What Meditation Is – Vipassana
June 15th, 2010 | 244 Comments
What Meditation Is
Meditation is a word, and words are used in different ways by different speakers. This may seem like a trivial point, but it is not. It is quite important to distinguish exactly what a particular speaker means by the words he uses. Every culture on earth, for example, has produced some sort of mental practice which might be termed meditation. It all depends on how loose a definition you give to that word. Everybody does it, from Africans to Eskimos. The techniques are enormously varied, and we will make no attempt to survey them. There are other books for that. For the purpose of this volume, we will restrict our discussion to those practices best known to Western audiences and most likely associated with the term meditation.
Nisargadartta Maharaj: A Meditation on Continuity
June 15th, 2010 | 401 Comments
Nisargadartta Maharaj: A Meditation on Continuity
Here is a dialogue from the famous book, I am That, by Nisargadatta Maharaj, 65: A Quiet Mind is All You Need:
Q: Does not the knower know itself?
M: The mind is discontinuous. Again and again it blanks out, like in sleep or swoon, or distraction. There must be something continuous to register discontinuity.
Q: The mind remembers. This stands for continuity.
M: Memory is always partial, unreliable and evanescent. It does not explain the strong sense of identity pervading consciousness, the sense of ‘I am’.
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