Meditation

From The Maze Where Realities Converge - the psychedelic encyclopedia of reality from The Ultimate Comment

Meditation is the act of focusing the mind. If you know how to control where your attention goes, you'll be able to focus on anything you do, so you'll be better at anything you do. Meditation is concentration, and also non-attachment to selfhood and non-identification of the self with thoughts and mental chatter.

Contents 1 Points to bear in mind 2 Shortcuts 3 There are two kinds of meditation 3.1 Pure Being 3.2 Concentration 4 Other methods 5 See also 6 External links 6.1 Raja yoga 6.2 Zazen

Points to bear in mind

Sit in any position that you find comfortable and that allows the spine to be straight. You must be absolutely, absolutely motionless, as any movement of the body will tend to trigger sensations in the mind. Most people find that sitting or kneeling positions work better than standing or lying down, as this is a message to yourself to not be too excited nor too lax. Tuck your chin in slightly. Stretch your head up, like you were trying to touch the roof. Do not allow your posture to sag during meditation.

Allow your breathing to become rhythmic, relaxed and deep (by 'deep' I mean using the lower abdominal muscles). Your chest should not rise and fall as you breath. All the breathing should be done with the muscles of the abdomen, not of the chest. You can press the pads of your fingers together to feel your pulse.

In meditation, you must be in a state of relaxd concentration. The practitioner falls into error when he either becomes too excited and determined, and thus sacrifices his calmness, or else when he becomes to relaxed and thus loses his focus. Pay vigorous attention to your practise, but be relaxed.

Shortcuts

Meditation is a skill that - like any other - will be developed over time through practise and continual progression. And like any other skill, there are magickal ways of cheating to get get good at it faster. These have all been tried at tested by our crack team of researchers and they all work:

• Anchoring can be used to help a meditative state. If you always meditate at the same time of day, in the same place and/or in the same clothes, your mind will come to expect to enter a meditative state.
• Before you meditate, perform a banishing ritual.
• Muscular tension, especially in the face, is closely linked with mental tension. Many psychologists even think that facial expressions cause emotions, rather than the other way 'round. Muscles relax when moved passively (that's why out your hand when you get writers' cramp), so shaking your head so that the flesh of your face jiggles around is a good way to relax and clear the mind before meditation. Pretty clever, eh?
• You can use brainwave entrainment to synchronize the hemispheres of your brain and set your brainwaves to about 8-10Hz before you start. This will make it considerably easier to enter a meditative state.
• Drugs are by far the best shortcut to high meditative states. Psychedelics like LSD and mescaline are perfect and you might be surprised at just how well-suited MDMA is to meditation.
• Understand NLP submodalities and manipulate the submodalities of the object of meditation in a way that makes it easy to focus on. For example, here's a trick that will help you concentrate on a sound in your mind: one submodality of auditory thought is the direction the sound seems to be coming from and when you try to fix a sound in mind, you can get mental chatter seeming to come from different directions in your consciousness. So imagine the mantra quadrophonically - as coming from in front of you, behind you, to your left and to your right. This will leave no room for other auditory thought.
• Excellent exercizes for developing the ability to suppress thoughts are given in Aleister Crowley's 'Liber III vel Jugorum' and 'Liber Turris vel Domus Dei', both of which can be found here
• Innovate!

There are two kinds of meditation

Essentially there are two kinds of meditation: one in which the mind is concentrated on one object, and one in which thoughts are disregarded. The Ultimate Comment calls these 'concentration' and 'Pure Being' respectively. They have also been called objective and subjective meditation. The student should practise both, as the two overlap and compliment each other. The practise of Pure Being will aid concentration by teaching the student to disregard distracting thoughts, while the practise of concentration will aid Pure Being by training the focus of attention. Like all dualities, this proves to be a false duality once a high level is reached. The very highest forms of meditation, such as 'samadhi' - the last stage of yoga in Patanjali's terminology, belong equally to both categories. In samadhi, there is no division between subject and object, so there can be no distinction between subjective and objective meditation.

Pure Being

In the movie I Heart Huckabees Albert and Tommy whack themselves in the face with a rubber ball to induce a state they call 'Pure Being'. The Ultimate Comment uses the term 'Pure Being' as the most accurate term to describe the first category of meditation - what may be termed subjective meditation. Vipassana, zazen, conscious observer meditation, nididhyasana and pratyahara fall into this category. This type of meditation brings peace, clarity of mind and knowledge of the True Self (or non-self, if you're into the Buddhist thing).

Sit in your position of choice, take any of the preparatory steps described above (under 'shortcuts'). Most practitioners find this meditation works best with the eyes half open, but experiment. Now detach from thoughts by considering them as not arising from yourself, but just as being the brains's chatter. When a thought comes into your mind, you are not thinking that, it is just a thought that is happening, that has neither subject nor object. You are not your thoughts. In fact, 'you' do not exist - what exists is a bundle of perceptions that have been classed together as 'you', much in the same way as a bundle of stars are classed together as a constellation.

You must be without purpose, without judgement, without attachment and without desire. Do not prefer anything to anything else. When you listen to music, you're not trying to do anything with it and are certainly not trying to understand the meaning of the notes. You're just letting your perceiving self dissolve into the perceived. As it is with music, so it is with Pure Being, except that you regard internal perceptions with the same non-attachment as external perceptions.

When you've gotten a feel for Pure Being through practise, start considering this during your practise: The universe exists in every grain of sand, and eternity in every hour. The ideas of locality in space and locality in time are incidental effects of neurology, and are to be disregarded as you have disregarded the rest of the brain's chatter. Allow your consciousness to expand to be at all times and in all places at once, as is the natural state of consciousness when uninhibited by thought. It would be helpful to read up on David Bohm's theory of the holographic universe or Kant's theory of space and time as categories of perception.

