The profound opportunity that meditation gives you is the chance to completely free you from any adherence you have to your current interpretive framework. That means letting go of all of the ways that you make sense of your experience so that you can feel the ecstasy of non-conceptual pure awareness.
If this doesn’t necessarily sound good to you, read on.
Not Really Experiencing Reality
You see, all the experiences we have, which means every sensation that runs through us, passes through an elaborate and largely unconscious interpretive mechanism.
The result is that we don’t experience reality the way it is. We see reality the way that we’ve been taught to see it.
Our past relationships and experiences, our traumas and disappointments, as well as our successes and triumphs, have conditioned us to experience reality in certain ways and not others.
See Reality As It Is
The great miracle of meditation is that it can allow us to see reality as it is. This is when we can finally respond to reality the way it is rather than to our ideas and fears about it.
So often we’re not aware of the process of interpretation that is generating our experience of reality. It’s happening unconsciously.
We don’t see the interpretive processing going on so we assume that we are seeing things the way are.
Too often we find ourselves responding rationally to the way things appear to be and not getting the results we would logically expect.
We never seem to be able to accomplish this, or stop doing that. Why do we feel so stuck? It can make us feel a little crazy.
A strong meditation practice can bring us in touch with the way things really are and that changes everything. So much more becomes possible for us once we are in direct contact with reality.
Letting Go
Letting go, truly letting go, not only of our conscious ideas about everything, which is already hard enough, but even of our unconscious assumptions about everything, is the profound opportunity of meditation.
And there’s no way you can let go like this through an act of will. You can’t make it happen. You have to allow it to happen.
It’s not something you can do consciously because it’s not happening consciously.
The only way you can let go is by not engaging with anything that is going on in your mind which means disengaging from anything you feel and anything you’re thinking about.
Meditation is the practice of sitting and simply allowing anything that arises in your mind to pass away without getting involved with it at all.
That means every physical sensation, all of your feelings, your thoughts, your thoughts about thoughts, even the thoughts that feel like you talking to yourself, you just have to let them all pass away. If you can do this, you will inevitably fall through and beyond all of the interpreted experiences of the mind. You leave the world.
Disengage from Thinking
So in meditation I invite you to be as physically still as you possibly can, and let every single thing that arises in consciousness pass away without touching it, without getting involved in anyway whatsoever. That’s it.
No matter what arises in consciousness you just let it go. You don’t discriminate between anything and anything else. You let it all go by, untouched. And if you recognize that you’ve gotten involved with something you don’t even need to look to see what it is you’re involved with. As soon as you get the very first hint that you’re involved with something, you just let it go and allow it to pass away.
If you can do this with enough focus, you’ll start to feel like you’re becoming dislodged from the world.
If you start to feel that, let that feeling pass away too. Don’t get involved with trying to see what’s happening. The temptation to want to see how you’re doing is ever present. Let the temptation pass away without touching it. As soon as you realize you’re touching something, let it go.