What Is Meditation?

In the most basic sense, meditation could be said to be attending to what is actually happening for you here and now. There are many methods, techniques, schools and goals. The one thing I would like to emphasise is that meditating ‘for’ something is completely different to meditation in its proper sense. The main question is: what do you want out of it? This question, when answered honestly, should reveal important information about where your experience with meditation will lead.

There are many potential outcomes associated with meditation practice. It could be oriented toward health, longevity, stress-reduction, or it could be to experience blissful or altered states. It is important to note that when we are really interested in paying attention to what is, i.e. Truth, there is no outcome or goal associated with it. If you do want to meditate for some of the reasons specified above, there is really no problem with that, have away at it. All I want to make clear is that meditation is not a prescription for an outcome of how we or anyone else thinks things should be.

Over the past twenty years or so there has been a global shift toward mindfulness, which is really a kind of prescribed meditation practice. It holds onto limitation, and in fact issues from limitation – which isn’t to say that it is wrong, only that it is limited. It is encouraged by big business and educational institutions among others and touted as a way to boost inner health and overall productivity.

The reason it must be anchored in limitation is that groups with special interests such as maintaining productivity and satisfaction levels have an agenda.

Mindfulness has indeed been shown in the literature to have measurable benefits upon human well-being. A corporation or institution can achieve much by way of letting out the leash, however it simply cannot afford to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Progressive religions are also generally comfortable with mindfulness, just so long as it doesn’t push you over into questioning the main tenets of their ideology, in which case the leash is very firmly brought back in.

Corporations are happy to implement measures of mindfulness in the same capacity as they promote regular hand-washing, loud-shirt Wednesdays and sneezing into your elbow. Mindfulness is a prescribed form of limited meditative awareness that promotes mental and physical well-being. It makes for a more well-behaved, cohesive team environment, and staff are less apt to flip out and require stress leave.

Please recognise that you are not being blessed with the keys to the kingdom in this scenario.

At the end of the day, the ultimate interest is minimising loss and maximising profit. If you are the CEO of a multinational corporation, your investors and share-holders aren’t going to be terribly sympathetic to you waking up one morning having discovered that you are unconditionally connected with the source of all life and that your deepest being is as timeless, immortal spirit that feels no need to define itself through achieving material goals.

Meditation by contrast does not have a capped limit placed upon it. In fact, if there is any goal or outcome attached to it, you can say it isn’t really meditation in the true sense.

About twenty or so years ago, a group of Buddhist monks were visiting New Zealand. They visited a cathedral and remarked that it was a very holy place. They noted that there was a small chapel off to the side which was clearly labelled ‘Meditation Room’. Naturally, they asked if they could be permitted to use the room for – you guessed it – meditation.

The clergy responded kindly that no, they may not use the room because they didn’t think the kind of meditation that they were planning to do in the chapel would be appropriately Christian in nature. From that point on, the name ‘Meditation Room’ was abruptly changed to the name ‘Contemplation Room’, underscoring with wonderful irony the requirement of established authorities and institutions to maintain limitation, and therefore control.

This story perfectly encapsulates the issue surrounding meditation being held as something in abeyance to something else; some other hierarchy of values. True meditation cannot be this, because there can’t be a fixed itinerary on where you are being taken, otherwise it is not really meditation, it is something else.

So, the question arises, should we meditate? I find people struggle with this question, because it really can’t be prescribed. I personally don’t meditate, but that is because it would be redundant for me to set aside time to engage in awareness when I am committed to that every waking moment. The more interesting question would be, are you curious as to the fact that in spite of all the odds, you just happen to exist? Are you curious that perhaps one of the least possible things in the universe is directly observable within you and as you? If not, there isn’t much reason to advise someone to meditate. You may as well be asking them to join you in going to a movie they have no interest in seeing.

I’m not saying that having no interest in meditation is necessarily a terrible thing. It is admittedly a mystery to me why someone would not have their interest piqued by something that seems so profoundly fascinating as the existence of a universal force which is eternally self-aware, but there are reasons for everything. A simple life with no questions may be just as precious or pleasant to participate in as one filled with inquiry or reflection.

I can’t see why the lives of trees and plants shouldn’t be a perfectly valid form of existence, it’s just that the realm of the vegetable doesn’t share any overlap with my current interests and lifestyle.

As humans, the orientation of the intellect and the judging, perceiving mind is such a powerful and often heavy burden to bear. Meditation can certainly be said to provide perspective on the realm of the mind without turning itself inside out and trying ever unsuccessfully to come at itself from a non-intellectual angle. When minds engage in self-examination and analysis, all kinds of twists, ties, and knots are possible.

