Forms of Meditation

The above excerpt is from page 237 of Meher Baba's Discourses and it was only after reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now that I realised that Baba is describing an approach that is the same as the one that Tolle is recommending. In his book (available for download here), Baba describes many different forms of meditation that he divides into two categories: personal and impersonal. Personal meditation relates to a person whereas impersonal meditation relates to aspects of human personality or things that are beyond the realm of human personality. He describes four forms of personal meditation:

• meditation on the divine qualities of a Master
• concentration on the form of a Master
• meditation of the heart
• meditation of action

These four forms in practice represent a continuum in which the spiritual aspirant's initial meditation on the one of more of the Master's divine qualities, such as egolessness, leads to a focus on the physical form of the Master that in turn leads to the release of unrestrained love for the Master (meditation of the heart) and a life of selfless service to the Master (meditation of action).

The eight forms of impersonal meditation that are described are:

• meditation on all forms of life
• meditation regarding one's body
• meditation on the formless and infinite aspect of God
• quest for the agent of action
• considering oneself as witness
• writing down one's thoughts
• watching mental operations
• making the mind blank

In the first type of meditation, the goal is to acquire the constant habit of regarding all forms as equally the manifestations of the same one all-pervading life. The second type of meditation aims at creating detachment from the hypnotic identification with one's own physical body so that it is seen as just another form of life. Both types focus on finite forms of life and are a preparation for a shift in focus to the formless and infinite. Some symbol of infinity is commonly used, such as the ocean, but the focus is firmly within. It is reinforced with mental suggestions such as "I am as infinite as the ocean within".

These first three forms of impersonal meditation are predominantly concerned with the impersonal objects of experience but the other five types are more concerned with the subject of experience. One such important form of meditation consists in ceaselessly pressing the query "Who is it that does all these things ... who is this 'I'?" This is the quest for the agent of action and is logically connected to considering oneself as witness, writing down one's thoughts, watching one's mental operations and making the mind blank. It is these final five of the eight types of impersonal meditation that Ekhart Tolle and Barry Long are connected with in their teachings.

Meher Baba admits that making the mind blank is one of the most difficult things to do but interestingly he describes a possible method involving:

an alternation between two incompatible forms of meditation, so that the mind is caught between concentration and distraction. Thus the aspirant can concentrate on the form of the Master for five minutes; and then as the mind is getting settled on the form of the Master, he can steady his mind for the next five minutes in the impersonal meditation in which the thought is "I am infinite". The disparity between the two forms of meditation can be emphasized by keeping the eyes open during meditation on the form of the Master and closing the eyes during impersonal meditation."

I've recently been trying this (with Meher Baba as the Master) and have experienced quite positive results but I need to build the practice into my daily routine and not just make it something that I do intermittently.

Seeing God in All

An Indian teacher at the school where I teach asked me to suggest some teaching resources for a friend of his who had started teaching the same course as I was teaching in Bali. I made some suggestions and sent them in an internal email that the teacher forwarded to his friend. In turn, his friend responded with thanks and the teacher at school forwarded the email on to me. It began with the quote "if you cannot see God in all, you cannot see God at all". I'd been thinking about that idea a lot but this morning I was very busy with school matters and hadn't had time for a spiritual thought at all and I certainly wasn't expecting a little gem of wisdom to pop up at the top of an internal email. The author of the email is clearly Indian judging from his name and it was refreshing to receive a whiff of the divine amidst the mundane tasks that were occupying my morning. So many emails are generated nowadays and it's not a bad idea to embed a little spiritual wisdom within them to counteract the spell that the world casts over us, especially when we are at work.

Our daily, world-focused consciousness sees the figures in the foreground (people, animals and things) and ignores the background that they all share. Seeing God in all requires us to focus on the background instead of the foreground figures. This page from Ram Dass's "Be Here Now" expresses this idea very "graphically".

Be Here Now

I managed to get hold of an electronic copy of "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass. The e-book is actually a compilation of over 200 images, each corresponding to a page of the book. The images have been gathered together in a single PDF file. Each page has the same brown background and large, uppercase text. Most of the pages feature drawings as shown above which is part of page 87 of the book's 221 pages. He wrote it in 1971 when he was thirty years old, after his return from India. He augments his spiritual reflections with quotes from Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, The Buddha, Jesus, Meher Baba and others. The book is very retro but timeless nonetheless.

