Introduction

Today we live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with information. We constantly check our status via a mobile phone which has let us with a Pavlovian response where we feel the necessity to check our devices to find out what is happening. We are easily distracted, every time we choose to look at our apps we choose to take our self out of the zone to connect to a different one. A zone is just like meditation, a state which can be held by proper attention. There are many different types of meditation, one of the more known and increasingly popular forms of meditation in the West is inspired by the Dzogchen tradition. This form of meditation helps us calming the mind and learns us to find our true nature.

In the year 2017 most people lives seem to be more hectic then ever, although we seem to work less than a 100 years ago, the west seem to be more active in trying to forget. We denied what we have become and we restlessly try to upheld our standard of living like ants scurrying the ground in search for food before the winter. To be able to do all of this we identify our self materialistically so we have an excuse to not face our real problems. we become restless and anxious of the things we could lose. We fall of a boat in to the waves of existence and are helplessly trying to keep our heads above the stormy current. We are doing so much our best to not drown that we do not see the thrown rescue buoy of the boat we have fallen from. Meditation helps us bringing us back in contact with our true nature, and helps us decreasing the storm in our mind and make things clearer. In this way we can find peace, realize our nature and find liberation.

A good posture

So the purpose of this article is to give you the basics to test it out. Fortunately it´s easy to meditate to the present moment. It can be fun and interesting seeing your thoughts popping up. The way you react upon them says something about yourself. I have started reading some books about Tibetan Buddhism to give you a proper answer. The following information comes out of the book ¨Tibetan book of living and dying¨ by Sogyal Rinpoche. (I’m aware of his recent controversial) I have also read some other books about spirituality and share some personal experience. I also suffer from a psychoses which led me to lose knowledge about myself. Meditation helped me partially to find my path back.

So lets begin with posture, the whole idea of a ¨right posture¨ was something I pondered a while about. You are probably familiar with the stereotypical meditation position. The one where you sit on the ground with crossed legs and your hands resting on the knees. This is called a lotus position. This position makes you aware that you are practicing now. It gives you the atmosphere which is very important in the beginning. The fact that you can meditate without this position proves that the posture itself is not needed necessarily, but an extremely handy tool. Which bring me to the second reason. Like a mountain you are grounded in a stable position which you could hold for a long time. Personally I find this position comfortable enough to meditate, but not easy to lose awareness in. Which makes it ideal for practice or longer sessions. In my experience you are more stable with your legs crossed traditionally, but if there seems to be to much strain I would advise against doing this, because It’s not needed. Oh and hey, you could also sit if you want too. The crossing legs symbolizes the oneness of life and death. The back posture should be held straight like stacked coins. Your spine should be supporting it’s own weight, you don’t want to over encumbered your back. Try to make the posture comfortable. Find something to focus on. Look with your eyes 45 degrees downward at your focus point. This could be an object which I’m going to talk about later. Start making big slow breaths in and out and become aware of your breathing. When you start to become relaxed you can look straight in front of you, so you can become aware of your surrounding. You don’t close your eyes with this type of meditation. When you are in position you can start practicing being aware of your surroundings. This whole awareness thing needs practice for some, because we are very used to focus on a specific task all day. In this form of meditation we want to expand our awareness to get a sense of oneness. Try to expand your awareness across the room. You can do this by experiencing the entire room all together. It’s like you change the focus of a laser pointer to a candle that lights up the entire room. I can assure you by taking this posture and being aware long enough you learn meditation, and your mind will always calm down if you sit long enough. Sometimes you meditate and you slowly drift away in a nebulous cloud of thought, this happens when we lose focus of the idea that we are meditating. If you become aware of this then sit straight up again and try to experience your surrounding again. Never be angry at your self when you lose awareness because of a thought. Remember, every hero starts out as a fool and you deserve all the love you can get from yourself.

