137 - What is Meditation?
How does one meditate?
with Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan and Taj Inayat
INTRODUCTION
Taj Inayat

I'd like to share with you the background against which this Keeping in Touch was written.

It took weeks after Pir Vilayat's first stroke for him to recover his ability to speak and communicate his ideas. Gradually, he developed a system of communication where he would dictate his thoughts and have them read back to him. Try to imagine, if you will, the difficulty of keeping the sequence of entire paragraphs clearly in his mind as he listened to what was dictated back to him and then made revisions.

It was a tedious process, but one that he never seemed to [get] tired of. He often dozed off into sleeping episodes, yet upon waking he would always say, "Now, where were we?" Then he would begin again immediately. This went on for days and weeks. He worked intensely on several articles, some of which were published before his death in past issues of Keeping in Touch.

One day he said that he would like to write an article on meditation with me, that we would each write a portion of it. At first, I didn't think he was serious, so I tried to delay it several days. I thought he was just trying to keep me busy, thinking I didn't have enough to do all day just sitting by his bed. When he finished his portion I hadn't even started mine. Every time he asked how my part was coming along, I responded with some excuse. But he continued to bring it up, until I started feeling guilty and finally began to write down a few thoughts.

Then of course, I would have to read back to him what I had written and he would ponder what I had said. His eyes would light up at certain points, such as the phrase "God becomes man so that man can become God." I never found the source of that quote. I must have read my portion of this article to him 20 times, sometimes nearly screaming in his ear because of his hearing loss. I thought the other family members in Fazil Manzil surely must be sick of it, but he never appeared tired of hearing it. He seemed happy to see the two poles of meditation spoken about together.

I remember that time now with so much tenderness. I feel grateful in those last days, even under such difficult circumstances, to have had the joy of sharing deeply our inner thoughts and experiences as we had for over 35 years. In some way, this Keeping in Touch is a testament to our ongoing dialogue: the conversation we started when we first met and which continued until he was not longer able to speak.

WHAT IS MEDITATION?
HOW DOES ONE MEDITATE?
Pir Vilayat

It is a fallacy to put a certain amount of time aside to meditate and then to return to one's ordinary thinking. The objective of meditation is awakening - seeing the programming behind the facts. It requires one to change one's point of view from the usual one. Awakening affects our thinking and acting in everyday life.

To meditate one must first expel thoughts related to the physical world. Shagal is the first step because one eliminates those thoughts that are related to what is not. By closing one's senses one shuts out the impressions of the day. The consequence is that if one's consciousness is blinded on one side, the 'outside,' then it turns inside.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
When he can go into the inner chamber and shut the door to every sound but to that of his soul he will know the keynote of his life. Sangatha III

One needs to reconsider the thoughts regarding oneself in light of the whole picture. One touches upon another level of reality than the physical. Reality does manifest in the physical, but to grasp it one has to see the physical from the point of view of the divine.

So in shagal one is seeing everyday reality as secondary, as a concretized and personalized expression of the divine planning. The power of meditation lies in seeing things from the divine point of view.

Actually one is seeing backstage of life and into the motivations of the divine planning. This is what is meant by: "seeing things from the divine point of view."

Meditation is the art of correcting distortion in order to grasp reality.

To do this one has to first deal with one's identity. One needs to include in one's identity one's transpersonal being, which is what we mean by God. It is a totally different realm to the physical. One considers material facts as the application of the programming; one is always seeing the motivation behind existential facts. Awakening requires that one dismiss the usual way of seeing things to grasp the cause behind the effect. One has to avoid slipping back into one's ordinary consciousness.

There is a disparity between our opinion and reality. This could be illustrated by the description of an electron as a particle gravitating in an orbit. That description would be a total misinterpretation of the path of the electron because one cannot estimate the speed and location of a subatomic particle at the same time.

One's personality is like a variation on a theme of music. It is the divine theme but somehow the individual has arisen within the perspective of the whole. It is separate from the whole in that it has its own point of view, yet interprets the divine point of view in a unique way. The divine being has fragmented itself and those fragments enrich the divine being just like the variation on the theme enriches the musical theme.

What is gained by life is the individual in its relationship with the totality.

