The Key to Meditation

The key to meditation not grasped by a lot of people is to combine meditation with sleep! A good state of meditation is mind awake, but body asleep. That’s one of the things we’re trying to achieve.

Relaxation, the first step, is important because that is what will put your body in that sleep state. What we’re looking for with meditation is voluntary controlled sleep of the body while the mind remains focus and concentration.

You want to breathe deep to slow the rate of respiration and slow the heart rate as well. That’s why we take the time to relax the body because the “voluntary controlled sleep” is what we’re trying to do. Ironically not a lot of people know how to relax, and relaxation is a skill. With time you get better and better at it, and you can put yourself in a deeper state much quicker.

In the beginning everything in your house bothers you, the traffic outside, the neighbors, the heat. Everything seems to bother you and prevent you from relaxing. But over time you can quickly get yourself into a deep state of relaxation, which is what you need for meditation.

Techniques for Concentration

All meditation techniques that you come across or read in a book or practice are really the same thing; an exercise to get you to concentrate. Concentration is key. Every meditation technique is just something for you to concentrate on. It’s something for you to focus your mind on in an attempt to wrestle control of the thought process away from the subconscious. Consequently, there are a whole lot of different techniques:

Mantras

Mantras are specific sounds or phrases that are vocalized or chanted during a meditation for a specific purpose related to spiritual development. Here are a few examples:

Gate, Gate, Para Gate, Para Sam Gate, Bodhi Swa ha
This is a Tibetan mantra meaning “gone, gone, gone to another shore, completely gone to another shore, enlightenment, hail!” The mantra is sung in chant and is used to reach a deep state of meditation known as the “illuminated void”.

WU
This mantra is used to clear the mind of all thoughts. The sound should be vocalized as the wind or the sea blowing or washing away your thoughts.

OM
This is a famous Tibetan mantra to develop clairvoyance.

It’s more effective for you to pick one mantra that you like and stick to it, rather than mess around with a bunch.

Zen Koans

These are tricks to occupy and silence the mind. Your mind is kind of a pest and it’s a really difficult thing to control. Zen Koans are a way that we can exhaust our mental process by giving it a little trick or riddle to solve.

Koans are meant to be inaccessible to rational understanding and cause the thought process to stop. It’s a riddle that your mind cannot solve because it has no rational answer. It’s a question that the intellectual process can’t answer because it relies quite heavily on reason and logic.

What happens when we’re working with a Zen Koan is the mind fails to grasp the meaning or find the answer and in the end the intellectual process is defeated. It’s like giving a playful dog a toy that it actively plays with until it exhausts itself and drops dead. A Zen Koan is like the ultimate dog toy. All it does is it keeps the mind so busy, it puts the mind into overdrive until eventually the intellectual process just stops. The mind exhausts itself.

Examples of Koans:

• What came first, the chicken or the egg?
• What is the sound of one hand clapping?
• If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
• It is not the mind, it is not the Buddha, it is nothing?
• Take an object and begin breaking it down into its components. Continue breaking down the components into components until arriving at the smallest particles at the atomic level. What do they break down into?

You have to concentrate on the koan and attempt to solve the riddle. Let your mind explore every possibility, no matter how silly. You have to be determined. Gradually your mind will tire out. Be persistent! Your mind will attempt to distract you from the koan with regular mundane thoughts. Don’t identify with them and lose the koan. Persistence in solving the koan is what tires out the mind, don’t give up!

Duality Technique

The Duality Technique is the continuous process of placing opposites against every thought that we have. It’s intentionally thinking the exact opposite of whatever thought enters our mind. This teaches us a lot about the way our thought process works. To us everything is opposite.

Remember, every thought has two polarities, positive and negative, thesis and antithesis. Hot/cold, tall/short, pleasure/pain, entering/leaving, etc. Whatever it is, there’s an opposite of it. That’s how we’re wired to think. Every single thought that enters our mind, we see as a duality to something else.

When the thesis and antithesis come together, they’re reconciled in the synthesis. If you take one step forward and then take one step backwards have you gone anywhere? No. You got the positive and the negative and that’s reconciled and balanced in the neutral. That’s what we’re trying to do with the duality technique, everything you think of, you’re going to find an opposite for.

