First of all let me be clear that when I talk about meditation I am not referring to sitting with your eyes closed. I am talking about deep abidance in the experience of who we are beyond the mind.
You see, our awareness has been profoundly conditioned to remain relentlessly fixated on a certain range of thoughts, feelings and sensory perceptions at all times.
Meditation, whether it be done sitting with your eyes closed or not, occurs when you discover how to remove your attention from anything in particular and allow it to float freely in consciousness.
When meditation occurs it is like realizing that you can fly. You live your whole life anchored to thought, feeling and sensation and suddenly you find yourself floating in midair. Nothing is more exhilarating or mind altering.
The human experience is a small subset of a vast field of conscious possibility.
To understand the relationship between meditation and transformation the first thing we have to realize is that our human experience is a small subset of a vast field of conscious possibility.
We know that our eyes only perceive a narrow part of the electro-magnetic spectrum, and our ears only hear a small range of sound frequencies. In the same way our minds have been trained to experience only a small part of the field of consciousness.
The miracle of meditation is that we can experience consciousness beyond the mind. It is like seeing beyond what the eye can see, or hearing beyond what the ear can hear.
We have much more access to consciousness than what the mind can experience.
The next thing that we have to realize in order to fully appreciate the relationship between meditation and transformation is that all of reality is in constant flux. We are born into an unintelligible rush of experience.
Slowly we learn how to filter our perception so that we stabilize in a particular experience of being someone. Out of the unceasing flow of experience we have temporarily stabilized into the experience of being me.
In order to stabilize into a particular identity we had to learn to remain doggedly fixated on a narrow band of consciousness – the experience of being me. That habit of riveting attention on the experience of being me is so strong that we have forgotten that there is any other possibility. Most people live their lives being whoever they learned to be in the first place.
Some of us become interested in transformation. We begin to feel stifled by the fixed sense of self that we are. We begin to realize that we are more than that, but we don’t know how to break the habit of mental fixation that holds are identity in place.
If we want to transform, if we want to expand our experience of consciousness, we have to first unglue our attention from the small band of possibility that it is habitually adhered to. Meditation is a practice for releasing our awareness.
The experience of freedom is the first miracle of meditation. The second is the discovery that once our attention has been liberated from strict adherence to our current sense of self we enter into a natural process of growth.
We realize that while we have been trying to change we have also been holding on to who we are. The experience of meditation is the experience of letting go of who we are. And as soon as we let go of who we are we enter into a natural process of growth and evolution.
That is why I feel that the experience of meditation is essential to transformation.
~ Jeff Careira