WHAT IS MEDITATION?
HOW DOES ONE MEDITATE?
Taj Inayat

The practice of meditation can help us fulfill the purpose of our life: awakening to our divine nature and further, embodying and living this Mystery in our day to day life. Embodying our deepest nature is the spiritual keynote of our time. As Hazrat Inayat Khan says, the message of the day is the awakening of humanity to the divinity of the human being.

Evolutionary Intelligence "desires" further and further integration of all aspects of its Being. This takes place through the process of descent and ascent (see the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan in The Soul Whence and Whither). All is one in the eternal beginning ( the Alpha of our being) yet through the process of manifestation, the Only Being divides or discriminates into distinguishable forms (subtle and gross) for the pleasure of the Creator/Artist.

"God has become the human being so that the human being can become God."

The soul incarnates, substantiates, through a gradual process of learning to be a separate "I." When this "journey" is more or less completed, the soul finds itself, here, in a subject-object world, individuated into a unique ego-centered universe, no longer able to feel and abide in the inherent loving oneness of existence.

Yet in spite of this sense of estrangement, there is a great purpose behind the "fall." As Hazrat Inayat Khan says, "Hail to my fall from the Garden of Eden...if this had not happened, I would not have been able to taste the depths of life."

Mystics throughout the ages concur that our highest human task is to realize the unity of existence in and through all levels of being. Yet most of us experience our self and the world around us subjectively, through the lens of an historical, conditioned point of view and sense of self. Beneath a thin veneer most people feel a vague sense of unhappiness, agitation and emptiness.

The whole mystic path is the process of awakening from our ego-centered existence with its inherent dissatisfaction and meaninglessness into a deeper ground of being which by its nature gives a sense of wonder, joy and peace. In fact our attempt to gain love, value, peace and joy is really the search for our own Self, our deeper self that is buried in our own heart.

The practice of meditation can help us dis-identify from our usual limited sense of self and open to this deeper, more true nature. In discovering and living from this depth we not only gain our heart's desire but fulfill the purpose of human existence.

How can meditation help?

Just the intention to meditate regularly begins to shift the centrality of the ego life. By first believing and then experiencing a greater existence or field of awareness beyond our normal range, our self-centered view is made relative. We start to become loyal to a greater, deeper center. At the simplest level, to commit to a daily practice means that our ordinary way of doing things needs to change. For example to add a half hour of meditation to our morning schedule implies the loss of time for other activities (such as sleeping, reading the newspaper, procrastinating, etc.)

To stick with a meditation practice day after day, sometimes with very little reward, requires discipline, loyalty, love and faith. In the beginning it is common to believe that enlightenment will end our suffering so we are highly motivated to practice. But gradually it begins to dawn on us that the self who desires enlightenment is actually the main barrier to experiencing our deeper ground. It is natural to go through developmental stages in our meditation practice. We begin as the seeker and discover we are the One who is sought.

Poem by La La:
I searched everywhere for you. You played hide and seek with me, until I realized that I was you. And the celebration of that began.

Hazrat Inayat Khan speaks to these stages beautifully:

When Thou didst sit upon Thy throne, with a crown upon Thy head, I did prostrate myself upon the ground and called Thee my Lord.
When Thou didst stretch out Thy hands in blessing over me, I knelt and called Thee my Master.
When Thou didst raise me from the ground, holding me with Thine arms, I drew closer to Thee and called Thee my Beloved.
But when Thy caressing hands held my head next to Thy glowing heart and Thou didst kiss me, I smiled and called Thee myself.
The Complete Sayings of Hazrat Inayat Khan, p. 103.

As our meditation deepens we learn to abide more and more in the deeper ground of existence (God). This signals a shift away from a more ego centered experience towards a more divine centered experience. The temporary state is called a hal. For a hal to become a station, however, more and more attention needs to be directed towards how we live our daily life. (See the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan on Moral Culture). Having peak experiences of the divine is a first stage, but to embody this reality in an ongoing way requires a radical overhaul of our whole personality structure.

The systematic dissolving of our habituated life is the spiritual work of a life time. This process requires profound dedication, love and guidance. Very few of us seem to be genuinely interested in such a complete surrendering of the ego life we have become accustomed to living. Yet this transformation is the invitation we are given. If we accept this path, and offer ourselves whole- heartedly to the divine operation, our historically constructed personality gradually dissolves ("dying before death") and we become a temple for the Only Being to live a human life. The previously "merely human" has now become the "sheer divine."

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
Man is divine limitation and God is human perfection.