Every mental form can be eliminated through its synthesis. The subconscious introduces an image or memory in an attempt to get us to identify with it and fantasize and dream while falling out of the present moment. What we’re trying to do with the duality technique is eliminate those mental forms.

This is something you can demonstrate physically with light, sound, or radiation, just by inverting polarities. The thought that enters our mind is like one polarity. We’re going instead generate the opposite polarity to cancel the thought out. It’s like our mind wants to push us in one direction and step forwards, but we immediately step backwards so we haven’t gone anywhere.

Thoughts should pass through the mind without leaving a trace, not identifying. The thoughts in our mind should be like cars on the street simply driving by. We don’t acknowledge it and get in and let it take us for a ride. Or the thoughts in our mind could act like clouds in the sky, just drifting by without interacting with us whatsoever. When we reach that state where the thoughts just pass us by, then we can say that we’re not identifying with them.

Imagine your mind as a clear lake. Every time a thought enters your mind, be it a memory or image, that suddenly creates all these ripples travelling out on the lake. The thought is like a stone dropped in a pond and all the ripples that are created are like you identifying with the thought, letting it pull you in different directions. We want to create a situation of a calm, blue lake and a stone dropped into it, and then nothing, no reactions.

We eliminate the traces by arriving at the synthesis. The negative cancels out the positive and negates the effect of the thought. The thought is the subconscious pushing us in one direction, and we’re going to push back with an equal force in the opposite direction. The net result being no movement. There’s no consciousness shift. You simply stay in the present moment with awareness. You don’t identify with the thought or image.

For every thought that comes in our mind, it’s always one polarity. We always associate with one aspect, but after that we have to immediately generate the opposite aspect. For example:

• If you’re thinking it’s hot wherever you are, imagine it’s cold.
• If you’re thinking about your fun plans for the weekend with friends, think “no, it’s going to be boring.”
• If you’re excited about a road trip coming up, think of how exhausted you’ll be at the end of it.
• If you’re excited about a new job you’re about to start, think of how much of your time and energy it’s going to take up.
• If you’re fantasizing about your significant other, think of how much they’ll age as they grow old and lose their beauty.

We have one polarity. We have to acknowledge the other polarity, which allows us to arrive at the synthesis, the blending of the two. Another way of looking at it is a coin, heads or tails. It’s just one coin with two sides.

Being human we only want to acknowledge one polarity of everything. We draw this line in the sand and say “I like this. I don’t like that. I only want to be over here. I never want to be over there.” By defining our own happiness we consequently define our own sadness. By defining our own pleasure we also define our own pain. That’s something we can discover by using the duality technique. We can discover how the mind works and creates these little polarities.

By reaching further and further to one side, we’re also reaching further to the other side, like a pendulum that swings. The further you push it to one side, the further it’ll swing to the other side.

By the duality technique we’re trying to achieve a state of balance in our emotions and thoughts. Working with the duality technique allows us to experience that state of balance by being in the present moment. Usually our whole life is like half of the pendulum is in the past, and half of the pendulum is in the future. But there’s a very precise point in time when the pendulum is in the center. That’s the present moment.

Normally, we ride the pendulum and swing along with it. Instead we should jump off the pendulum and simply watch it. Have a different perspective right in the middle. That’s what we’re trying to do with the duality technique. That synthesis is that point of balance that’s neither one extreme nor the other. It’s the exact correlation of the two, the state the consciousness works at.

This technique is different from other techniques that are trying to stop your thoughts. With the Duality Technique you’re more like “Bring ‘em on!” The weird thing is you usually immediately stop thinking about stuff when that happens. It’s almost a form of self-observation too because you’re deciding to be “conscious” of all your thoughts. You’re going to have a tug-of-war with your mind until your mind gives up. You’re left in control. That’s what’s happening with the duality technique.

The result is to make every arising thought ineffective, no ripples on the pond. For every step forward the mind tries to take, we make it take a step backwards. Because it’s the flow from positive to negative that the subconscious uses to sustain itself. Like a teeter-totter going up and down, the subconscious uses that flow to sustain itself. What we’re trying to do in this process is interrupt it, to bring the mind to a halt. And then we’ve arrived at that synthesis, that different state of consciousness. The infinite procession of thoughts are exhausted and the mind remains still.

