The Only Thing That Matters (36 page)

Neale Donald Walsch

Ashland, Oregon

September, 2012

Addendum

N
OTE:
The material in this section of the Addendum is adapted from its first publication in the book
When Everything Changes, Change Everything
(Hay House, 2010). It offers a look at four different types of Meditation.

Although there is no one form of meditation that is “better” than another, so-called “sitting meditation” is what many people are most familiar with and want to know more about. So people who seek to make a connection between their Mind and their Soul may wish to undertake the practice of sitting meditation twice a day—15 minutes each morning and 15 minutes each evening.

Try, if it is possible, to set a regular time when you will do this. Then see if you can stick to that time. Yet if you cannot keep such a consistent schedule, know that any time will do, so long as it is at least twice a day, early and late.

When you meditate you may want to sometimes sit outside, if it is nice and warm, allowing the morning sun to bake down upon you or the stars to sparkle above you. Inside, you might sit by a window and let the dawn sun pour in and the night sky enclose you. There is, as has been said, no “right way” to do sitting meditation. One may sit in a comfortable chair, or on the floor, or upright in bed, for that matter. Choose what works for you.

Some people sit on the floor, usually with no backrest but occasionally against a wall or a couch, because floor sitting keeps them more “present” in the space. They report that if they are too completely comfortable, as in an overstuffed chair or on the bed, they tend to doze off or fade away from the moment. When they are sitting on the floor, or outside on the grass, this rarely occurs. They are totally mentally “present.”

Once sitting, begin by paying attention to your breathing, closing your eyes, and simply listening to yourself inhaling and exhaling. Be in blackness and pay attention only to what you are hearing. When you have “united”—that's the only word that seems to fit here—with the rhythm of your breath, begin to expand your attention to what your “inner eye” is seeing.

Usually at that point this is nothing but darkness. If you are seeing images—that is, “thinking thoughts” of something and seeing that in your mind—work to fade those thoughts out, like a “fade to black” on the movie screen. Turn your mind to blankness. Focusing your inner eye, peer deeply into this darkness. Be looking for nothing in particular, but simply peering deeply, allowing yourself to search for nothing and need nothing.

For many peoeple what happens next can often be the appearance of what appears to be a small, flickering blue “flame” or a burst of blue light piercing the darkness. Meditators find that if they begin thinking about this cognitively—that is, defining it, describing it to themselves, trying to give it shape and form, or making it “do” something or “mean” something—it disappears immediately. The only way that they can “make it come back” is to pay it no mind.

Many people have to work hard to turn their mind off and just be with the moment and the experience, without judging it, defining it, or trying to make something happen or figure it out or understand it from their logic center. It is rather like making love. Then, too, for the experience to be mystical and magical, most people turn their mind off and just be with the moment and the experience, without judging it, defining it, or trying to make something happen or figure it out or understand it from their logic center.

Meditation is making love to the universe. It is uniting with God. It is uniting with Self. It is not to be understood, created, or defined. One does not understand God; one simple experiences God. One does not create God; God simply is. One does not define God; God defines one. God IS the definer and the defined. God is the definition itself.

Insert the word Self wherever the word God appears in the above paragraph and the meaning remains the same.

Now, back to the dancing blue flame.

Once you take your mind off it, all the while keeping your focus
on
it, without expectation or thought of any kind, the flickering light may reappear. The trick is to keep your mind (that is, your thought process) off it, all the while keeping your focus (that is, your undivided attention) on it.

Can you imagine this dichotomy? This means paying attention to what you are not paying attention to. It is very much like day dreaming. It is like when you are sitting in broad daylight, in the middle of some place of great activity, and you are paying attention to nothing at all—and to everything all at once. You are expecting nothing and requiring nothing and noticing nothing in particular, but you are so
focused
on the “nothing” and the “everything” that someone finally has to snap you out of it (perhaps by literally snapping their fingers), saying, “Hey! Are you
day-dreaming
????”

Usually, one daydreams with one's eyes open.

Sitting Meditation is “daydreaming with your eyes closed.” That's as close as I can come to explaining the experience.

Now the dancing blue flame has reappeared. Simply experience it, and do not try to define it, measure it, or explain it to yourself in any way. Just … fall into it. The flame will appear to come toward you. It will become larger in your inner field of vision. This is not the flame moving toward you at all, but
you
moving into, and inside of, the experience of
It
.

If you are lucky you will experience
total immersion
in this light before your mind starts telling you about it and talking to you about it, comparing it to Past Data. If you have even one instant of this mindless immersion, you will have experienced bliss.

This is the bliss of total knowing, total experiencing of the Self as One with everything, with the Only Thing There Is. You cannot “try” for this bliss. If you see the blue flame and begin to anticipate this bliss, the flame will disappear instantly, in most reported experiences. Anticipation and/or expectation ends the experience. That is because the experience is happening in EverMoment, and anticipation or expectation
places it into the future, where you are not
.

Hence, the flame seems to “go away.” It is not the light that has gone away; it is you. You have left EverMoment.

This has the same effect on your
inner
eye that closing your
outer
eyes has on your experience of the physical world around you. You quite literally shut it out. Most meditators report that this encounter with bliss comes but once every thousand moments of meditation. Having known it once is both a blessing and, in a sense, a curse, because people are forever wishing for it again.

