Seeking a Clear Mind
Meditation is nothing more than an absence of activity.
Our inability to calm the torrent of our thoughts produces incessant swirls on the surface of consciousness, and disturbs its originally limpid clarity.
Last year, I wrote these words in a notebook:
“I am on a quest for the ultimate experience of self-awareness. I want to feel life vibrating around me, and in me. To become fully aware of being alive, so I don’t go through my existence with blinders on, as if anesthetized.”
Just a year before, I was discovering self-development books, especially Eckhart Tholle’s The Power of Now. The intuition I had, without knowing how to put it into words, was then verbalized: most human beings live asleep. Everyday events are only just coming to the surface of their consciousness, as are their perceptions of themselves.
I had, and still have, the feeling that there is more to existence than what we do of it.
Consciousness would therefore be this constant background to everything we do. What remains when we are plunged into deep sleep. In his book Being Aware of Being Aware, Rupert Spira explains that we identify our consciousness, what we call “I”, with our body and our mind. When in fact, it is not the same thing. Or rather, consciousness is the body and the mind, but not only. Consciousness would be everything. Everything that surrounds us. I confess that this point has not yet crossed the threshold of understanding and acceptance of my mind.
Consciousness would be the zero level. The background, empty and full at the same time. Background of what? Of everything. Of this “I” constantly present, of which we are not always conscious but which nevertheless does not leave us any second. Is this what some call the soul?
It would seem that it’s in consciousness that the experience I am looking for is located. This “absolute” of being alive. This whole, this ultimate experience, which would be our nature but which is fogged by all that we have, unconsciously, added on top. Like clouds in the sky, which, behind them, always remains blue, no matter what.
Our inability to calm the torrent of our thoughts produces incessant swirls on the surface of consciousness, and disturbs its originally limpid clarity.
It is this purity that I am trying to recover. This sensation of veiled reality that I try to solve.
And I realized that the more we search, the more we look, the more we obsess about the question, and the more reality moves away. This seems quite logical, since if the total perception of reality corresponds to the zero level of the consciousness, the fact of searching produces again some stirrings.
Hence meditation. Meditation, which is nothing else than the release of our constant mental contraction. The return, or at least an attempt, to our original state. We are no longer aware of this as it has become a perpetual state, but we impose a constant contraction on our mind. Meditation is the release of this tension. It seems difficult at first, like a fist that has been clenched for too long, so long that its joints have turned white.
Meditation is not something you do. It is a return to something that you are.
It’s hard at first. The torrent of our thoughts is such that it seems unmanageable. But with practice, the intervals between the eddies become longer and longer. And one day, they will be so far apart that the water will have time, for a few seconds, to be perfectly still.
Perhaps then I will discover that this is where the life experience I am pursuing is located. But I try not to pursue it too much. I fear it would otherwise run away…
