It takes time to get to know yourself. Meditation can help
I USED to be what you might call a spiritual slut, although ‘spiritual tourist’ might be a nicer turn of phrase to describe hopping from religion to religion for more years than I care to remember.
However, finally I decided to commit myself to a daily meditation technique, which seems to be making an honest woman out of me, not to mention a calmer and more focused one.
I came to this conclusion after a recent five-day retreat in Agros, where a group of around 30 of us cleaned out some of the dust from our collective closets. Sound like New Age happy clappy drivel? Far from it. It was hard work, but in the same way as getting to know someone else often takes a lot of effort, so does getting to know yourself, probably more so, because facing up to who you are can be a messy business.
Most of us live our lives unconsciously, going about our daily business in the same way as we put one foot in front of the other, often not thinking about what we are doing from one moment to the next.
Ever find yourself reading a book or newspaper and eating a sandwich at the same time? You can be so engrossed in reading that you don’t even realise the sandwich is gone – and you didn’t even taste it. Life often passes us by this way because we spend a lot of our time regretting yesterday or worrying about tomorrow, and today is lost and so it becomes just another yesterday that we failed to make the most of.
We function like overworked machines conditioned to automatically respond to certain circumstances, without fulfilling much of our potential because we are too tired or too busy. Instead, we end up stressing ourselves out to the point of becoming ill, until one day we wonder what it was all for anyway.
It’s about evolution. Evolution is the concept that every generation will produce more advanced human beings than the previous one. Each of us carries attributes of our parents in our genes and the job of parents is to turn out an improved version of themselves so that society and civilisation can advance another step. Unfortunately in many ways, although we are advancing in leaps and bounds with technology, we seem to be regressing both physically in terms of killing ourselves with junk food and environmental poisons, and as human beings in our treatment of each other.
Physical evolution has always been determined by environmental conditions and challenges. But humans also possess the ability to think and to choose. Unlike other species, we used the thought process to invent the wheel to adapt to the needs brought about by our then environment.
So if we have the ability to evolve our minds as well as our physical bodies, could the evolution of the human mind through ‘conscious’ evolved thinking, rather than the thinking dictated by the necessity merely to adapt to a particular new environmental condition, ultimately allow us to reach potential as a ‘fully evolved’ species in every aspect?
In other words if we start to think beyond many of the petty problems that take up so much of our thinking, such as what’s on TV tomorrow, what’s the latest fashion, who has the fanciest mobile phone or car, and focus instead on how we can contribute individually to changing so many of the unpleasant things in the world by simply changing ourselves, could we speed up our evolution instead of waiting thousands more years for this to happen – or not – in a random fashion or out of pure necessity only? Shouldn’t we be ‘grown up’ enough by now to take on responsibility for our own evolution in a conscious rather than an unconscious manner?
How do we do that? We get to know ourselves by delving into our minds and hearts and one way to sort out the dross of the human mind is to spend time with ourselves and weed it out. It’s a journey into personal responsibility.
Meditation is one of the easiest and most useful ways to do this. By focusing your thoughts you learn to control the chaos inside your head, instead of letting the thoughts control you. It can also clear out impressions imprinted on the subconscious that affect us in more ways than we know. The subconscious mind represents the past because it carries the sum of all life’s experiences. When you realise this, the phrase “letting go of the past” makes more sense.
Living in the ‘now’, that is, not thinking about or regretting the past, or worrying about the future, which ultimately only creates a future full of worry, results in clearer thinking and focus on the present moment.
Hence the weekend retreat. The end result? Did I float down from Agros on a cloud of universal bliss? No, because wild and way-out spiritual experiences, like an LSD trip, are often of little use in the ‘real’ world. Life itself is the best teacher there is if you take notice of it and do not allow it to pass you by.
What I did experience was a noticeable peace of mind when I came home to discover my wardrobe had collapsed. I consciously chose not to treat it as a major calamity, although I cannot deny it is a big inconvenience and added expense. Becoming upset about it was not going to help it back together so there was no point. It was just a matter of picking up the pieces and moving on, and perhaps making a mental note to learn DIY.
The marathon meditation also seems to have resulted in a greater awareness of the present, which I put to the test by taking the time actually to look around me while walking back to the office instead of rushing along as usual with my head in the clouds while looking at the ground, noticing nothing or no one, so engrossed in yesterday or tomorrow.
I’m glad I took the time to carry out that little exercise. Twelve hours later I can still recall every single one of the 14 people I casually observed as I walked along, even down to what they were wearing and what they were doing at the moment I noticed them. Police lineup? Bring it on.