Eventually you don’t even have to practice meditation, it becomes a state you can request just like you request something out of your memory. Or if even better, it becomes your default state. I advise you to practice everyday, it could be a small amount. At the beginning 5 minutes will be enough. Later you can add upon that. I even advise you not to push your self to hard, because this could discourage you by forcing something upon yourself and you take out the fun of meditation by doing that. Personally for me it helps being inspired by a good lecture or book on meditation. There are many great lectures made by rinpoche’s on Youtube.

Different types of methods

Have you ever looked at the horizon of a vastly stretching sea. You start to feel insignificant when you imagine the scale of what you experience. That feeling of being one with your surrounding is what we want to achieve. Here are three types of meditation methods you can combine or use individually which help you to inspire your meditation. I would advise for this specific meditation to use the methods as temporarily focus eventually you want to spread your awareness out and become generally aware of your surrounding just like the open sea.

We can use objects as a focus point. The specific object does not matter, the only thing that matters is how you interact with the object. For example, many practitioners use a statue of inspiration like Padmasambhava. But a specific picture from a master, inspirational leader or something like a loved one could help you as well. Objects like stones or flowers can all be of great inspiration. The effectiveness in object comes from two things primarily. One is that it gives you a reminder and inspirational atmosphere of what you are trying to achieve and second it gives you an experience sense in how the object relates to you.

Don´t underestimate the power of a good mantra sound. Mantra´s are practiced in almost all religions including the Abrahamic. Where it’s important to praise god via song and prayer. Within Tibetan Buddhism you use mantra’s to remind yourself of what you are doing. By focusing our awareness on each word we experience fully each spoken text. There is a specific inspirational prayer often spoken by practitioners at the beginning of a session going something like:

¨May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the causes of happiness;
May they be free from suffering and the causes of suffering;
May they never be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering, and may they dwell in the great equanimity that is free from attachment and aversion.¨

I have seen it being recited in multiple books, but this specific sentence comes from the Tibetan book of living and dying. It’s not a mantra specifically, those are often shorter. But it helps to tone your justification and makes the practice more inspirational. You don’t have to speak it out loud but it would be significantly better because hearing your own voice makes you more aware of your surroundings because of the sound you hear. The general idea is that you speak something that inspires you. You can also speak quotes from of the bible. You don’t pray to other gods, so it should be within the laws of the religions of Abraham. Personally I often meditate in the shower, the feeling and hearing of water droplets falling on me brings me one with the stream and helps me to be in the here and now. A specific mantra that Sogyal Rinpoche teaches to its students goes something like: Om ah hung varjra guru padma siddhi hung. Which is the mantra of padmasambhava.

Probably more used than others. The breathe is a great archetype of life, it begins and it ends. It signifies life and death. By focusing your attention on the sensation feeling of the breathe you bring your awareness to what is. Eventually you also let go of the breath and be more in the moment. Breathing trough the mouth often helps because the sensation is greater and the air feels fresher.

The nature of thoughts

Before we can actually solve mental problems we have to learn meditation first. Half of the concepts could sound vague for the untrained mind. I advise you to first practice calming your mind by being in the present via the ways I just talked about. Fortunately our brains are wired to find equilibrium and solve internal contradictions automatically. Eventually you’ll notice the nature of your mind and you start solving mental problems instinctively. But, for the people who like some theory behind the reason for your thoughts.

When we meditate in the ways I described above we become mindful of our surroundings. We have a general spread out awareness of objective existence. There will be moments when a thought pops-up and you can learn the nature of that thought. When you understand the nature of a thought you'll understand your relation with that thought. This is needed to understand who and what you are. Thoughts to an unpracticed mind appear right after the other like scenes from a movie. But just like scene ends, every thoughts ends as well. When you practice you´ll observe that there is a brief moment between different thoughts. Those moments are a fraction where your mind can come home again. So we are meditating upon the empty moments between thoughts. If you stay in this state you are meditating correctly. This can be done anywhere, but when aware and inspired it´s easier to learn and train. While meditating there is a tendency to fall for a thought. When you become aware of this then you have become aware of thinking a thought and a way out presents itself back to the meditation state. Just like when you realize you are dreaming and because of that you become awake.

