Meditation

This week I'd like to touch on meditation. Any spiritual tradition has a place for contemplation and quieting the mind.

Foundational Concepts

There are many among us who feel a strong spiritual connection, yet do not identify exclusively with one religion. We may have grown up going to church, synagogue, mosque, etc,  and felt that the organizations did not align the values written in the scriptures, or that perhaps our religion may not be the only answer.

I personally felt lost for a long time and quite guilty regarding this dissonance. I could not prescribe to the notion that one particular mythological story was 100% literally true, and that belief would save me from an afterlife of hell and suffering; while those others around the world who put belief in a different mythology were destined for hell after death, even if they walked the straight and narrow. As a teenager I started wondering how a Christian saint was any more "worthy" than a Hindu, Buddhist, or other far along any variety of spiritual paths. This idea was like a splinter in my faith, and I didn't know what to feel or do about it. I just knew that something was fundamentally wrong with the system I had been conditioned into. I was beginning to lose hold of my exclusive ethnocentric world view, but didn't realize that such an evolution in my structures of consciousness was a natural thing. 

After years of struggling with guilt and confusion,  I attempted to take an atheistic viewpoint but could not accept that there is no POSSIBILITY of God or a force that binds all of the universe together. This view point did not seem very rational given much of the discoveries emerging in the field of quantum physics regarding waves, particles, emptiness and the act of observing. (For more on this, look up the double slit experiment). 

I began to consider myself agnostic. I knew that no religion had all the answers, but felt the core concept of Atman/God/Web of energy connecting all beings to be real.

Reading The World's Religions, by Huston Smith as well as Essential Spirituality by Roger Walsh, I began to consider where the world religions might overlap, and started to mend together my own spiritual path like an old woman sewing a huge blanket for her grandchildren. Walsh lays out seven principles common across all the board which I use as a foundation in my personal practice: 

1) Live Ethically

2) Train Attention

3) Redirect Motivation

4) Transform Emotions

5) Refine Awareness

6) Cultivate Wisdom

7) Serve Others

Below is a link to an audio between Ken Wilber and Terry Patten in which Wilber outlines some basic but important distinctions between religion & spirituality.  Wilber goes on to discuss human development in regard to states and structures. Click on the Wiber dialogue to hear it!

Wiber

Rapture 2011

We live in strange times these days. Resistance to creating global sustainability on planet earth coupled with a widespread developmental arrest in human consciousness could lead to catastrophe for our species within our life-time. It is of course still reasonable to postulate that we can collectively get our acts together, and make a radical shift in our perspectives to self-evolve.

As I was driving home from downtown Los Angeles on Friday night I watched the sun set beyond the skyline. I thought to my self...What if this is the last sunset I will witness? Countless billboards announcing THE RAPTURE and end of the world have been visible throughout the city for the past few months. After watching the youtube videos and doing a bit of research on the fellow predicting such events, I personally did not feel my life was in eminent danger. I did however imagine what it would be like if it were my last day on earth. Was I embracing all the beauty around me, in spite of grid lock traffic and lack of air conditioner? Was I making a sincere attempt to give thanks? To increase the love in the world? To be present?

Yesterday I headed to Joshua Tree National Park to sleep in a tent and celebrate life with my friends (crossing my fingers that nothing cataclysmic would go down). I watched the sun set beyond the mountains and considered how blessed I was to be alive and able to witness another day.

Each day is a fresh start, a chance to create, a chance to witness beauty and be in the moment. This is powerful.

Photo: Katelyn Lehman