Still, there can be times when they can retreat from the wishing, remove themselves from the hope, desert their desires, reject their expectations, and place themselves totally in the moment, utterly without anti­cipation of anything in particular. This is the mental state you may wish to seek to achieve. It is not easy, but it is possible. And if you achieve it, you have achieved mindlessness.

Mindlessness is not the emptying of the mind, but the focusing of the mind
away
from the mind. It is about being “out of your mind”—that is, away from your thoughts for a while. (More on this later.) This gets you very close to that place at the point between realms in the Kingdom of God, the space of Pure Being. This gets you very close to nirvana. This can carry you to bliss.

So … if you have managed to find a way to quiet your mind on a regular basis—through Sitting Meditation, what is called Walking Meditation, or “doing meditation” (doing the dishes can be a wonderful meditation, as can reading, or
writing
, a book), or Stopping Meditation (again, I'll get into this more later)—you have undertaken what may be the single most important commitment of your entire life: a commitment to your Soul, to be
with
your Soul, to
meet
your Soul, to
hear
and
listen to
and
interact with
your Soul.

In this way you will move through your life not only from the place of your Mind, but your Soul as well. This is what Ken Wilbur, one of the most widely read and influential American philosophers of our time, refers to in his book
A Theory of Everything
as: Integral Transformative Practice. The basic idea of an ITP, Wilbur says, is simple: “The more aspects of our being that we simultaneously exercise, the more likely that transformation will occur.”

That's what we've been talking about here since our conversation began, of course. We've been talking about personal transformation—the altering of your individual experience of all of life. We've been talking about integrating the all three parts of the Totality of You in a cooperating, multifunctioning Whole.

Walking Meditation

The meditation technique described earlier is one way—and one very good way—to go about silencing the Mind and connecting with the Soul. But it is not the only way, nor is it necessarily, for everyone, the best way.

There are many people who find it extremely difficult to sit in silent meditation. For them, it may seem as if the “art of meditation” is something that is lost to them. People who are impatient by nature often found that sitting in silent meditation was not a thing they tolerated well. For them, I suggest Walking Meditation, and everything changes for them around the idea of “meditation.” Suddenly, it was something they could
do
.

The first thing that happens when people learned about Walking Meditation is that their whole idea about what meditation
is
completely vanishes, to be replaced by a much more clear and concise picture of what is going on.

For most people, meditation has always meant “clearing the mind of everything,” leaving the space for “the emptiness” to appear, so that they could move in consciousness into “the nothingness that is The All …” or something like that.

What they were supposed to be trying to do, they thought, was “empty the mind.” They were supposed to try to sit in one place, close their eyes, and “think of nothing.” This made some people crazy, because their mind never turns off! It is always thinking, thinking,
thinking
of
something
.

So some people never get very good at sitting with their legs crossed, closing their eyes, and concentrating on The Nothing. Frustrated, they hardly ever meditate—and envy those who say they do (although they secretly wondered whether those other folks really did, or simply went through the motions, doing no better than they were able to do).

A story now, please, about a master teacher who once said that most people have entirely the wrong idea of what meditation was about. Meditation, she said, was not about
emptiness
, it was about
focus
. Instead of trying to sit still and think about nothing, she suggested doing a “walking meditation” and moving about, stopping to
focus
on specific things that the eyes light upon.

“Consider a blade of grass,” she said. “Consider it. Look at it closely. Regard it intently. Consider every aspect of it. What does it look like? What are its specific characteristics? What does it feel like? What is its fragrance? What is its size, compared to you? Look at it closely. What does it tell you about Life?”

Then, she said, “
Experience the grass in its Completeness.
Take off your shoes and socks and walk on the grass in your bare feet. Think of nothing else but your feet. Focus your attention on the bottom of your feet and consider immensely exactly what you are feeling there. Tell your mind to feel nothing else, just for that moment. Ignore all other incoming data except the data coming from the bottom of your feet. Close your eyes, if this helps.

“Walk slowly and deliberately, allowing each slow and gentle step to tell you about the grass. Then open your eyes and look at all of the grass around you. Ignore all other incoming data except the data about the grass, coming from your eyes and feet.

“Now focus on your sense of smell, and see if you can smell the grass. Ignore all other incoming data except the data about the grass coming from your nose, your eyes, and your feet. See if you can focus your attention in this way. If you can, you will experience the grass as you may never have experienced it before. You will
know
more about grass than you ever knew before, at a deeper level. You will never experience it in the same way again. You will realize that you have been
ignoring the grass
your whole life.”

Then, the master teacher said, do the same thing with a flower. “Consider it. Look at it closely. Regard it intently (that is, with
intention
). Consider every aspect of it. What does it look like? What are its specific characteristics? What does it feel like? What is its fragrance? What is its size, compared to you? Look at it closely. What does it tell you about Life?”

Then, she said, “
Experience the flower in its Completeness.
Bring it to your nose and smell it once more. Think of nothing else but your nose. Focus your attention on your nose and consider immensely exactly what you are experiencing there. Tell your mind to experience nothing else, just for that moment. Ignore all other incoming data except the data coming from your nose. Close your eyes, if this helps.