You know the saying: you know you're in love when all the songs start making sense? I've found the same with meditation. All that spiritual shit was just white noise to me too. Then I decided to hunker down (well, sit down actually) and just start at the beginning.Riggerjack wrote: ↑Thu Jan 11, 2018 12:44 pm...And most of them sound like this. Thank you for summing up your experience, but this is so foriegn to me it almost comes across as gibberish...
It has taken me a couple of years to really incorporate meditation into my way of thinking but I think I can tell I'm on the right track, because all that spiritual 'gibberish' is starting to make a lot of sense to me too.
I think I commented on this in my journal. We've been taught that
Time + Effort = results.
But meditation is more like
acceptance + innocence = calm
Anyone with a STEM background will think this is the shittiest formula for anything they've ever seen, but those who've sat on their zafu probably knows what I'm talking about. It was actually that one stinkin' formula that made a breakthrough for me. I sincerely stopped trying and I just crashed right into a whole new way of viewing the world over the course of a couple of days.
The Western way of achieving results doesn't work very well with meditation. That is part of the reason why I think it's so important for people to experiment with it. The stigma is of course attached to meditation because all those incense stinkin' hippies that usually advocate are as impervious to reason as a particle physicist is to spirituality. In the name of systems thinking I decided to take a holistic approach to figuring out my life and sitting on my bony ass has proven to be the most bang for my buck in terms of both time, money, and calories.
IN OTHER WORDS!!!:
I get your confusion. I recommend learning how to meditate and it'll start to make sense.
Edit: In fact I'm experiencing that whenever someone is being a grade-A douche I automatically draw fram a hitherto completely untouched pool of empathy and acceptance and just let their shit wash right off me without affecting me. Meditation has established a mental trigger that pops up when something goes awry and reminds me not to lose my shit right away.
So either I'm humming along all pleasant-like, like I'd normally do, and if something annoying pops up my inner Thich Nhat Hahn says: This too shall pass, and I usually find a way to get back on track within mere minutes of being disturbed. I literally had an altercation last Friday where I would have smashed the nearest obstacle into someone's face just two years ago. Now I knew exactly how to disarm to situation and how to make that guy a friend again.
The liberation is unfathomable.