The Malleable Light

I came across Charles T. Tart a few days ago while reading out on the My Big TOE forum. My impression of him after watching his “Reflections on Meditation” is that he is very intelligent and adds some interesting perspectives on many topics that I have been researching and experimenting with (such as spirituality and exploration of consciousness). His approach is not based on any specific practice but upon his own experience with a multitude of different practices.

He explains that humans as a whole are dummies when approaching meditation and that there are many gaps in our knowledge of the subject.  He makes the assumption that we all (video watchers and everyone in the room with him perhaps?) would like to know more about meditation and his goal being to help people become smarties when it comes to meditation. He asks the question, “Has there been any progress in the meditation field in the last few hundreds years?”

To make progress in meditation he suggests that we have to know what it is, how to measure the outcome of doing it and how to measure movement toward these outcomes. He then points out that humans are restricted to a subset of reality and within that subset there is an even smaller subset of things that are subject to logical definition. By being in the human realm we have limitations on understanding and then on top of that there is state specific thinking. This makes ideas about meditation in this state of thinking and in this reality more difficult to describe or define. Additionally he brings up the fact that there are different ideas about what meditation actually is.

He breaks meditation into three basic types, two of which are sitting meditations and the third is done throughout the day. This to me alone makes the video series worth watching. I have to admit that when I got into meditation I was completely confused by the term and rarely (if ever) know what someone means when they tell me that they meditate. It’s much like the confusion I experienced growing up in the Catholic church when someone told me to go pray or that they were praying.

Here are the three basic types of meditation as defined by him in the series:

1. Concentrative meditation (sitting). Which is to put the mind on one thing and when it wonders away come back to the one thing.
2. Mindfulness meditation (sitting). Buddhist Vipassana for example. Rather than holding the mind fixed on one thing,  three qualities are striven for in the naturally occurring flow of experience.
   1. The quality of clarity that is the pay closer receptive attention to what goes on from moment to moment.
   2. The quality of breadth, instead of only paying attention of the things we likes, we pay attention to the whole flow of experience
   3. The quality of equanimity.  Instead of getting caught up in “I don’t like” or “I want more”,  we just let things happen as they want to happen as we pay clear and broad attention to them.
3. Mindfulness in life meditation (non-sitting). Like Vipassana, but performed in everyday life rather than being a sitting meditation.

He feels that the third type may be far more important in that few people ever get in trouble sitting on a meditation mat which lead him to consider the possibility that  mindfulness is needed much more in daily life.

Moving on he talks about people living in an illusion and how it’s often translated into the world isn’t real. He argues that the world is real but our perception of it is so distorted that the world we live in and take to be the real world is a highly illusionary kind of world. I visualized this as absolute reality being filtered by local “physical matter reality” consciousness causing final perception of reality to be reduced to a relative reality warped by emotions, thoughts, ego, history etc. He is not suggesting that abstract thought is a bad thing, but when we don’t know that abstract thought is abstract thought, we end up living in an illusion, which is what meditation seeks to do something about.

He defines meditation as controlled attention practices. Instead of letting our attention be controlled by what happens to us and our conditioned reactions being brought up by what happened to us, instead deliberately take control of what we are going to do with our attention. Basically he is saying not to get caught up in a thought loop which causes us to miss out on what’s actually happening in the present moment.

Going back to the question of progress brought up earlier he goes on to speak about how he feels that Shinzen Young  is making some progress with meditation by using languages that are specific the the culture that he is teaching in. He has some very interesting mathematical equations for suffering  and satisfaction. He also talks about a computer coach that Young has developed that helps people with common problems that may come up with meditation.

In conclusion he feels that we are slowly making progress with meditation. With meditation he doesn’t feel that the one size fits all school of thought is the best approach for teaching people meditation. He concludes that we must define meditation terms more precisely and figure out what specific controlled attention practices should be applied by what specific kind of people under what specific type a circumstances in order to get a lot of work accomplished in an efficient way.

I have included a link to the first video out of a series of 9 below. I will work on getting the videos added to this site in the future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fajlmzsu6A

David Mathis Meditation, Techniques Charles T. Tart, Shamatha Meditation, Vipassana Meditation

Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit the Shambhala Meditation Center here is Austin. The center was established in 1976 and offers classes on meditation and Shambhala Buddhism which is a form of Western Buddhism. I made several new friends and had my first lesson in Shamatha Meditation.

During the visit there was a an initial focus on the history of Shambhala Buddhism and then 70% of the 2 hours was focused on Shamatha Meditation, what meditation is, what it isn’t and then about 15 minutes of actual meditation as a group.

Quote:

In Buddhism, there are two types of meditation: Shamatha and Vipassana. Shamatha is single pointed meditation. Vipassana is an analytic form of meditation. These 2 meditations have to be cultivated in sequence. Shamatha meditation first, and then Vipassana. Although, the individual need not to have fully accomplished the Shamatha meditation, he must have proper experience of Shamatha meditation in order to embark on Vipassana. Without having any experience of Shamatha meditation, then practice of Vipassana meditation is ineffective.

