Spiritual Or Delusion?

This question came thru today, and it’s an interesting one.

‘Roger, why is your view of meditation so unspiritual? As far as I know, meditation has always been a spiritual practice, yet you don’t address that aspect of it at all.’

And my reply:

You’re right, I don’t address the spiritual aspect of meditation at all – for good reason. Firstly, I am not a religious person, and though I am inspired by Theravada Buddhism, I don’t subscribe to the religious aspect of it. This is because I have a powerful belief that the multi-dimensionality of spiritual experience, once confined to the linear constricts of words, is a dead facsimile of that experience.

Secondly, I know from my experience with intense meditation practice, that the mind is a trickster, a magician, a con-artist skilled in creating convincing realities that don’t actually exist in any ultimate sense. So though I could, on one hand, point to any one of the multitude of unworldly experiences I’ve had during meditation retreats as ‘a spiritual experience’ – there is really no way I could ever be sure enough to believe it as truth.

So I don’t.

I let it go, as simply another fascinating hallucination created by a mind in the process of change.

Since gullible priests and travelers brought their limited understanding of meditation out of Asia and made it popular in the West in the late 1800’s, the ‘meditation space’ has been cluttered with what I ungracefully describe as bullshit. And most of that bullshit has arisen from what I described – the incredible capacity of the mind to delude itself when it is challenged – particularly by something as profoundly transforming as meditation. In particular the so-called ‘New Age’ has polluted the meditation space, either trying to reduce it to a cosy, almost lobotomizing narcotic, or posing it as a portal to all kinds of spiritual stupidity.

My personal view is that this material life, whose confines we seem locked into is, in essence, profoundly spiritual, both in form and source.

But for me to even begin to describe or speculate about that spiritual aspect would immediately diminish it and make it simply another tawdry and damaging delusion.

Nevertheless I experience it. But even though I get sniffs of the divine in every moment of my life, I think the only time I’ll know it fully and instinctively understand it, is in the moment after I’ve drawn my last breath.

Until then, it’s enough to sense, but not speak.

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‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’, Roger’s new book, is available now.

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‘BEING STILL’ is available on Amazon as a paperback ………….. AUD $26.40 (incl. GST) 

‘BEING STILL’ is also available as a Kindle ebook ………………………………………..AUD $11.99 

‘BEING STILL’ the audiobook (including all exercises) ………………………………. AUD $25.00 

(The audiobook includes all the exercises, as well as ebooks of Being Still, to fit any device.)