which we usually pass quickly when turning our dials from one state to another. Meditation is like moving slowly of the dial in the area between 93-94, or narrowing our operating frequency to that range.
When operating at that range, we generally experience silence, which can be soothing and healing to our mind. But there are also narrow frequencies, something precise like 93.75, where we can reach/perceive/assess the spiritual energy/intelligent infinity, if we were able to tune our mind to stay close to that frequency.
To me, if this understanding is correct, it will help me focus my intent when I meditate. Right now my mind seems to have trouble holding steady in the full attention state, slipping to and from thoughtful to sleepy state without being able to pause in the middle.
There are probably more complexity to the mind, for example, our mind seems to have at least two components that can operate simultaneously: that we can perceive/observe our thoughts while we are thinking. I'm probably only skimming the surface. I will write more when I gain some better insights.
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