Meditation: Inhale the Good Stuff, Exhale the Bad Stuff
By: Kelly Arce
Tags: Visualization, Multiverse, Manifestation, Awakening, Meditation

Sounds great! Now, how do I do it?

Guided meditations take you step-by-step, so they’re a great place to start. They become more effective each time you practice as your brain starts to realize meditation is a safe place for healing. In most guided meditations, you start by relaxing your physical body. This helps to eliminate bodily distractions so that your mind and spirit can get to work.

Contemporary Meditation

Western civilization has grown fond of meditation because it promotes mental, physical, and spiritual wellness in ways that can’t be obtained from modern medicine. There’s a section at the bottom of this post that focuses on the physical benefits. For now, we’ll venture into the mental & spiritual aspects.

I generally find contemporary meditation techniques easier to comprehend than traditional techniques. This is by design; the contemporary techniques were created with contemporary culture in mind.

The course chapter mentions a man named G.I. Gurdjieff who made significant contributions to contemporary meditation, touching on a few of his methods.

Gurdjieff used a method called self-observation, in which the practitioner focuses on softening the line between themselves and the world around them. The idea behind self-observation is that we have lost our ability to expand our consciousness beyond the boundaries of cultural limitations. - University of Metaphysical Sciences, 2020, Meditation Skills

The sensation described in the first sentence is a glimpse of what I experienced during the Object as a Focal Point guided meditation.

The second sentence stood out to me the most, specifically the mention of cultural limitations. My current understanding is that Western society, in general, has much more defined “boundaries of cultural limitations” than Eastern. Now this is coming from a person who has never traveled further than Central America, so take what I say here with a grain of salt.

But it’s worth considering that we get further & further from our natural state of consciousness as we become more intertwined with the systems society has built for us. We start losing awareness of where we originated and become consumed with what appears to be our whole world, a manmade system.

I hope this doesn’t convey a dark tone, as I do not intend to imply that humans live lives not worth living. Our system is beautiful and beneficial because we have created it and flourish within it. The point is that we should make efforts not to lose sight of our essence during our human journeys. Remembering where we came from leads to a more fulfilling journey throughout our time here.

Another one of Gurdjieff’s methods mentioned in the chapter was self-remembering, or self-observation. I like to think of this as the process of remembering our true form underneath all this daily consciousness stuff. It’s the idea that we are separate entities from our thoughts.

When I think back to what I know about ~science~, I picture an amoeba that appears to simply function for survival. Under a microscope, we see them wiggle around, consume other amoebas, and avoid or be consumed by other amoebas. I sometimes think of us as little amoebas, with each thought being an energy signal sending us a message to do something for survival. Humans’ survival needs have become more complex because we view various things as “essential” for survival, but even amoebas probably consume other organisms for the sake of growth, rather than just survival. If that is true, then I would compare them doing it for growth to us having want-based thoughts as primal efforts to “grow.”

I like to think that our natural desires exist with an evolutionary purpose. I hesitate to phrase it as “our desires exist for a reason” because I don’t hold the belief that we actually have a “reason” to be here. I do believe that life holds purpose, but nothing about life or the universe needs to have a reason for being, so even if human desires don’t exist for an exact reason, they almost certainly serve a larger purpose if we have them. There is nothing unnecessary in existence; everything is necessary and contributes to something else in some capacity.

A tidbit on sexual desire in the world of tantra:

Instead of viewing pleasure and desire as something to be avoided at all costs, tantra recognizes the powerful energy aroused by our desires to be an indispensable resource for the spiritual path. Because the goal is nothing less than the realization of our highest human potential, tantra seeks to transform every experience―no matter how unreligious it may appear in the path to fulfillment. It is precisely because our present life is so inseparably linked with desire that we must make use of desire’s tremendous energy if we wish to transform our life into something transcendental. - John Powers, Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism

People. They are talking about HARNESSING SEXUAL ENERGY. That is such an interesting concept! It's a great point; what happens to that energy after its exerted? Why not make use of it? They talk about transcending desire this way. I didn't read too much into it, but this blog exists to get people interested in new things, so Google away.