Buddha said that “life is suffering”.   And that one significant antidote to suffering is meditation.  We’ll explore both of these ideas in today’s post to discover “How Does Meditation Help?”   Buddha was acknowledging a very core fact about human existence.   Life on planet Earth involves suffering by its very nature.  This is a tough planet to be born onto.  Human existence seems to be an endless struggle for survival and feels like we are bound to a wheel of birth and death.   With no way to escape.  So we suffer, mentally, emotionally and physically.   

We don’t know that there are other options besides being a human with wants, fears, worries about the past and the future, and with many concerns that are related to the care and feeding of the body we inhabit, and centered on our ego’s need to be in charge.  This in order to make sure we survive the fierce forces that seem to be at play.

We don’t know that freedom is just a breath away.   

One Major Cause of Suffering is Wanting 

Being trapped inside of a very limited sphere, a very limited personal universe, is an experience we are all very familiar with.  An experience that is the only one we know.  In this limited, personal universe, isolated from the rest of the world, we want.  We want.  And want.  And want some more. 

Whatever our eyes light upon, we want.   I want this.  I don’t want that.  I want this thing.  I want that experience.  I don’t want that.  I want to be happier, more fulfilled if I had……  But when achieved, for  a moment, this wanting, in the next moment it changes.  And new wants emerge, vibrate, to capture notice, and to want to possess. Things necessary for our survival, things perceived as being necessary for our survival, and things that for whatever strange we’ve “gotta have” or if not had, cause regret, a sense of loss, a momentary sigh.  

The Problem–Focusing on What’s Outside 

This wanting is a focusing on the outside.  Even if those things wanted are more “good thoughts’, or good “stuff”.  They tend to be things, often as not, that are outside.  Instead of within where our Selves reside.  

What satisfies the wanting?  Meditation for one, according to Buddha’s Fourfold Path, and which I agree is true according to my personal experience.  Not because it satisfies the wanting, per se, but because the wanting disappears.  For a moment, and then for more, in the Light of Reality. 

Our hunger is satisfied by The All.  By relationship to The ALL.  By an experience of the ALL.  At the moment of experience of the omnipresence of The ALL there is nothing to want.  Not even The ALL.  Because you and The ALL are one.  There is nothing more than That.  In the est training Werner Erhard used to say that “Life is about something being more important that something else (check the quote)”.  When breathing the One, in and out.  When being breathed by the One, in and out, the “something more important” evaporates away in the Light. 

And suffering stops.   If only for a moment.  A Sacred Moment. The spell is broken.  A spring is sprung from which there is no turning back.

Meditation Helps

I’m glad I don’t suffer over it all so much anymore.  My longer view, and my ongoing meditative experience, results in the realization that there is nothing that needs to be suffered over, because everything is all going to turn out.  Not in a way I could ever have imagined, but it does turn out. Some how, some way.  Without trying to impose my desires on the system.  My job, then, becomes about staying centered–as much in a state of awareness and peacefulness as I possibly can be.  This is the most I can do.

Meditation helps.  I keep coming back and back to my higher consciousness.  My Awareness of Presence.  Out of the confluence of forces happening in Blair World.  The world I inhabit.  The world I create.  And the world that creates me. 

Relax

Hey, we might as well relax.  And enjoy the ride.  And be amazed at the story that is getting told.  Day by day.  A reality show.  Like the Kardashian reality show.  What are they going to do in the next episode?  Who knows?  Wait and see.  Participate as a co-creator with eyeballs to lend to the scene.  And participate in my own reality show.  (Glad I don’t have the attention of the world trained on me 24/7.  That has to be exhausting.)

In fact, what I have come to realize, if I relax, if I meditate and make contact with my Higher Consciousness, which all of our Master Teachers say lies within, I will come in contact with Spirit.  The Spirit that fills the Universe with light and life. Which also constitutes my personal individual Soul, has my best interest at heart if I will look to it for freedom and the things I need to grow and evolve.

Recognize the Patterns

The trick to ride the wave of the unfolding Universe, is to recognize the pattern in the wave building up, wave crashing, wave subsiding, wave building back up again.  It helps to meditate on the cycles, the coming and going of the waves in the ocean.  And to not get taken over by the details of the events. 

Observe the waves with great interest.  And keep the vibration of my energy elevated so that I can be of some use to the whole.  While living my best version of a human life from the most peaceful and impeccable place I can come from.  For myself and for the Universe.

Getting and staying peaceful helps all of that.  It calms the mind down.  It engages the personal and collective Spirit.  It enables us to choose light rather than darkness. Spirit awakens and flows.  The hot mess begins to cool.  The fevered temperature of the country, and its leadership, could begin to subside. 

Your Real Guide is not Your Brain 

Your Soul is intended, among other things, to be our Guide in this lifetime.  It is its job to be your companion, your confidante, that which “goes before you to make the crooked places straight.”  And not to be guided by our ego mind.

• Ego minds’ job is not to lead, it’s to follow, to follow the lead of your Consciousness in conjunction with your Soul.
• The ego mind thinks its job is to keep you safe, and it has attempted to do so by using fear to generate solutions to problems that don’t work very well. Because that’s not its job.  Not knowing any better, however, that’s the job we’ve given it, and this is the crux of the suffering that Buddha said we are all party to.  Insanity, defined as doing the same thing over and over again, getting poor results and continuing to do that which doesn’t work.  We do this out of ignorance, ignorance that doesn’t allow us to see the insanity, until it is pointed out to us.  So, I’m pointing it out, for myself as well as you.  I’ve worked with this now for a while, and I still forget, and sometimes get caught up in my ego mind’s dead end.   Only now I recognize the pattern and know how to transcend it.  The more often I do this transcendence through meditation, the more I remember and the less becomes the hold that ignorance and fear have on me.
• It’s your Soul that will keep you safe, and secure and functioning and peaceful. That’s its job.  That and being the conduit through which Spirit can come into your 3d life and energize it to allow you to shift into a 5D Life. And outpicture a Life filled existence. 
• As you shift your awareness and your allegiance over to Soul you become a new person. You are reborn, in effect, as the Eternal being that you are.  A conscious shift allows the ego mind to go back to doing its job not the impossible one you gave it of keeping you safe.  Your priorities click into place and every part of you begins to hit on all cylinders, each system  doing  what it is supposed to do to all you to have the expansive experience you were meant to have on this planet, not the contracted, fearful one we inherited by default.

Conclusion.  The Pendulum Swings

Those who know and practice meditation can ride the wave and not get sucked under.  I can just let the pendulum of light and dark swing back and forth. When I say this to myself from a place of mindfulness, I can also remind myself to “Peace, be still”.  And becoming so myself adds a drop of peace to the pond of outcome.  For me, for us, and for the Universe.

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