I feel guilty not paying for it, given that he's living in a rented house in Maui and his friends are currently collecting money in order to buy him a house. However, I promise to buy a physical copy the next time I'm in Australia or Singapore. It' s not likely to be available here in Jakarta. It's the sort of book that is probably more useful in physical form anyway. If you just had it sitting on your bedside table, you could just pick it up, choose any page at random and gain a little spiritual boost.

Ram Dass

A friend of mine on Facebook sent me a video of Ram Dass talking on spiritual matters. I'd heard the name over the years but knew nothing about him. I was impressed by his presence in the video even though he struggled with his words due to a stroke that he suffered in 1997. "We are fingers of consciousness for the one consciousness" was one memorable phrase. I was prompted to read the Wikipedia article about him and it turns out he has a very interesting background.

As Richard Alpert, he was a close friend and associate of Timothy Leary and both of them were dismissed from Harvard in 1963 for activities surrounding their Harvard Psilocybin Project.

He visited India in 1967 and corresponded with Meher Baba who would have been in seclusion at the time and so not accepting visitors. He went on to meet Neem Karoli Baba who became his guru and gave him the name "Ram Dass" which means "servant of God". His first meeting with his future guru was quite transformative. He describes it quite poignantly in an interview as follows:

I was coming up a hillside and I saw him sitting under a tree with eight or ten devotees around him. I'm standing at a distance and the guy who is with me is on his face touching this his feet, and I'm thinking, "I'm not going to do that."

Neem Karoli Baba looked up at me and said, "you came in a big car?" We had come in a friend's Land Rover that we had borrowed so this guy could come and see his guru to get his visa. So I said, "yes." And then he said, "you will give it to me?" Now, coming from Jewish charities as I do, I had been hustled, but never like this! I was speechless. The guy I was with leans up and says, "if you want itMaharaji, it's yours." I protested and said, "you can't give David's car away!" I was aware of everybody laughing at me, but I was very serious. (laughter)

Then Neem Karoli said, "take them and feed them." So we were taken down to the temple and fed lunch. Then he called me back up and he told me to sit down. He looked at me and said, "you were out under the stars last night," Then he said, "you were thinking about your mother." My mind started to get agitated and I started to entertain hypotheses as to how he could have known that. Then he said, "she died last year," and the dis-ease kept growing. Then he said, "she got very big in the belly
before she died." My mother had died of an enlarged spleen. And then he closed his eyes and he rocked back and forth and he opened his eyes and looked at me, and in English he said, "spleen."

When he said that, my mind just couldn't handle it. I just gave up. Something shifted and I started to feel a wrenching pain in my chest. There was a radio show on many years ago called Inner Sanctum and they opened this screeching door at the beginning of every show. I felt like this door that had been long closed was being violently forced open. I started to cry and I cried for two days. And after that, all I wanted to do was touch his feet.

I had recognized that not only was he inside my head, but that everything I was, he loved. There was not a part of me that he didn't know, and he still loved me. So, all the models of `if they only knew that little thought that I don't even admit to myself, they wouldn't love me,' didn't apply.

This wasn't an intellectual process. It was a direct experience of that quality of unconditional love. It took that long (snaps his fingers) and all the rest of it has been basically irrelevant. I cherish everything that came after and I got all kinds of teachings, but the thing happened at that moment. He didn't do anything, he just was it. He was an environment where my ripeness to open had a chance to express itself.

Now 77 years old, he lives on Maui in a rented house overlooking the ocean and a sense of the atmosphere there is conveyed by this report by a visiting journalist a couple of years ago:

His house feels like a temple. There are altars everywhere, covered with pictures of saints, tropical flowers, candles and incense. He has a photo of George Bush on an altar, “because he’s someone I have trouble loving.”

He greets every visitor with joy and fixes his attention completely on that person, even the ones I find tedious. When his assistant, Kathleen Murphy, tells him she’s going into town to do errands and asks, “Is there anything you want?” Ram Dass looks in her eyes, then smiles. “That you have a good time.”

At 75, Ram Dass feels he’s demonstrating “a way to grow old and prepare for dying.” I ask how he prepares for dying. “With quiet presence, and by practicing change,” he says. “Being content with change. I’ve been changed by a stroke…and I’m happy. Death is the biggest change we’re going to face in life. So we need to practice change.”

I particularly like the George Bush reference. 1n 1973, Ram Dass wrote his famous book "Be Here Now" which I certainly intend to read if I come upon it. The title of the book is very similar to "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle, the book that seemed to reignite in me an active interest in spirituality. It was a friend at work who recommended Tolle's book to me and she was quite persistent that I read it, despite my initial reluctance. The recent recommendation from my Facebook friend is similarly appreciated. I guess you really can get by with a little help from your friends.