That is often what the majority of neurosis is, simply thought wrapping around itself again and again until there is an unbroken knot that results in an anxiety loop.

Meditation offers the promise of space and relief from this kind of insanity. Rather than reformulating new solutions within the structure of the known, it opens the doorway to the possibility of reviewing all of our mental content from a broader phenomenological space in which the contents of our inner lives seem relatively small by comparison.

Whilst meditation can provide the space for the entire spectrum of states possible within the human mind, it needs to be understood that so long as your notion of meditation is fixed upon seeking to experience certain states, it will ultimately fail, even if you get very good at it. This isn’t to do with me being pessimistic about your abilities, but concerns a feature of reality itself, specifically the law of impermanence.

No state lasts forever, so at some point or another it needs to be faced that what we are doing in meditation is not ultimately about attaining states or even insights. These will all come and go. Ultimately, meditation in its purest form is coming into a real relationship with what is true and changeless, that within which all states come to pass, including all those states associated with birth and death.

This is why meditation draws your attention to what is happening directly here and now, because 99% of people will miss the significance of it every time. It really does no justice to truth for me to attempt to describe that which you may come into if you persist – I may as well be trying to describe a sunset in binary code.

I once took it on a heuristic basis that there was more to the world than what was immediately tangible and visible. My curiosity could not be swayed.

A man in the foothills of the Himalayas once said that the best thing that ever happened to him was to have his legs shattered by an avalanche forcing him to live in poverty and solitude, because this allowed him to come into contact with who he truly was. I couldn’t let go of the impetus to understand what inner force could prove that important to a human life. The possibility captivated my attention that something could be so important that it could even be worth losing everything familiar in order to touch upon. Having now looked into this matter satisfactorily, I now hold this to be self-evidently true.

Rather than ask you to believe it, I invite you to consider the possibility that maybe there is as yet undiscovered depths to you that defy description. Awareness is the doorway to understanding the depths of your true nature, and meditation is the opportunity to embrace the awareness of that which is always here, right now.

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon as a Kindle ebook or paperback. Compilations of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Reclamation

The current opportunity we find ourselves faced with is the chance to
reclaim that which is true from amidst the vast wasteland of that which
has hitherto been claimed as true in falsehood. All of it – all the
rubbish and the refuse of centuries that has weighed us down. If not now,
when? Is there really going to be some better time, or a better
opportunity somewhere down the line to reclaim who we truly are
from amongst the ashes?

You might sense that there is a kind of timer within you. Perhaps you
sense that you are nearing the end of a great cycle that can no longer
be sustained. Or, you may simply feel saturated with the mental and
emotional litter of the world and know intuitively that this dimension
in its present perceived state has taken you about as far as it can
take anyone.

No one is winning any ideological wars, and even those
who seemed to have were either usurped or soon may be. Where does it end?
Are you still awaiting an external conclusion that would end this charade?
Maybe the timer is already going off for you, and the very real sense
that there must be something meaningful beyond all of this cyclical,
fleeting and ultimately dissatisfactory realm is making itself known
to you at very visceral level. The arising of inner questions such as
‘what is the point?’ Or ‘where is all of this leading to?’ are such
markers of reaching a phase in which you signal your readiness for
change to the universe.

This change is reclamation.

It is far less important to apply some kind of conceptual overlay or
philosophical modelling to your existence than it is to broach some
very serious inner questions.

So why has everything we have tried, personally and collectively,
yielded such unimpressive results? How can it be that our human
endeavours have put men on the moon and robotic rovers on far distant
planets, but we haven’t solved simple problems of basic human suffering?
Why do we still drive ourselves and each other to death and madness
in the name of a quick buck, or a belief system? How is it that instead
of having a clear understanding of who we are, we reinvent all of
these absurd modalities of self-identification over and over again?

Me, the one who adheres to this political system. Me, the one who
has been shaped by my circumstances into a victor (or a victim). Me,
the one who got it all right, me, the one who got it all wrong. Me,
the one who has just the right answers at the right time. Me, the one
who has mastered the ability to reason with myself and others. Have
you entertained the possibility that this is all just a story, mere
narrative pressed into the service of self-torture or as an exercise
of egoic masturbation? The conquests, the victories, the shortcomings,
the failures.

What if the reason your world looks like trash is
because you thought white was black and black was white?

Do the people who love you give you something you don’t have? Do the
people who dislike you threaten to take something from you that is real?
Are you caught in ‘your’ story? If the story belongs to someone,
who is this one to whom the story belongs? Are you a character in your
own personal movie, novel or fairy tale?