Shamatha meditation helps to free the mind from disturbing emotions and conceptual thinking processes. It brings the mind under control, under discipline, with some degree of single pointed focus, with full alertness of mind. By doing this meditation, the individual is able to suppress disturbing emotions and gain inner peace, harmony and balance.

Vipassana meditation directly helps to pull out the seeds or imprints that are left in our psyche by these manifest emotional defilements and distorted thoughts so that disturbing emotions and thoughts will never reoccur. It brings unchanging and everlasting inner peace, joy and harmony.

The very purpose of Shamatha meditation is not just to feel good for a period of time but to give birth to deeper levels of understanding, of wisdom. So that individuals can see the ultimate reality of phenomena and are able to go beyond ordinary perceptions. Shamatha meditation cuts through ordinary appearances and the confusion between our concepts and reality.

Now, how to engage in Shamatha meditation and what exactly one is doing while sitting and meditating? When sitting in meditation, one is sitting in motionless body and motionless mind. Sitting in motionless body is not difficult. Sitting in motionless mind is not easy because our ordinary mind is so undisciplined and so oriented, or drawn, towards external stimulation. It is very hard to bring the mind to rest and calm with no single wave of thought or thinking process. Although one can bring mind to rest or calm for a short time, our mind can remain blank, or numb, with no sense of freshness and alertness. Thus, one forgets the object of meditation and mind will be influenced by drowsiness, excitement, or wandering. Therefore, it is really not easy for us to live in motionless mind, even during the meditation period.

In brief, Shamatha meditation is the state of single pointed mind, characterized by perfect mental stability and mental clarity, having some degree of freshness within the mind. Mental clarity can only come when the mind becomes free from sluggishness, drowsiness, haziness, cloudiness, numbness and blankness. Mental stability will only come when the mind becomes free from excitement, agitation, manic thoughts and addiction to wandering aimlessly with no definite destination.

Mental drowsiness and excitement are the two obstacles out of the six obstacles of shamatha meditation that we are going to discuss next time. Every human being is fully qualified to practice Shamatha meditation no matter who we are, no matter what kind of culture we come from.

What causes us to fail at perfecting this form of meditation is laziness, forgetfulness, lack of interest, and not being able to see the positive benefits of Shamatha meditation. The reason we are not interested in meditation is that we think of material comforts, luxuries are the best things in life. We are so consumed by the needs and many demands of this life that we become slaves of material comforts. But in fact, material comforts and luxuries are not the best things in our life because life is temporary. We have a lot of fear and worry concerning material comforts. Material comforts really fool us and mislead us in many ways. If we are sincerely able to see the way material comforts effect us then we can sit in meditation without grasping at what may be the end result of our meditation.

During the meditation there was verbal guidance which provided the key techniques that must be followed to achieve success. I would like to go over the things I experienced during the meditation and touch on the parts that I feel are important and how I think they tie directly into Astral Projection.

The first thing we focused on was posture and position. I feel that this is vital for this type of meditation but maybe not for astral projection. The posture was a seated position with legs crossed and sitting slightly lower than the hip. The back must remain straight but comfortable with the ears positioned directly above the shoulders. The arms hang straight down with the hands resting palm down on the knees or thighs. I was not able to get perfectly comfortable in this position however I have terrible posture so I expect this to improve with time.

The next step was relaxing the body. This step is vital for this type of meditation and for astral projection. We moved through each part of the body relaxing each until the entire body was relaxed. This is the exact same thing I do each night while preparing to project and it’s a prerequisite and one of the first steps you will hear on Robert Monroe’s “Gateway Experience” CDs. You must be relaxed for meditation or astral projection to work.

The last and very important step in my opinion was the focus on breath. The goal is to be still and focus all attention on breath with no expectations. When you do this thoughts will naturally arise and when they do, you neither cling to them or push them away, but rather acknowledge and observe them and return your focus to breath. Inner peace can be achieved if you are able to successfully do this. This step is interesting to me because it’s one of the main techniques I use when astral projecting except I focus on a place or object rather than breath. This technique is presented in William Bulhman’s book “Adventures Beyond the Body: How to Experience Out-of-Body Travel”.

In conclusion. I feel that Shamatha Meditation and astral projection are very similar (if not the same) and that by practicing both I should be able to achieve inner peace and astral projection quicker. The two practices complimant each other and I suggest that those of you who are attempting astral projection without practicing meditation add meditation to your lifesytle.

David Mathis Meditation Astral Projection, Astral Projection Techniques, Buddhism, Shamatha Meditation, Shambhala, Shambhala Buddhism, Techniques, Thoughts, Vipassana Meditation