Concentration

This kind of meditation involves bringing all your attention to bear on a single object. Dharana, dhyana, samatha, anapanasati, pranayama, mantrayoga, sound concentration, image concentration, object concentraion, breath concentration and concentration on nothing (shikantaza or munen muso or non-thought) all fall into this category.

The fruit of this training is increased concentration. There is no human activity which will not benefit from improved concentration. You will find you will gain vigour, enthusiasm and alertness with dedicated practise. Don't take our word for it - try it.

Pick an object of meditation and keep it in mind. Do not let it out of your consciousness. However, it is not enough to just have the object in mind; you must pay proper attention to it. You can pay attention to several things at once, but full attention only to one thing at a time. Do not let your attention slacken, but don't let it become excited either. In short, be singleminded, be attentive and be calm. When other thoughts come to your mind, don't push them away forcefully, just notice them, disregard them as in Pure Being and allow them to pass by. Some practitioners find that it helps to do a few minutes of Pure Being before doing object concentration, so you'll be better able to disregard distracting thoughts.

• Breath. Concentrate on the act of breathing, the sound of breathing, the feel of breathing. Some people call this anāpānasati, but those people speak Pali instead of English. Anāpānasati is usually done by breathing through the nose and focusing on the sensation of air against the nostrils.
• Counting. A good technique to begin with. Just count to a number, say 2323, with complete focus. You may want to count out a number of breaths.
• Mantras. Either chant a phrase aloud over and over again, or repeat it to yourself while sitting still with your eyes closed. We recommend the holy syllable Miaow, a secret or any rhythm sentence. You can also create a sigil in the form of a mantra to meditate on. According to Hindu tradition, mantras should be pronounced at 136.1Hz (C sharp) to resonate with the entire universe.
• Gazing. Just stare at one spot for extended periods of time. Don't move your eyes. Keep blinking to a minimum. Look at something unimportant - a dot on a wall or something - as this will not be provocative of other thoughts. Hallucinations are to be expected.
• Picture concentration. Take a symbol or picture from some mythos, a picture of a god, a sigil you have created, a mandala, a fractal or other hallucinographic image, your reflection in a mirror, or any image really, and stare at it. Do not move your eyes, not even a little bit. You may blink, but only when absolutely necessary.
• Visualisation. Focus on an image in your mind's eye. A common method is to visualise a light coming from or moving around your body. Concentrate on this completely. Aleister Crowley suggests visualising one of the five tattwas (a yellow square, a red triangle, a silver crescent, a purple oval or a blue circle).
• Bodily sensations. Focus on a somatic sensation like your heartbeat or a tingling feeling at one of your 'chakras'.
• Concepts. Focus on a philosophical concept such as chaos, identity, meaning, love or whatever you're into.
• Nothing. A more advanced method is to not think at all. Having developed control of your mind by suppressing random thoughts when you are thinking of an object, the next step is to banish all thoughts without needing an object of meditation. You'll probably find it necessary to do a few minutes of breath-concentration or bodyscanning before attempting this.

Here you'll find the forty objects of meditation (the samatha kammatthana) used by Buddhists.

Other methods

• Yoga nidra. Yoga nidra is an advanced method of meditation in which you enter a state of consciousness in which your thoughts are unrepresented as verbal or sensory objects, but exist as formless entities. In this state, you can manipulate the subconscious motivations (samskara in Sanskrit) of your habits. According to yogic interpretation, this state of consciousness is the state of deep (non-dreaming) sleep, except with yoga nidra (which means 'yogic sleep') you remain conscious while going down to this level. It has been claimed that half an hour of yoga nidra can replace several hours of sleep. Swami Jnaneshvara Bharati describes yoga nidra here and gives a method for entering this state here.
• Sensual meditation. The method developed by Raël for his flyingsaucercult. You can download the e-book on how to do it here, but don't drink the Kool-Aid!
• Energized meditation. The method developed by occultist and insaner Christopher Hyatt in his handbook on The Great Work "Undoing Yourself With Energized Meditation And Other Devices" (a pdf of which was said to be floating around on file-sharing networks). Before doing meditation, you do a special series of physical movements which supposedly facilitate focus by their neurological effect. Israel Regardie - who certainly knows a thing or two - said it's the best form of meditation he's come across.
• Laughing meditation. An Ultimate Comment original and maybe a form of worship of A Magical Trumpet Called Bill

See also

• The Great Work
• Methods of altering consciousness

External links

• The Sri Chinmoy centre, The Vipassana Research Institute, The Samatha Trust and the Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University are groups that offer free meditation courses around the world. (Note that these links should not be taken as an endorsement of these groups or their philosophies by The Ultimate Comment.)
• Here are 108 meditation techniques.
• E-books on Buddhist meditation

Raja yoga

Raja yoga is a a training method for mysticism, developed in India about 2300 years ago. "Become a qualified mystic in eight easy steps over the Internet!" It is highly recommended. Key texts are The yoga sutras of Patanjali, "Eight lectures on yoga" and "'Book 4, Part 1: mysticism'" by Aleister Crowley and "Raja Yoga" by Swami Vivekananda.

Zazen

Zazen - Zen Buddhist meditation - is also an excellent system, but there don't seem to be any decent instructions of it online. If you find some, post a link here. Until then, the best thing to do is buy this book or find a Zen dojo near you. They're all over the world and generally teach zazen for free.