Meditation

I have always resisted the word meditation. Much about it was suspect to me. Yet at the same time I have always practiced my own forms of meditation, without calling them that, or without having learned them.

For me, the realm of meditation includes: a) contemplation, that is, sinking into a thought and deliberately tracing impulses of thought on a subject, circling until the mental image becomes clearer and appears before the inner eye. b) Paying attention to one’s own breath. In this, one becomes conscious of one’s own body. That is, through conscious inhalation and exhalation, the body also straightens, the spine is relieved of strain and one becomes conscious of one’s own physical existence. With this consciousness of existence, new planes of consciousness can then be opened up. c) In transcendental meditation, the Self connects with general consciousness and can now assume almost any form. The concept of becoming is exciting in this context. The Self can now dissolve entirely into another. For example, the Self can open itself, or it can place itself mentally in another space or another time. Thoughts are free. These are forms of meditation that I generally practice for half an hour.

During longer meditations in the lotus position, lasting up to an hour and a half, entirely different things happen again. This also has something to do with the pain that the sitting posture brings. I sit, as it were, through the pain. This leads to a kind of trance. This boundary experience crosses the separation of Self and world; within it I find a reality where everything is in harmony.

India

In India I have the feeling that I can write this down without sounding like a dreamer. It feels natural to do so and to speak about it too. Perhaps my longing for India also has something to do with this. I have the feeling that here I can give my consciousness space without having to justify myself. These experiences are simply allowed to be and need not prove themselves against the compulsion to reduce imposed by a materialist philosophy. Rather, being here allows me, for the first time, to explore consciousness at all and, from these experiences, to understand the constraints of the Trinity, capital and neurobiology as such in the first place.

I am not a machine, and I do not want to be understood as one.

A beautiful description of what meditation can be is found in the Shvetashvatara Upanishads, chapter 2. In: “The Upanishads. Introduced and translated by Eknath Easwaran” ISBN-10: 3-442-21826-8, pp. 294–95.