Current Letter | John's Letter Archives
Summer 1994
NAMASTE,
In the winter newsletter I talked about the yoga boom that is sweeping across the country. Evidence of it continues to mount. More yoga studios, more yoga students, more yoga publicity. Even Jane Fonda has a yoga video out now! Have we arrived or what?
Because Unity Woods gets so many calls asking about yoga in general as well as classes in particular, in that newsletter I outlined briefly what yoga is, concentrating specifically on Hatha yoga. I also raised the question of meditation, what it is and how it relates to yoga, because we get a lot of questions about that, too. Since space was running out, I promised to discuss the topic of meditation in the next newsletter. Of course as those of you who read this newsletter know, I was unable to write the spring letter and printed a piece by Bea Briggs instead. That article, “What’s Wild About Yoga?”, received lots of favorable response.
Anyway, as fate would have it, last Christmas I received a thoughtful gift from Cindi Contie, a long time work exchange student who keeps the library at Unity Woods in such good condition. The gift is a small hand-lettered sign that says “Meditation is not what you think”. I was quite struck by it because it says so much so succinctly and directly, like a little sutra. In a way it says it all. I’ll explain.
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Patanjali, in the first three sutras of the Yoga Sutras says, “(1) Now an exposition of Yoga begins; (2) Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind; (3) Then one is established in one’s true nature.” In the last of the 196 sutras he defines our true nature as pure Consciousness.
Krishnamurti, another great explorer of consciousness and the nature of being, in a book titled, ironically, Think on These Things, says, “This slowing down of thinking and the examining of every thought is the process of meditation; and if you go into it you will find that, by being aware of every thought, your mind –which is now a vast storehouse of restless thoughts all battling against each other – becomes very quiet, completely still…and, in this stillness, that which is true comes into being.” In another book, The Awakening of Intelligence, he says, “…meditation implies not only the body being still but also the brain being quiet.”
“Meditation is not what you think.”
“Meditation implies…being quiet.”
“Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.”
When you get right down to it, yoga and meditation are one and the same.
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To go on, just as I did with yoga and Yoga in the winter letter, I would make a distinction between meditation with a small m and Meditation with a capital M. Meditation, small m, is any of a number of techniques and practices designed to bring about the state of Meditation. Meditation, capital M, is what happens when the mind becomes quiet.
So meditation is the “process” of slowing down the mind, and Meditation occurs when the brain becomes quiet.
You can do meditation. You can’t do Meditation. The various meditative practices prepare you for the experience of Meditation.
Let’s look at it another way. A farmer prepares a field by plowing, fertilizing, seeding, weeding, and so on. The something grows or it doesn’t. After all the preparations, whether or not something grows isn’t really up to the farmer. We say the farmer grows corn or wheat. In one sense that’s fine. On another level, that isn’t really accurate. The farmer does all the things described above: plowing, etc. And then either corn grows or it doesn’t. The farmer doesn’t grow it. Not really. It just grows or not, depending on lots of things, some of them under the farmers control, some not.
The same thing is true of Meditation. The meditator does whatever practices s/he does: reciting a mantra, gazing at a candle, or design, concentrating on their breath, observing thoughts, etc. And then either Meditation happens or it doesn’t. The meditator doesn’t Meditate. The meditator meditates. And those meditation practices may or may not produce the state of Meditation.
From my discussions with people inquiring about “meditation” and their descriptions of what they’re looking for, I think that most mean meditation as some sort of practice. They want a technique, a method.
They also often differentiate between physical practices, which they don’t associate with meditation, and mental practices, which they do. That separation between physical and mental makes it very difficult for me to answer them when they ask, “Do you teach meditation?”
In Iyengar yoga that separation is not there. Mr. Iyengar, in the beginning of the chapter, “The Nature of Meditation”, in The Tree of Yoga says, “Meditation is integration – to make the disintegrated parts of man become one again. When you say that your body is different from your mind, and your mind is different from your soul, that means that you are disintegrating yourselves. How can meditation bring you back to integration if it is something which separates the body from the brain, the brain from the mind, or the mind from the soul?”
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The Iyengar method is sometimes called “meditation in action”, because in it we use the physical postures themselves as the vehicles to realize the integration of the mind, body, and soul.
Interestingly enough, many of the same people who want to learn meditation, meaning some kind of mental as opposed to physical practice, are interested in it because they have heard that it may be good for heart trouble or high blood pressure. Others want to reduce stress in their lives, to calm their anxieties, to get away from their problems. They speak as if all these things were unrelated to one another.
I still haven’t figured out what to say to people when they ask if we teach meditation. Do they mean meditation or Meditation? Do they mean meditation as being something different from yoga? Do they mean something not physical, just mental, or maybe spiritual?
Maybe I should say “Meditation is not what you think.”
Maybe yoga isn’t either.
Have a cool summer.
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