What are we dealing with in meditation and what is the ‘goal’?
The goal of meditation is happiness. What we are dealing with are the obstacles we buy into that prevent us from finding happiness. Actually, there is a very thin film separating us from happiness but we seldom pierce it to experience the bliss described by mystics of all religious traditions.
Through identification with thoughts and feelings, with the constructs of the ego, we shield ourselves from the happiness we so desperately want. We believe this constantly changing, insubstantial person formed by our interaction with other constantly changing, insubstantial people is where we will find happiness. We believe that this person I have become and will continue becoming is the real me and that other people are just as real as I am.
Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who came to the West in the 1960’s, describes the defenses we put up to resist finding our true happiness.
“Consciousness consists of emotions and irregular thought patterns, all of which taken together form the different fantasy worlds with which we occupy ourselves. These fantasy worlds are referred to in the scriptures as the “six realms”. The emotions are the highlights of ego, the generals of ego’s army; subconscious thought, day-dreams and other thoughts connect one highlight to another. So thoughts form ego’s army and are constantly in motion, constantly busy. Our thoughts are neurotic in the sense that they are irregular, changing direction all the time and overlapping one another. We continually jump from one thought to the next, from spiritual thoughts to sexual fantasies to money matters to domestic thoughts and so on. The whole development of the five skandhas –ignorance/form, feeling, impulse/perception, concept and consciousness–is an attempt on our part to shield ourselves from the truth of our insubstantiality.”
Trungpa describes our situation further:
“When we fly in an airplane above the clouds, we realize that the sun is always shining even when it is cloudy and rainy below. In the same way, when we cease to hold on to our identity, our ego, we begin to see that the nonexistence of ego is a powerful, real, and indestructible state of being. We realize that, like the sun, it is a continuous situation which does not wax or wane. That state of being is called vajra nature.”
Like rising above the clouds into the brightness of sunshine there are people who have ‘parted the veil’ or ‘pierced the film’ into that realm of happiness, that state of everlasting bliss. Trungpa calls it our vajra (diamond) nature because it is our indestructible, eternal nature. It is always there above the cloud-covering of our thoughts and emotions. The surprisingly few people who have experienced their vajra nature, also called Buddha nature or Christ consciousness, belong to every religious tradition; there are the Christian mystics, Hindu mahayogis, Buddhist bodhisattvas, Moslem sufis, realized souls, and enlightened beings of every part of the world and every age.
Through meditation we learn to see how insubstantial our thoughts and emotions really are. By practicing the simple action of letting go, of returning to the experience of being in the present moment without drifting along with the programs of the ego, we prepare and make ourselves available for the experience of happiness. And, as the mystics have repeatedly discovered, it is possible to not only glimpse but to enter into and even constantly maintain the experience of happiness. What they have discovered is love; that happiness is to love and to experience love.
If it is love, something we already know gives us happiness, then why don’t we practice love? Why do we allow our egos to confuse and cloud our lives? Why can’t we love and be in love all the time? Good question!
So, meditate and find out; ask the question, live the answer. Love all!
Threshold 