72 - Meditation Aftereffect

            At a certain point in our search for meaningfulness, it may suddenly dawn upon us that our quest of trance-like meditations or retreats may arise from a perhaps unconscious wish to escape from a life situation (for example, parental authority or the ruthless, merciless civilization we are living in: its violence, its greed, its manipulation). Moreover, it has become evident in recent years that meditation practices can and do lead people to drop out of life in general and eschew taking responsibility in their lives for loved ones or fellow beings.

Further, we just may be trying to validate our own personality in our own view or that of others by being special or different! Actually, we may be missing out on the inestimable value of that which has been acquired by humans throughout the ages in terms of beauty, material convenience, and orderliness: the marvel, the excitement, the courage, the vulnerability and the enriching effect of sharing joy and pain, relationship, friendship, loyalty, and service in which God is to be found as a living reality. It is tragic to cloister oneself in an anesthetized psyche that shields one from confronting the challenges of the drama of life, which both actuates the celebration in the heavens in a concrete way, and tests our mettle. There is a way of being high without being spaced-out!

            When meditating ( or prescribing meditation ), it is important to be clear about the aftereffect that the shift of focus of consciousness may be expected to have upon our personality, attunement, and world-view, and to know which practices trigger off which effect.

1) Since our notion of ourselves needs to be expanded when extending consciousness, we contemplate vaster and vaster reaches of space, we identify with zones of our being beyond our notion of a skin-bound material body. We may become aware of and identify with our magnetic field and/or aura. As these do not have a boundary, we then envision ourselves as being like a vortex (boundless). What is more, we tend to assume that we lose ourselves by merging with the totality of the universe.

            It is important here to keep in mind that one is both a vortex and, at the same time, something like a cell, bounded by a membrane, albeit porous. We need to work with both in combination, not just one or the other. Our minds in their commonplace thinking mode find it difficult to reconcile these two paradigms. This problem is similar to the one that physicists encountered in accepting that, since photons of light behave either as waves or as particles according to the way the experiment is conducted, they may be considered as displaying both of these properties. So it is with our notion of ourselves.

            Our bodies (including the subtle bodies, the psyche, personality, and consciousness, etc.) are indeed holistically related to the totality of the fabric of the universe. This means that they carry potentially in them the bounty of the totality of the fabric of the universe, just as every drop of water has the same properties as the water of the ocean. In fact, every cell of the body has the same genes as every other, but in one some will be activated and in others different ones, so that by diversifying they create the change to cooperate. Thus they differ while being potentially identical, and in that sense may be considered as "discrete entities." It is in this diversity that our freedom is rooted. A vortex is open to its environment, and in fact incorporates its environment indiscriminately, whereas a cell, thanks to its membrane, may select the elements it takes in from the environment, or secretes to the environment, while still being open to some measure of osmosis.

            If we identify just with the vortex model, we are overlooking the containment which ensures our protection against undesirable impressions, honors our idiosyncrasies, and confers upon us our incentive. If we neglect our boundaries, we run the psychological risk of finding ourselves disoriented, spaced out and unable to confront circumstances as real (one may even invoke the concept of maya to justify this attitude). What is more, just as we generally fail to realize that an eddy does not lose its identity by joining with other eddies in a wave-interference pattern (whirlpool), and can even be retrieved, we tend to believe that we lose ourselves as we merge blissfully with the totality of the universe or the being of God. However, the objective of the universe is that the bounty of the totality should be customized in each of its sub-wholes in a unique way! Fana does not mean that one loses oneself, but only one's commonplace notion of oneself.

2)         In meditation we learn to "turn within", which can easily be misconstrued as encapsulating ourselves in our psyche while blocking any impressions, physical or psychological, from the environment. Here it is the opposite: by setting up a boundary segregating ourselves from the environment, we tend to merge with the totality in an inverted space. A person unfamiliar with physics would find it difficult to have any clue as to what one might mean by "inverted space." It may therefore be preferable to envision that our magnetic field or aura intersperses with that of other such fields, like the eddies on the surface of a lake as they compose to form a wave-interference pattern. It is difficult for us to realize that this does not imply that they spread out or diffract in space. A good analogy would be the difference between a short musical theme, each note following the other and the notes forming a chord without being stretched out as a melody. This happens in our dreams, where impressions are jumbled; in order to retrieve them in our memory, we sort them out in a space-time framework.

            If, however, as we turn within in meditation, instead of setting up a boundary encapsulating ourselves in our thoughts, we envision that we are protected by a porous membrane that filters impressions from the environment (at all levels of reality) and that we are consequently able to radiate into the environment, then we will enjoy an incomparably richer experience. Now, envision that you are not just filtering these impressions, but transmuting them, just as we digest our food in order to use it, since we can only deal with amino-acid chains that match our own. Just as in digestion, we need to break down the ingested elements and rebuild them on the model of our own idiosyncrasies and reject those elements which, being too alien to our own beings, would prove to be difficult to incorporate, or might even be harmful. Here our sense of having boundaries will help us reject unwanted impressions, on the one hand, or filter and transmute those impressions that can be put to good use if adjusted to our particular attunement, on the other hand.

3)         Transcendence: there can be no doubt that our involvement with life at its lowest common denominator fosters greed, limitations in the field of consciousness, and conflict, while our quest for freedom from conditioning opens the doors to the wonder and meaningfulness behind what seems to be happening at the existential level.

            Another way of putting this is to say that we must instill something of the way of the hermit into the way of the knight. Our need for freedom is as compelling as our need for involvement. Are they necessarily mutually exclusive? There is a way of reconciling the irreconcilables. One example is to love without being dependent upon being loved. In meditation, detachment frees one from the conditioning of one's thinking and the constraint of one's self-image. Freedom from the usual setting of consciousness will enable us to shift consciousness into an inner space or, alternatively, into a mode of self-transcendence.