These questions are all very worth your time, particularly if you don’t
have any clarity around what is real. The test for whether you don’t
have a clear understanding of what is real is already known to you – it
is whether you are still actively searching for something. Really, anything. Material, spiritual, intellectual – it makes no difference. It is the religion of ‘the next big thing’, that which is always coming, but never arrives.

This is goal-driven, seeking behaviour, even if you never go outside of yourself (introverted ‘spiritual’ types are some of the most notorious and imperturbable seekers). If you are, that implies forward momentum into the world, an attempt to manipulate it toward your own ends. The whole project of ego has been an expeditionary foray into the false, with the hope of bringing back something that so glitters that it will make us gods.

Alright, so what has been tried before? What hasn’t?

What has been tried before is: everything under the Sun. Don’t you think
if there was some miraculous solution that would save us one person in
history would have somehow found it and made it work? Remember those
people who were so certain they had the answer that they gave every atom
of their entire life in service to it, and it even changed whole countries,
political systems, saved some people killed others? Even that level
of extreme devotion must meet death, because it is up against the
universe itself.

So what exactly is it that hasn’t been tried that would
terminate our restless seeking? Is the answer to that collective or
personal? Both? We also know that simply giving up in frustrated cynicism
isn’t the solution either, because how often has that been tried to no
effect?

People don’t see just how simple and straightforward it is to let go of
all of this. People fail to see how such a simple factor as their agreement
could command such a range of effects. Stories within stories of
victimhood and blame, resentment, judgment. These are all chains we
happily wear while we pace around our cages. We are so eagerly invested
in this crap that we even volunteer to check that what is keeping us
caged and chained is in good working order. The locks are well oiled,
the bars are secure so that no one will be making it in or out. We make
for very well-behaved and cooperative animals in a very bad zoo.
Even the rebels and dissidents are all a welcome part of this infernal
machine, because every role contributes something by way of rendering
the meaning of a collective narrative, from the saints and sages to
the corporate elite.

If it was all doom and gloom, we likely would have come out of the
collective illusion by now. The difficulty is that we have found ourselves
in a set of conditions in which our restraints and limitations are the known
and familiar, and as uncomfortable and restrictive as they may sometimes
be, they provide us with a miserable sense of comfort, security and
reassurance. In other words, the comforts of the known offer protection
against the presumed horrors of the unknown.

Being fitted with collar and chain, being broken is the perennial solution the world offers against that which is claimed to be evil in advance of any serious inquiry.

Let’s go back to what hasn’t been tried before. The thing that hasn’t
been tried before is the thing you probably haven’t ever even thought
about attempting. Stopping. Seeing what is actually here contrasted
with what the world has offered you as temptation to keep up a mindless
forward momentum. Have you tried stopping for one real moment? Does
your body know what it feels like to do anything other than run toward
the next day, the next moment, the next imaginary milestone? You’ve
actually been so afraid of even looking at it that you built an
entire human lifetime, including the complex structures of a human
personality to avoid facing it.

Don’t settle for being comfortable in the familiar. It isn’t what you think
it is! Don’t settle for being reassured, for having security. Remember this
is what has been tried before, this is the old reliable that keeps
spouting more and more crap year after year. The world has offered
you a phoney promise of comfort to secure your tacit agreement to not
look, to not go snooping behind the curtain. Comfortable is
self-reinforcing. This is the same phenomenological expression in effect as
nepotism or cronyism – keeping the devil you know in power to
guarantee more of the same.

In a very real sense, to discover that which is new to you means to
effectively guarantee that you will be shaken, disturbed – maybe even
wiped out.

If you are utterly fed up with the bullshit of this world, and you
will know it, you will arrive at a sense of determination which,
if you touch upon it, will provide you with the tenacity and wherewithal
to push beyond the known limitations of comfort and security in each
new moment. You will know what that entails when you need to know,
because you will be fed from the source of that from which all truth
springs.

Dissatisfaction with the false feeds hunger for the truth. At some point,
more variegated or refined falsity will cease to appease you. How
many times can you be lied to before you are willing to question where
your allegiance should lie? How much bullshit (from yourself or others)
would you be willing to put up with in order to defend your tenuous stake
in the ground?

The name of this game is reclamation. Reclaiming the truth of who you
are from the tentacles of the false world in which it has so long been
wilfully trapped. What is at stake is your inner transformation, the
thing that has been waiting to happen for time immemorial.

