A good race car driver isn’t daydreaming or rationalizing about their past race – which is all in the form of permeance. They instead have to be so aware of the constant change in order to make the next best move. Life is always changing. How often do our minds stay the same? And is it our thoughts keeping our mind the same? The intoxicating effect of sport, like race car driving is you’re alert and present to what is. The danger and the competition wakes you up to what is. You’re not thinking about a million different solutions, instead you are responding from awareness. You’ve established a foundation of logic to offer you that freedom. Allowing for access to this part of the mind, will light up your mind. This isn’t permanent, nothing living is. Mediation is breaking free from the permanence the mind creates, lighting it up! A mind thinking and imagining is a mind that is not one with existence or reality in an exacting sense. It’s a memory existing in reality and projection of a future reality. This is what separates us from the animals. This is the greatest living asset and greatest liability on planet earth. The race car driver is one with their car, the track, the other cars, the steering wheel, the tires on the road, etc. The danger in mediation is you lose your attachment which creates a sense of permanence. Without that permanence you might feel like someone stripped you naked in the middle of giving a public talk. Like the race car driver this could feel exhilarating or devastating. Obviously I’m not suggesting stripping naked in public, but I am attempting to drive home the point of exposing oneself. Why would you hold anything back? If you’re lucky you will live another 60- 70 years, why waste any time not living. A thinking mind is a mind in insulation. It is insulated from its environment, a form of protection to maintain its permanency. Permanence implies unchanging. If the mind is fixed on an end result it has stopped expanding its search. If the end was the only motivation for the race car driving she would miss all the moments in between, suffocating her of the experience and likely making her a terrible race car driver. A mind seeking the end remains in isolation. The words love and freedom are closely related. When there’s freedom, there’s space. So space from what? Space from the permanency the mind creates? Can we exist in space without attachment to ideas and alive with the constant change that our life and life itself brings? Love is in the seeking, the work, the process. Death is at the end. How often do our minds become dead because of attachment to thought? A yoga teacher does yoga teacher training just to become a glorified “yoga teacher”. A doctor gets a degree just to become a glorified “doctor”. Yoga studio owner, just opened a yoga studio to be a “business owner”. When you chase something with an attachment to getting something from it, you lose capacity for truth and love. People that love what they do, don’t need anything from it. It’s the doing that they love. Not the “getting”. Because love is in the doing.
One of my favorite authors/ speakers is J. Krishnamurti. He often speaks in the negative. *Not to be confused with “negative thinking” or “positive thinking”. He negates or removes all conclusions from one’s programming or conditioning. This leaves you alone to figure it out. Through negation the positive arises. But if you are just stuffing what you know on top of what already exists you see nothing new or fresh. There’s no original mind. It’s just an old mind. Teaching yoga can be a forever beautiful thing, if you teach with an original mind. Or it can be a terrible bore if you are just teaching from the known. When you deeply understand mediation you understand this and you realize it’s available wherever you do whatever you do. You don’t have to “wait” or “practice” to do it. You can do it right now!
I think mediation gets a bad rap, because it’s misunderstood and has become a propaganda machine. To J K point, it is not about day dreaming or imagining. Your mind might fall into that, but that’s not it. When it does, and you recognize it does then at that point of recognizing you’ve woken up from that “dream”. Recognition is the beginning. It’s being in this constant state of awakeness. The mind will pull you into your imagination, thoughts and memories because that’s where the mind is conditioned and in that condition it is more comfortable. Mediation is of the now. Your thoughts and conditioning are a result of the past. I think people take drugs and alcohol to free them of the past. It’s more clear to recognize this with addicts. I’m not saying this is bad. But I think we have to have potential within ourselves to be independent of outside sources. At Least that is what I am interested in.
Steve K.
