"The bliss of deep sleep is a
free sample of the awareness enjoyed by the mystics when they are
awake."
Rumi
Meditation
is sleep! A bold statement perhaps, no doubt contradicting much of
what is written on the subject. Well now that I've stated the premiss
let me defend it. I intend to claim that meditation is nothing other
than the conscious and wakeful accessing of the place we go when
we're deep asleep.
This is also a kind of follow up
piece to a blog post I wrote a few months ago called 'Meditation and
Sleep'. I'm not sure that title drove the message home hard enough so
the 'and' is out and the 'is' is in. If that makes sense.
I first became interested in the
practise of meditation when I was eighteen. Lots of different reasons
why, I'd just been reclassified as an adult but wasn't sure that I
really felt any different from when I was five years old. What was it
in me that remained the same whilst other things changed?
Materialist reductionism had become less than satisfying as a
philosophy. It was also perhaps a search for sanity in what I
perceived as an increasingly mad world (George W. Bush had just been
elected U.S. President – that was the final straw).
I had no real idea what
meditation was but thought shifting consciousness somehow sounded
interesting. Luckily this was right at the time when internet
shopping had just taken off, so I was able to order a book on the
subject. In spite of my initial lack of knowledge however, I felt I
had an intuitive sense of what meditation was about and that this
book would really just confirm my expectations and explain more of
how to go about it. I felt it would all be something to do with
dropping awareness back into deeper levels of the mind and accessing
the relaxed and intuitive capacity that was to be found there. Well,
when the book arrived, I was surprised to find it made no mention of
such things, rather it explained that meditation was all about
bringing ones attention out of ones head and into the world, then
attempting to hold it there. I got the point, that we're overly
consumed by our rational minds and need to break free of the constant
cognitive chatter, but this just seemed like a rather arduous and
unnatural way of doing it. Having always had a rather unjustifiably
high opinion of my own ideas, I decided my way sounded better so I
would go with that.
So I would sit and drop my
awareness back, attempting to consciously enter the place that nears
the border between wakefulness and sleep. I had some very interesting
experiences of entering a dreamlike state of consciousness, but
always it would end the same, with me falling asleep. I also noted no
lasting benefits to this practice, I didn't feel any more enlightened
for the rest of the day, in just the same way we don't carry the
relaxation of deep sleep into our waking day.
And so after a while I relented
and went with what the book recommended. Standard stuff, I would sit
and bring my awareness to my breath, re-placing it there every time
it fell away. I would do this maybe three times a day for what
started at twenty minutes a time, the rest of the day I would live as
a constant mindfulness exercise attempting to be continuously aware
of my bodily sensations. I had a job in a mail room at that time,
putting letters in envelopes all day, which was perfect for this. I
carried on this practice fairly intensely for about two years.
I'm not saying that I didn't
experience benefits from this, I'm sure I did, but after a while I
didn't feel those benefits were proportionate to the time and focus
I was putting in. Also, I started to question the fundamental logic
of what I was doing. I'm supposed to be accepting of the moment as it
is, and yet really I'm always trying to change this moment into a
better one where I'm more present, awake and conscious. I'm
attempting to realise than my individual sense of self is an
illusion, and yet my individual sense of self is hard at work trying
to achieve this! It all seemed contradictory.
One morning after a poor night's
sleep I was just too tired and decided it was a fruitless endeavour to
try to meditate, so I just lay on my sofa for the allotted time
period and took a nap. A funny thing happened, I went into a state
where I was sort of awake and asleep at the same time. Rather than
being identified with my thoughts I felt identified with the
'blackness' in which they were arising. There was an amazing feeling
of spaciousness and liberation here, freedom from being my thoughts!
But again I would end up falling asleep and I detected few lasting
effects from this practice on the rest of my day, I wasn't more
relaxed or nicer or anything like that.
At this point I could describe my
meditation experience as being as if there were a line running
through the centre of my head, extending out the back at one end and
out between my eyes at the other. I could either sink back or expand
out along this line and this would determine whether I would had a
deep and relaxing but drawn in experience, or a shallow but expansive
one. It really was a case of either/or.
This contradiction resolved for
me when I realised that the answer lay in a juxtaposition of the two
approaches. Moving awareness only outwards (onto the breath or
something like that) is fairly pointless, it might have some limited
benefit for a while but it seems to me that this is cancelled out as
there always has to be a you there to keep doing this task. This
becomes rather problematic if the ultimate purpose of meditation is
to lose the sense of a separate self. Similarly, only sinking ones
awareness back inwards is also futile. It may briefly feel great the
way falling asleep does, but it can't be sustained for long without
actually falling asleep. And even if it could, it's not a
good place to drive a car from or operate heavy machinery or anything
like that. Holding my attention out in the world (again perhaps on
the breath) acts as an anchor that prevents me from falling asleep
when I then allow my awareness to fall backwards into deep
Consciousness.
In
fact more than being just possible it was essential to do so for the
following reason. If I take an analogy with lucid dreaming as a
starting point, I experience myself as a character in a dream who
wants to also know his real identity as the dreamer, the one
consciousness in which the dream is arising. The dreamer and the
dream must arise together as a primal duality, you can't have one
without the other, obviously there can be not dream without a dreamer
but equally a dreamer without a dream is just asleep. To put it
another way, consciousness needs something to be conscious of, else
it is unconscious. This was the root of my problem, I would look
within to become conscious of consciousness itself, aware of
awareness. What I failed to recognise was that consciousness itself
is not a 'thing' in the sense that thoughts or material objects are,
rather it's the thing in which these things arise. Therefore, every
time I would attempt to become conscious of consciousness, I would go
unconscious - every time the dreamer became aware only of himself, he
wasn't dreaming any more and therefore ceased to be. The result, I fell
asleep. This is why it is essential that when awareness delves
inwards and seeks to become aware of itself, it also reaches outwards
to remain anchored in the world (on something like the breath) and by
doing so the primal duality remains.¹
What
does this look like in practice?
Sit
and anchor yourself in the body by becoming increasingly aware of its
sensations. You may choose to particularly focus on the breath.
Remember this is not the meditation itself, it's merely the set up to
prevent yourself from losing consciousness when you fall backwards
into the sleep state.
Become
increasingly aware of the thoughts as they rise and fall in your
head. Then become increasingly aware of the dark depths that they are
rising and falling within.
Now
simply fall backwards into the sleep state, just the same way you do
every night in bed, letting go of the attachment to the outer world.
And now here's the difference to actually falling asleep, as you feel
yourself entering the depths, begin to undulate your awareness
inwards and outwards so as not to lose connection with the material
world and fall asleep all together. You may find the breath helpful
in this regard, to sink into the depths on the out breath, and pull
yourself back out into the world on the in breath.
A
final note, in my previous post 'Meditation and Sleep'² I stated that
'Everyone is already an expert at falling asleep and therefore it's a
great starting point to explain meditation.' A lot of people got
back to me and said that they weren't experts at falling asleep and
actually found it very difficult. Fair enough, whilst I didn't write
this with the idea of developing a cure for insomnia in mind, if you
struggle with this, I think it can only help to explore the line
between wakefulness and sleep consciously. What I personally find is
that if I do this practice when I want to go to sleep at night, if at
some point I just 'let go' of the anchor of holding my awareness in
the world, I drop right off. Best
of Luck.
1. I've written this piece as concisely as and non-metaphysically as
possible – for more depth on the lucid dreaming analogy I'd
recommend Tim Freke's books, either Lucid Living or The Mystery
Experience.
Artwork courtesy of Kazuyo Yamada - http://kazuyo.exto.org/
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