What happens when the small things that used to bother you don’t do so
anymore? That notion may even provoke a fear response in you. But then
what about the big things? You might not even know who you are anymore,
or who you thought you could be. Your entire perceived world could
change, even turn inside out. That could actually be the psychological
end of your world as you know it. Does that sound frightening? Who or
what is it that is frightened? Is it you (as in the real you) or ‘you’
from the perspective of the configuration in which the way things were?

Could you concede that in the face of reality? Would you be prepared to
give up everything you thought you knew, including all of your arguments
and conclusions, weak or strong, in order to clear the table for truth?
The entirety of the known in your life up to now may be a casualty in the
process. Would that be so utterly terrible? How would you really, finally
know unless you let it happen? And I don’t mean as some single unchanging
conclusion, but as a life ongoing lived at the very edge of mystery?

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.

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If Darkness Ruled

Have you ever wondered what our world would look like if it were ruled by the powers of darkness? Imagine that the evil and self-absorbed demiurge Yahweh, or Satan, or Lord Mara of the Buddhist tradition, held total dominion over the world. What could we expect to see?

If darkness ruled, we would have evil posing as sanctity, from the lowest of places to the highest places of power in order to breed shadow, to mislead and blaspheme against Truth.

Because the world would be a hellish quagmire of the soul, it would be forbidden to spare a child being born into it, so abortion would be categorically outlawed, as would those in unbearable suffering being provided the mercy of an assisted death. This is an attempt to seize the power of birth and death as its own hellish tool, yet the motives of darkness would be shrouded in a veil of righteousness and sanctity. Those enslaved to the powers of darkness would never see through that holy shroud into the hypocrisy behind it, and they would defend it to the death.

If darkness ruled, we would be told that the highest service to the peace of the world is to engage in warfare and destruction. We would be enslaved to the degree that we would find delight in the tools of destruction, claiming defence of the material body against danger as the highest religion. The darkness would insist by almost unseen increments of cultural pressure that its soldiers become religious fundamentalists in order that their sense of empathy for their enemies is disengaged and their primitive capacity for causing unbridled trauma with no recourse to conscience is potentiated.

Darkness would have learned this from its much earlier experiments in interfaith warfare.

Darkness would entrain a culture prepared to be excited to kill. Being such a skilled liar, the darkness would have also learned the mastery of claiming that the brutality of these wars had nothing to do with inter-religious violence. It would also demand that its subjects carry out the most heinous of crimes against humanity under the banner of what they value most, which is a false sense of freedom offered conditionally by their patriotism for ‘their’ country (they would be convinced they were members of a country, not a world of people). The darkness would have found a way to take what makes them feel special and turn it back into what makes them feel separate, then use that as fuel for violence, domestically and globally.

If darkness ruled, every man woman and child would have the freedom of their souls bound to a new device like a mass-produced weirdstone. This demented implement would nefariously track their thoughts, by watching their faces, as well as by subtle twists of dark psychology tell them what to want and think, carefully implying where their allegiances lie.

It would also bestow great power, allowing them the illusory freedom of temporarily entering other dimensions, and have some of their most obscene fantasies seemingly materialise out of thin air. Such devices would be seen as novelties for the wealthy at first, but would soon be considered necessity even to the most poverty stricken in society.

If darkness ruled, our leaders would not be in the least concerned with communicating truth. Nothing would be more important to avoid. They would first and foremost become perfectly adept at communicating mistruth before any other consideration came to mind. Since truth is like a lantern to darkness, as in psychopathy, their total focus would be fully entrained upon appearing to others how they intend to appear rather than ever once broaching the topic of truth.

What such leaders say must fit their agenda, otherwise it would never be uttered.

Such a trait would be so fundamentally objectionable in any social situation that they would be forced to rely upon entirely different personalities for dealing with humans in their personal lives so that they are not met with a sense of enduring horror. Selective slivers of this human aspect would also make its way to the media so that people were reassured of the leader’s fundamental humanity, despite not realising that this had been a most brilliant ploy.

If darkness ruled, every platform of media would be screaming and shouting with the distraction of what was the least important in life. We would have distraction and triviality marketed to us at breakneck speed, at the most oppressive volume. We would be up to our eyes in the refuse of the world which either comes to rest in our oceans or our brains, never to decompose or be removed unless the most revolutionary of actions is taken.

If darkness ruled, our natural resources would be stolen from us beneath our noses, sacrificing the freedom and well-being of every future child to be born on this planet for the fattening of billionaires’ already swollen coffers. Water that could not be bought would be destroyed at the source by nefarious means weakly claimed in ignorance, destroying the planet’s living systems, enforcing further scarcity onto an already overpopulated world of sad, lost, dying beings.

