Meditation — one size never fits all

Sunday, January 6, 2019

4:50 a.m. Woke up at 3:30, suddenly enough that I said, “Nah,” and managed to eke out another hour. But you’ve got me now. What’s up, besides me? Oh, you wish to comment on Bob Paddock saying [on Facebook] meditation often seems to him a waste of time? Feel free.

It isn’t the right tool if you aren’t using it on the right job. You can’t tighten screws with hammers, or pound nails with screwdrivers. At least, not very efficiently! But this hardly exhausts the subject.

Meditation is one tool, ILC [Intuitive Linked Communication] is another. Applied logic is a third. Careful analysis is a fourth, and careful observation is a fifth. Nor of course are these the whole toolbox. But – different tools for different jobs, and, better, different combinations of tools for different jobs.

So. Suppose you are living your life taking the 3D world as all there is, taking your varying moods as if they were a stable platform, placing all your attention on the external world and not even realizing that your internal world is primary. Meditation may help you stop the machinery long enough for you to realize that there is more going on than you realize. Silencing the noisy clanking and banging and whirring may let you hear the birds singing, so to speak. It may be a revelation, and a revolution.

Or suppose you are well aware of the inner world and are somewhat unaware of the outer world. Your internal trance, your daydreaming your way through life, may need a corrective. Mediation may be such a corrective, but maybe an experience of ILC, or a course of logic, or applied effort at acquiring a skill, say, may be better applied. And so forth.

If you need to clear your mind of chatter, that’s a very different starting point from needing to slow down an internal daydreaming trance, and the fact that people don’t differentiate between the two conditions creates confusion when they give advice as to what to do about it! Or, if you have an endless calculating machine operating, ceaselessly collecting the data presented by life, it too is not the same initial situation, and will not necessarily respond to the same purported remedy.

An analogy would be, taking psychotropic drugs. It should be obvious (but apparently is not) that the effect such pharmacology produces will vary not only by the circumstances in which it is used but – and primarily – by the person who comes to the experience! That is, if you are a person filled with chaos, what can you expect from a drug magnifying your receptivity to (previously unnoticed) internal conditions? More chaos, of course. Magnified chaos, seemingly a confirmation that chaos is what the world consists of. But if you are made differently, your experience will differ correspondingly. Compare the results obtained by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzger on LSD, as opposed to Ken Kesey, say, or musicians on cocaine or marijuana. These are all creative people – we are not contrasting creative people with unorganized intelligences, here – but what they brought to the experience couldn’t help affect the experience they received. It’s only common sense, after all.

One size never fits all.

Precisely. Why should anyone think it would?

So if meditation does nothing for you, or perhaps no longer does anything for you, why persist in it? However, that doesn’t mean, forget about internal exploration. It means, try a different kind of tool.

Your point seems obvious enough, but I can remember that for years, people would ask me if I meditated, and were puzzled when I said I did not. It was only last year that I realized that and why my need and practice was different. I didn’t need anything to wake me up to the fact that I as observer was (am) something other than appearances. What I needed was not a way to listen to the still small voice, but a way to better interact with the world. As long ago as 1980, I realized I needed to develop logic, though it was many more years than that before I realized how much I needed to develop it, and how much I needed to apply it to the world around me.

Everybody’s life may be looked at as a problem to be addressed, a puzzle to be engaged. You are always trying to accomplish a task some of which is invisible to you. Only the lapse of time makes it clearer what your life was about, and doesn’t not necessarily make clear what it is about.

In other words, where we have been is always clearer than where we are, let alone where we will be (or may be).

Isn’t that your experience? Moments of clarity alternating with moments of opacity? And of course the proportions of each vary, by the individual and perhaps also by the moment.

So what is the point here?

One point is that meditation is not going to be productive for everybody, nor is it necessarily going to be effective for any given person forever. There is no guaranteed path to heaven, you might say.

As you say that, I get the image of a priest saying his breviary – the prayers he is required to say every day.

Yes. Such practice may concentrate a young man’s mind on the continual existence of the non-physical world, may serve to help him remain on a path of consciousness. But it should be easy to see how such practice can degenerate into mere rote, accomplishing nothing. Do you have any reason to think that meditation per se is any more universal, any more infallible?

Nor is ILC for everyone.

Nor psychotropic drugs, nor disciplined attention to the internal or external world, nor any conceivable path. Address life as you will, it remains true that one size can never fit all, and it is a mistake to think so. Don’t put your trust in a method, any more than in any particular creed, to bring you infallibly home. What works for one may not for another. What works at one time may not work at another, or may not work until another time. There is no external way to know. It’s all in your experience, which of course varies by the person, by the circumstances, and by the time of day.

Well, then, any advice on how people should find what is right for them?

Sincerity and persistence will always bring you through.

Say a little more about that?

Although your means of deepening your conscious connection to your higher self, your non-3D self, will vary by person and perhaps by time and circumstance, the connection itself does not vary. You need not fear becoming unanchored. It’s just a matter of allowing, not of forcing. So, doing what you are led to do – following the pattern of your life – will always result in your doing the right thing (that is, will result in pursuing the right path for you; we don’t mean to imply that you will never make mistakes). The thing to monitor above all is your intent. Intend, and your inner life aligns in turn, obviously. Intend consistently and alignment follows consistently. Waver, and what can you expect but a wavering result?

I get it. and – for the studio audience, so to speak – I know that the “obviously” refers to the fact that inner and outer are parts of one thing, hence are never decoupled.

They may appear to be decoupled, because there is a lag in manifestation to the degree that there is a separation between intent and resolution.

I think you’re saying, intent that wavers brings irresolution in its wake.

Rather, it is irresolution. What it brings in its wake is the appearance of separation, to which the conditions of 3D life renders your susceptible anyway.

Okay. More?

This should do for the moment.

Okay, thanks as always.

Even though you had to get out of bed?

Very funny. Till next time.