Progress in Meditation
I could tell you the history of how I started meditating and why it changed my life but we’ll do that another time. It’s a mistake I’ve often made: when I create a new website or a new notebook, I want to start over from the beginning and explain the genesis of everything. But soon enough, I’m overwhelmed by the task and I give up.
So let’s talk about the present.
A notable progress I’ve noticed in my practice is being able to recognize more and more inner contents as thoughts.
You probably know that meditation is all about taking a step back to realize that a particular anxiety, fear or anger is actually “just a thought” which will pass like a cloud in the sky. This shift in perspective is often enough to get rid of it. When an existential anguish is seen for what it is – a brain fart – it looses its power.
But we don’t always succeed.
If some apprehensions are soon recognised for what they are – intellectual constructions – some others are more insidious and harder to let go. As if in the game of “thought spotting”, these particular thoughts didn’t count. “This is not a thought, it’s reality.”
These thoughts which won’t let themselves be classified as thoughts are often the most intimate. The ones we’re most accustomed to, the ones we’ve been dragging around in our head for years, sometimes since childhood. They’re part of us, part of our mental construction and often play a huge role in the way we react to everyday life. They’re like a wallpaper glued to reality for so long that it becomes impossible to imagin the world without it.
Progress in meditation, for me, is the process by which we manage to put these contents into question as well.
Day after day, the frontier of consciousness expands and what we thought to be the fabric of reality, the essence of things, fatality (…) turns out to be just another item of our inner world. Just another brain fart.
Until the day when, faced with an anguish so familiar we thought it was inescapable, we find ourselves in the the position to utter these magic words:
“That, too, is just a thought.”
(PS: I wanted to illustrate this by a picture of a cloud passing in the sky but, of course, no clouds today. Just the blue sky. Not that I’m complaining. Oh well: I guess as my metaphore goes, it works too.)
