Many believe that meditation requires the cessation of thought. In this brief exploration, we investigate a different understanding of meditation, one in which meditation is simply a reversal of our usual habits of attention, a relaxing of our exclusive focus on the content of experience. You’ll discover that the spiritual path isn’t really a path at all, and the spiritual journey isn’t a journey. It is more like having the day off and deciding not to go sightseeing, but simply to stay home, because home is the best place to be.
Sometimes people believe that it is necessary to stop thinking or perceiving in order to meditate. In other words, they think that the cessation of thought and perception is a prerequisite for meditation. This is not the case. If anything, we simply relax the focus of our attention from thought and perception.
Normally, throughout the day, we give our exclusive attention to thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling and so on. And as a result, we overlook, ignore or forget our being. Meditation is just the reversal of this. In meditation, we simply ignore, forget or overlook our thoughts and perceptions.
We don’t try to get rid of them. We don’t try to change them. We just cease giving them our exclusive attention.
In meditation, we don’t try to get rid of or even change the content of our experience. Rather, we just relax the focus of our attention. We cease being exclusively interested in the content of experience.
What happens to the content of experience, to our thoughts, feelings, perceptions and so on? It doesn’t matter; they just carry on doing whatever they have been conditioned to do. We just cease giving them our love and attention. We give our love and attention to our being instead.
All day long, our attention is roaming around in the world of experience, involved in thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions, activities, relationships and so on. Our attention, as it were, goes out of our self into the world of experience.
In meditation or prayer, our attention simply comes back to our self, comes back home, to its source, the fact of being, being aware or awareness itself, and just rests there naturally, effortlessly, without any intention or direction.
This resting of the attention could be described as resting the mind in the heart. By ‘heart’, of course, I don’t mean a physical object or location. I mean the core of our self, our essential being, the very heart of being itself. Just resting the mind in the heart of being without effort, without any agenda, without any demand placed on experience.
True meditation, or perhaps I should say, the ultimate meditation, doesn’t have a purpose. We don’t do it for a reason. We don’t do it to gain anything. This resting the mind in the heart of being does indeed have an impact on the way we think, feel, perceive and so on. But this impact of meditation on the content of our experience is a side effect of meditation. It’s not the purpose of meditation itself.
In true meditation or prayer, there is no purpose. There is no entity present to derive some benefit from meditation or prayer. There’s just our being, and our being does not need to derive any benefit from what the mind does or ceases doing It is already whole, perfect, complete and at peace.
So, the spiritual path is not really a path. The spiritual journey is not really a journey. Everyday life is a journey, a journey of exploration and activity, and I don’t mean to imply in any way that that is not appropriate.
But meditation is not a pathway from where we are to where we might become. It’s the opposite of a journey. It’s the opposite of a path. It’s just staying home. You have the day off, and you decide not to go sightseeing, not to go out. You decide to just stay home, because home is the best place to be. Meditation or prayer is simply staying home, remaining in being, as being itself, with nothing to achieve and nowhere to go.