If darkness ruled, the power of the divine light would have been attempted to be stamped out at every occasion. Powers of darkness would strip the authentic specialness of any occasion to make room for a calendar in which each day is claimed to be filled up with misery and nonsense. The sacredness of nature would be seen as a threat, so inch by inch, it would be razed to make way for the Satanic altars of enslavement and mass production.

If darkness ruled, our ideologies would be so skilfully divided so that wherever your political allegiances lie your hand would be forced to support long-term dysfunction and harm.

If darkness ruled, you wouldn’t want to spend another minute under the spell of such a world, no matter how unwell your mind had been made in the process, demanding a steady supply of sickening thrills and demonic highs. Knowing about it would mark the beginning of the end of illusion, the power of the spell would begin to wane, and the only sane recourse would be to begin the process of detoxifying our souls and healing.

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). Compilations of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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The Cosmic Penitentiary

My mother has a theory that this world is one gigantic prison, known as “The Pen”. This theory is based on the observation that most of the people walking the streets of the West look like the inmates of mental asylums. It’s apparent on first glance that there’s something seriously wrong with most people here – so what’s going on?

This essay will explain from an Elementalist perspective.

Many of us have found ourselves wondering how we got here. Of all the possible worlds that one might incarnate into, what did we do to deserve to incarnate into this one, full of violence, sickness, death and misery? It seems like a punishment to be born into a world where we inevitably die, and almost always in extreme pain.

The truth is that we’re all in The Cosmic Penitentiary, a.k.a. “The Pen”: a prison for criminal souls.

As above, so below: we got put in The Pen for the same reason that criminals in the human world get put in prison. In the human world, society decides that certain elements within it are injurious to the greater good, and so it expels them into quarantine zones that we call jails, prisons or penitentiaries. This is roughly analogous to how the human body expels excrement and urine.

In the cosmic world, elements that are injurious to the greater good are similarly expelled – into lower dimensions that serve as quarantine zones. In Elementalism, these dimensions are collectively known as the Hell Realms, as depicted in the theology of many different religions. This world is one of them.

If we do enough self-inquiry, and are fully honest with ourselves, we will agree that it’s perfectly fair that low-frequency fragments of consciousness are forced to incarnate among their own kind. Once this is accepted, it’s possible for true healing to begin; it’s possible to direct one’s life in such a manner that low frequencies are transmuted into higher ones.

A penitentiary is somewhere a person is sent to if they are too arrogant and need to learn some humility. Each of us have been forced to incarnate into The Pen on account of that our selfish behaviour in previous lives has disgusted God. The punishment for this is to die – that is to say, to experience the utter helplessness of dying and death, with a view to being inspired by this into spiritual reformation.

The beings in the higher dimensions, who we share the Great Fractal with, did not want to have low-frequency consciousnesses stinking up their otherwise pleasurable experience. This is entirely understandable. Public restaurants don’t allow people who haven’t showered for months to stink up the ambience, so why would beings in higher dimensions allow the spiritual equivalent?

We are forced to incarnate among our own kind, whether we like it or not.

In the same way that trashy people attract trashy people in this world, and in the same way that classy people attract classy people, trashy fragments of consciousness attract trashy areas of the Great Fractal, and classy fragments of consciousness attract classy areas of the Great Fractal. As per the Law of Assortative Reincarnation, every fragment of consciousness reincarnates in a world full of similar frequencies.

All of us have a relatively low frequency of consciousness as a result of crimes committed in previous lives. Some of us were murderers, others were rapists, robbers, liars, fraudsters. All of us were odious enough that the majority part of the Great Fractal does not want to be associated with us. But because of our pride we are unrepentant. As such, we have to be punished.

To punish a criminal consciousness, it isn’t enough to subject it to suffering. So the Hell Realms are not full of demons who were created specifically to torment their victims. It’s much simpler than that. The Hell Realms are populated by beings who create Hell around them through their own selfishness. And as such, they punish each other.

A being sentenced to The Pen, therefore, has behaved in such a selfish manner that the rest of reality has forced them to incarnate here, where they are surrounded by other selfish beings, and thereby learn that selfishness is antithetical to Godliness. This they learn from the suffering caused to them by the other beings, all a reflection of themselves.

Proof that this world is one of the Hell Realms comes from the fact that everything here must die, and that we must kill each other to live. Such a grisly reality makes clear to even the most incalcitrant fragment of consciousness that selfishness is against the Will of God. And if it doesn’t? You just reincarnate here again until you do figure it out.

A world in which one must die is a perfect ego shredder. Just as people are humbled within this lifetime by being put in prison, people are humbled between lifetimes by being put in The Pen.

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