But why is it that we have become so invested in those thoughts and why do we keep looping them over and over? We are invested in our thoughts because our nature is to find truth. Thoughts act like a vortex for our awareness. They scream for attention and the reason you give them the attention is because you instinctively believe there is truth to that thought. Knowing this truth is knowing the nature of the thought. It's a bit like admitting you have made a mistake or you have a problem, like a addiction. Only by understanding the thought we are able to solve it. Men has to shoot in the light in order to see it's target. Seemingly random thoughts are in them self unconsciously objective projection, just like dreams. Therefore, the way how you interact with a thought also says something about your relation with it's contents, just like reacting upon trolls giving them a notification of your suffering. If we want to better "know thy self" by thoughts understanding the ego could be beneficial.

The ego can be a curse or a blessing if you know what it is and how to tame it. There are two types of identification, dissociating and merging although both are ego attachment. As the noun suggest, it has something to do with identity. We as cautiously aware creatures are aware of our own identity. We have a sense of ¨I in this world¨ in which we attach with experiences and feelings. For example, I like this or I don´t like this are often ego phenomena. We create the ego because of a believe structure we have gained often, but not always in our childhood. The problems we have faced and could not solve as a child has resulted us creating an ego that protects us from facing the same negative emotions from that problem in our past. For example, if you failed public speaking as a child. You may avoid public speaking in the future. The ego projection would be: I´m bad at public speaking. Although In reality, you are untrained in public speaking. There are many different types of negative self images. One of my own and that of many westerners, is a sense that you are not worth it. This could result in a positive ego that helps you to do better and run away from that feeling by trying to find happiness in materialistic means. Or this could result in a negative ego which results in learned helplessness. In both ways the ego tries to defend us from negative feelings by giving up or trying to fight the judgment. There is however an objective self. Which is you true form, This self cannot be effected by the ego, as the ego is a deceptive projection of that form because you wanted to be socially accepted. In the west we have often identified our self with the ego. We believe all the outer judgments which has created a reason for the ego to exist. We build an identity based upon the ego, making us listen to that system. and now we have become one with that deception rather than the true inner self. This is why many philosophers talks about knowing the self, and why the truth sets us free. I´ts a way to understand what you truly are and what you can do, so you can reach your full potential.

There is much more information I could give you. But I don’t want to overwhelm you with just one big article, however there are some terminology I would like to share before you start practicing. If you practice enough one would notice over time after every practice that his mind becomes less prominent. The shouting and constantly thinking becomes whispers. This is a sign that you are going in the right direction. When you care long enough for the seeds they will grow and eventually bear fruits. You start to solve psychological problems, feel compassion, gratitude and understanding for what you are and the principal nature of your mind. The sense of understanding and seeing your own nature is called the sight. You become more in the present and enjoy every aspect of life as they for fill you with meaning and beauty. You just start to see things as they really are. This state is called rigpa and staying in this state is called meditation. We often say the practice is meditation, but that is the practice of meditation so you can have a more stable rigpa. Ignorance of your nature is the dragon that need to be overcome. Staying in a state of ignorance is called marigpa and causes all suffering because you are not proper aligned with what you really are in this physical form. Therefor one should know him self so he can align with his real self. The experience of rigpa is pure clarity. When there are thoughts you no longer feel a reason to identify with them, they still bare meaning but there is no ego to prove something too because you have become aware why you had that ego in the first place. Remember, in rigpa you know yourself, so you also know your ego. If you deceive yourself It’s called samsara, it’s a mistake you make caused by ignorance and leads to suffering. This happens when you feel a desire. You believe a thought deserve a specific amount of attention because you want to solve a problem in your mind. This desire could be fed by all kinds of emotions like guild, happiness or a lack of something. It’s called nirvana when we liberate our self from the identification of our thoughts.

I would love to go in more depth in solving psychological issues. Currently I’m reading Carl Jung and I need some time to get all the information straight. If there is incorrect information, please let me know. It is my duty to give you truthful media, may we all one day silence the lies of our world.