Asides

The power of meditation

One of my favorite gurus is Osho… a controversial figure. He dared speak the truth even to the face of his placiddetractors. He blurted blistering opinions on almost anything from the medical establishment, to corporations, to schooling, to meditation. He was a witness to the fusing of two worlds, the West and East worlds, a fusion he deemed necessary because he didn’t seem the split that characterized the world would help us go forward.

We hear often that we live in a free world, but this is just a sweet chimera. Half of the world has been and continues to be under more or less obvious oppressive regimes. This has being going on for centuries. And the West… well, just look at the media reports on the NSA surveillance and now the more recent New York Times’ report unveiling how the AT&T has a deal with the US Drug Enforcement Administration, to which it has provided with 26 years of phone call records. Privacy has gone through the drain.

Osho understood freedom and the illusion of freedom very well.

“The freedom from something is not true freedom.
The freedom to do anything you want to do is also not the freedom I am talking about.
My vision of freedom is to be yourself.”

In “Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic,” a compilation of nearly 5,000 hours of Osho’s recorded talks, we learn not only about his life but also about the importance he gave to meditation.

Meditation, he said, is the only thing that can give us freedom. It will free us of the mind.

Psychoanalysis and psychosynthesis, he said, work on the mind and make us more conscious of the mind. Instead, meditation makes us observe the mind and to the extent we stop identifying with it, we transcend. Transcendence IS freedom.

Osho encourages dynamic meditation and practicing it alone… if you feel comfortable with it. The group, according to Osho is for people who have grown uncomfortable with their egos. They can “dissolve” into the group and forget about their egos for a while.

Why I talk in first person

On the right… a list of posts. Click on the one you want to read.

I want to issue a warning.

I talk in first person. I believe that we’re all unique and that my experiences and conclusions might not apply to every other person.

I am not shy in disclosing my shadow. Most people hide it. Unfortunately, this will invite others – sometimes – to judge me and the judgement will be based in the fact that I am a Reiki Master and have been in a spiritual path for a very long time. So, some people wonder, how come I haven’t get rid of the ugly side?

I am very careful to prevent possible judgment from expressing my wholeness. It is important to me to be authentic. I don’t want to go into denial. Only when my shadow is visible to others, they can become my mirrors and it’s through my image reflected on them that I can become aware of my own dark side.

I don’t think that being human we could really abstract ourselves from society or kill the ego. I don’t even think we should kill the ego. The ego is the regulator of our physical aspect. The ego doesn’t give us much trouble unless it’s disconnected from the soul, the soul being the light, the part of us that connect us with everything that exists.

I am not sure that we can say that we are spiritual beings living a human experience either. This for me would be a linear statement. It implies separation between physical and spiritual aspects of our being. I see these aspects as part of a whole.

Separation and fragmentation is the problem that we are facing in the world. We see our differences before we see our commonalities. We see the part before we see the whole. We need to look at things from a dialectic perspective, like Khalil Gibran did in his master piece, The Prophet.

I don’t believe either that we can say we are here to learn and evolve… being part of the whole, the soul has it all, knows it all, is perfect. It’s love and joy. Maybe all there is is love. I believe we are experiencing an adventure here with the normal ups and downs of any adventure. The physical aspect of our body allows us to become aware of certain aspects of this adventure that for the subtle part of our being would be impossible to experience.

The adventure makes us increasingly aware of our divine nature, of our wholeness.