Let me show you something amazing...
When I was in college, I was really into eastern philosophy and meditation. I was on a quest for inner peace, for finding my center. It seemed like the better way to live.
There’s a rub, however. I never found it because I wanted it so that I didn’t have to feel all the anxieties and insecurities I had. That never works: covering up a tangled mess of emotional garbage by focusing on quieting your mind or contemplating your navel only works while you’re doing it. All the emotional mess is still there, but you’re just distracting yourself from it by focusing on not thinking.
So that whole enlightenment kick never worked out. But then again I didn’t stick around to become a meditation master because I found something MUCH better: 3D Mind. After all, what’s the point of meditating for 20 years to suppress all the mental junk before getting to a day-to-day state of not being quite so anxious, insecure and emotionally garbled when I can get started making progress bit by bit every day?
Plus this way I’ve learned a lot more about myself. It’s one thing to accept a Zen treatise on the nature of the mind as a general understanding, and it’s quite another to actually get hands-on experience with the nuts and bolts of what actually is happening in my own mind. The more I clear out, the clearer things get, too.
The interesting thing is that our problems are caused by out of balance emotions that drive us, often from one extreme of emotion to another. As they become more balanced, the mind and body become more quiet. There is a huge advantage to approaching it this way over the meditation way. When meditating, the goal is to suppress all unbalanced emotions and thoughts. It’s a blanket approach that covers every issue up without resolving anything.
Some emotions are useful, though. Peaceful contentment doesn’t help you get things done or take care of yourself when things get rough. Working on one thing at a time and actually resolving it let’s you maintain a balance between stress an being able to cope with it, instead of trying to build a false, overpowering sense of centeredness that leaves you unable to cope if you lose that feeling somehow. Plus you don’t have to work to keep a balanced state of mind. It’s already there.
I have to admit that efficiency is my favorite part. 
I highly recommend it to anyone who thinks, like I did, that what they really need is a better way to live.
May 6th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
You really ought to look at the brain wave research of meditation
http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~lazar/
http://www.researchingmeditation.org/home/brain-waves
Pretty fascinating stuff. Meditation is tougher than it sounds, looks, and think.
Meditation has enhanced my changework practice, 10 fold. For one thing, having the ability to focus on a specific state is now much easier.
Might want to look into Shinzen Young, seriously serious on that one. The science of enlightenment.
But that’s just my educated opinion.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I have. It’s interesting stuff. It’s also a bit remedial. Let me illustrate. This is an excerpt from one of Shinzen Young’s articles about a phenomena where the deeper you relax into meditation the worse you feel:
“It is an icky, sticky, creepy, crawly, jump-out-of-your-skin quality, a subtle cringing that may affect part or all of the body. The body may even move, shake or twitch as though it were in extreme agony, but there is little actual pain. It seems unbearable, yet it doesn’t actually hurt. The worst part is that the more you relax, the “yuckier” you feel. When this phenomenon arises, it seems that the last thing you would want to do is to keep still for even a moment.”
There is no identification going on there. Instead, he treats the emotions there as if they’re an enemy to be overcome. In fact, he lumps pretty much all thoughts into the same category: something to be avoided. I just don’t see what the benefit of fighting with your own thoughts is.
Seriously, though. What does emptying your mind REALLY do for you? Not much, really. It’s a means to escape from troubling thoughts and somehow find a perpetual state of feeling good. That’s overkill in my book.
Plus let’s not forget that the more attention you put on something, the more it flourishes. Putting your attention on ignoring your thoughts only serves to make you obsessed with your thoughts for the years it takes to develop the emotional state of calm equanimity.
Why go through all that frustrating rigamarole when you can just start cleaning out the things that get in the way of having a clearer mind?
I agree, however, that some meditation experience is good however. What we’re doing here is learning to examine our own minds, and meditation is good for getting the very basics of that observational state and learning to see your mind from a different perspective as well as basic state control and relaxation which helps when doing 3D Mind.
Here’s another snip:
“[W]hen pleasant states arise in meditation, one attempts to experience them fully. This leads to an ability to experience the pleasures of ordinary life fully and therefore to continually elevate your “baseline of satisfaction”with life in general.”
How does experiencing a moment more “fully” really make the moment different? Does it change anything out in the physical world? No. So then it’s just a matter of a personal need to get more pleasure out of every moment in life.
That sounds like the thinking of a drug addict. And that’s pretty much what the quest for enlightenment really is.
So. Some meditation is definitely good. But, as always, all things in moderation.