Meditation Essentials: Consciousness

Iwas talking with a man a couple of days ago who said, “Meditation is the hardest thing you can do.” This is a perspective shared by a lot of people. Yet, it is not exactly accurate.

Real meditation is a state of consciousness. In fact, the state of meditation is the natural state of the consciousness, when it is unconditioned. The state of meditation is not separate from our true identity. When you access the state of meditation, you are accessing what you really are.

The state of meditation in itself is not “difficult” or “hard” — to say that would be like saying it is hard for water to be wet, or for fire to be hot.

The consciousness in its original unconditioned state is content, serene, wise, loving, diligent, insightful, joyful, and capable of seeing reality. That fundamental state of consciousness is what we call “the state of meditation.” Since it is the unconditioned, original consciousness, it exists in that way right now, inside of everyone, but unfortunately it is clouded, veiled, conditioned, obscured.

Imagine a glass of water in which the water is dirty, filled with impurities. The water may appear dark, but the original clean water is still there: it is just clouded, obscured. We all know that it is possible to remove the impurities, and the original, pristine, perfect water is recovered, revealed. That is exactly the case with our consciousness.

So, what is difficult is recovering that original state of consciousness, because to do so, you have to change. And as you know, no one wants to change.

We have become so conditioned by psychological factors that we lost access to that natural state. We have too much anger, pride, lust, greed, gluttony, envy, laziness, and many other psychological conditions that filter our consciousness: those qualities prevent us from accessing the state of meditation. So that is what is hard: changing those qualities.

Meditation appears difficult because of the conditioning that prevents us from accessing it.

Meditation itself is not what is difficult, it is our psychological conditioning that provides the difficulty. This is a really important distinction.

This is easier to understand when we know what the consciousness is, not from the theoretical point of view, and not from belief or terms we read in a dictionary, or what people have told us, but from our experience.

Confirming the Facts about Consciousness
In terms of facts and personal experience: what is our consciousness? Answering this question is the starting point for effective spiritual life.

Spiritually, personally, from experience, we need to know: what are the facts? What can we observe? What can we confirm? What can we repeat?

Here we take a scientific approach. We are not looking for something simply to believe or to aspire to, something to wrap around ourselves as a security blanket in order to protect ourselves from the terrors of the world. Instead we are looking for something that is confirmable, that is real, that can be experienced and known, not in the future, but today, now.

The state of meditation is a reality that can be experienced. The consciousness is a reality that can be experienced.

We start from our experience right now, we observe the facts about it, and we learn how to change it, and from change, we learn new facts. If there were no possibility of change, there would be no hope. But we know we can change. We have that power. So we start from a position of knowing the facts and knowing that we can change in a fundamental way towards achievable goals, towards realistic goals.

If instead we start from lies we tell ourselves, lies that have heard from others, but believe anyway, believing things that that cannot be proven, then we have no idea where we are going. We have no idea of what outcome will result from our actions.

This is the fundamental point of view that we emphasize over and over: beliefs do not matter. We really do not care what you believe. Believe whatever you want. Let's talk about facts. Let's talk about confirmable, provable, experiential facts.

First, a fact must be observed.

Observation is a perception, not an idea, interpretation, thought, judgement, or analysis. It is simply observation, the perception of something that is real. This is where we must start if we want to learn real meditation and have a really effective spiritual life.