Obstacles to Meditation

During meditation our mind is assaulted by memories, preoccupations, desires, etc. The more you meditate, the more you start to control the regular mundane thoughts. Soon, the subconscious gets tricky and it’ll throw like a wild card at you. A memory might come up that you haven’t thought in decades maybe. It throws something at you that gets your attention. The more you meditate the more you get a sense of that; a thought that comes out of nowhere. It could be something pleasant like your first kiss or even a fear.

The good news is if you got to that point then you’re doing something right, because you’re fighting all the regular mundane thoughts, so something stronger had to come through.

The subconscious creates obstacles to our attention and concentration and attempts to distract us. To establish a correct basis for meditation we must be free of ambition, fear, egotism, greed for powers and yearning for results. If you’re an “instant gratification” kind of person then you’re not going to have a very pleasant time with meditation.

Lack of Concentration

The largest obstacle is a lack of concentration. We are so bad at concentrating. If you’re bothered by the noise or the time or temperature, then you’re not concentrating. If we can’t concentrate we will fail to progress. If our mind “is flying everywhere” we do not get the benefits from the practice. If we aren’t concentrating we are doing the practice mechanically, which gives no results.

Concentration shuts off all thoughts but one which leads to the stage of meditation or “non-thinking.” Concentration must be practiced in order to learn. The good news is you can practice it anytime you want to, no matter what you’re doing.

We can learn to develop concentration during daily activities. Whatever we are doing, focus on just that, the task at hand. It could be washing the dishes, driving to work, tying your shoes, vacuuming, or gardening. Anything can be a practice for concentration. If you practiced concentration during the day and then practiced meditation later at night, your concentration would be that much better because it was already used to focus on the chores and tasks that you did.

Time

When meditating we have to forget about time and live in the eternal instant, stop keeping track of time. When beginning meditation we find ourselves constantly aware of the time and wondering “how long it’s been”.

When we start learning to meditate, it’s like “time” becomes your goal. “How long can you do it for? 5 min, 10 min, 20 min, 30 min.” You become obsessed with how long have you been sitting there. That’s another trick the subconscious plays with you. You want to stop keeping track of time. We also set limits such as “I’m going to meditate for 30 minutes” and then spend the whole time wondering if it’s been 30 minutes yet.

In a good meditation time disappears. Ideally if you’re going to meditate it should be open ended. “I’m just going to do this and stop when I stop.” You can use music that stops at some point or set an alarm, and let the alarm take care of the time. We all have this internal clock that we really have to break free from.

Fear

This aspect of our psyche must be comprehended or else it prevents us from reaching higher levels. When the subconscious is silenced and the consciousness is liberating itself, the sensation can feel like dying, ceasing to exist, losing our identity, being annihilated, merging with everything. These sensations can trigger fear which pulls the consciousness back into the bottle of the subconscious.

Doubt

Doubt happens when you’re sitting in the chair. You’ve been practicing for a while and you go “This isn’t doing anything. This is a waste of time. I’m better off doing something else. Maybe meditation isn’t for me.” That’s how doubt works.

We have to dissect doubt to see what other impulses it hides. Why do you not think you can do it? We must self-criticize to find out why it exists. There’s plenty of documentation about different states of consciousness in meditation. So they’re there. Why is it that you don’t think you can get there? And you have to arrive at that conclusion for yourself. It could be related to fear or self-esteem, but you really have to have a good look at why doubt happens. For some people doubt becomes a big obstacle.

We must not identify with the mind. Doubts are created by the mind. If you’ve identified with doubt, you’ve identified with an aspect of your subconscious, which means you’re not concentrating. Eliminate doubt through analysis and discover the root of it. You might discover fear may be behind doubt; fear of the unknown.

Importance of Meditation

Meditation is like the “daily bread” for our consciousness. It’s like a workout for our consciousness. It strengthens it and makes it grow. By developing that consciousness we’re able to learn more about ourselves and penetrate further into the hidden side of our psychology. By strengthening that consciousness we become better at controlling difficult aspects of our mind like anger, anxiety, depression. That’s why it’s important to practice meditation regularly if you ever want to master any psychological problems you may be struggling with.