“There are no concepts that can depict it, and, above all, there is no entity separated from the presence that experiences it. I’m not there.” An excerpt from Avikal’s book, Who is in? Beyond Self-image.
I want to take you to a place of pure magic… It’s the place athletes call the “zone”. Buddhists call “satori” and ravers call “trance”. I call it the Silver Desert. It’s a place of pure light that holds the dark within it. It’s a place of pure rhythm.”
– Gabrielle Roth
More and more frequently I am asked what meditation is and if I meditate. The first question is simple, and I usually answer indicating that there is a substantial difference between meditation techniques and meditation itself. Techniques are ways / processes to learn to practice presence by embodying it, while meditation is the state of pure presence beyond any technique. So, techniques are part of the world of form and are put into action by personality, while meditation is the natural state of Being, a manifestation of its true nature that is Pure Presence and, as Osho speaks of it, it is expressed as Choiceless Awareness. The second question is more complex because it implies a paradoxical answer: It is I who sits down, it is not me who is sitting.
Let me explain: for many years I have been waking up in the middle of the night, usually between one and three o’clock. I get up. I go to sit and meditate. I don’t use a particular technique. I don’t do Vipassana or Zazen. I don’t focus on anything specific; I just close my eyes and I’m there. I don’t grasp anything, and I don’t reject anything: what’s there is what’s there. My attention is free. I don’t have a goal or a set time, I’m sitting for half an hour, an hour, or more. I know when I’m going to sit down, and I don’t know when I’m going to get up. At some point I realize that my eyes open, my body stretches, and I go back to bed. It is I who choose to get out of bed and sit down when I wake up in the darkness. As soon as I close my eyes the sense of me begins to dissolve and there is a clear internal movement where attention shifts from being focused on objects of various types, physical or not, sensations, emotions, thoughts, images, memories, etc., to the space, to the container of objects I experience. This happens on its own.
In this movement various things identifiable at the beginning take place: the boundaries of the body expand and gradually tend to disappear; the perception of time changes radically until I experience “being beyond time”; every object that appears in consciousness is at the same time clearer, more precise, and also immersed in the vastness of the space in which it appears, not separated from it; paradoxically I feel light, evanescent, and completely rooted and centered even if there is no definable center; sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly, everything dissolves… I could add many other elements, but each description belongs to language, and the truth is that there are no words that can really describe presence. There are no concepts that can depict it, and, above all, there is no entity separated from the presence that experiences it. I’m not there. There is no separation and fundamental subject/object duality. There is no me who is sitting.
When I get up the self comes back, as they say, happy and satisfied.
The technique
Going back to meditation techniques, I know, I’ve had the experience and I hear it repeated over and over again: sometimes they’re boring, repetitive, “I have to make an effort,” “I feel like I’m not getting anywhere,” “How many years do I have to do them?” Etcetera… The point of techniques is not to take us to awakening. How could it be possible that a technique practiced by personality and decided by the conventional self could create spiritual awakening?
The task of the techniques is to frustrate us, to make us thirsty, to keep us on the razor’s edge and to push us to ask ourselves continuously: Why do I meditate? What am I looking for? And most importantly, DO I REALLY WANT TO WAKE UP? IS SPIRITUAL AWAKENING THE FIRST AND FUNDAMENTAL ITEM ON MY EXISTENTIAL SHOPPING LIST?
Each technique helps to continuously verify our commitment to support ourselves in the search; to rekindle our curiosity towards the unknown, our intention to be present with what is, our openness and submission to the Absolute.
Every good technique forces us to ask continuously: WHERE AM I RIGHT NOW? And when we begin to answer with absolute certainty: I am here, then in that solid grounding in the present moment, the mystery of “Who is in?” reveals itself.
Preconceptions
Often when I speak with people it turns out that most people tend to see meditation fundamentally as a state of motionless pacification. For sure, this is one of the qualities through which the Absolute manifests, and… there’s so much more!
For example, when the boundaries begin to dissolve and with them possibly even our attachment to particular forms / objects, an incredible dynamism between space and forms becomes evident. A dynamism that when we immerse ourselves in it shows us the continuous intersection, interdependence, synchronicity of emptiness and fullness, what Buddha pointed at when he said: “Emptiness is fullness, and fullness is emptiness.”
In this interdependence we can relax and let the deep currents of the Absolute open the doors of creativity: EROS, the divine spark.
In this synchronicity the richness of the present moment explodes through the myriad of possibilities that turn out as a gift of the Mystery.
Here the dissolution of the conventional self implies awakening to the reality of the co-creation of the present moment. Meditation is LIFE!
Here, another phrase of the Buddha: “Samsara is Nirvana and Nirvana is Samsara”, finds roots and realization thus radically upsetting all materialistic and spiritualistic conceptions of the real, and inexorably focusing our attention on the reality of every moment, and the absolute non-separation between everyday life and enlightenment.
Here we can understand that there is a real possibility of meditating not FOR enlightenment but FROM enlightenment, creatively as an expression of your, my, our uniqueness.
As far as I am concerned, I have no doubt that meditation is effective. Effective in opening the door to the direct experience of states of consciousness that go far beyond our usual awareness. It is also clear to me that meditation is absolutely not synonymous with sitting silently in some more or less strange position contemplating one’s navel and waiting for visions, angels, liberation, buddhas of various kinds or any special state. Indeed, all this slows down or even prevents the real experience of meditation as pure presence.
All of us, in different ways, and almost always unrecognized, find ourselves going through moments, life situations in which we are in meditation even if unknowingly: walking in nature, listening raptured to a piece of music, dancing letting ourselves be possessed by the movement, in intense moments of combat in martial arts, while painting or singing or playing, while we run, swim or surf… The state of flow, where I am one with the environment in which I interact, is meditation! Feeling fully involved in this moment, in this feeling, in this action where there is no separation or distance, this is meditation! Meditation in the world of form and relativity.
And it is essential to recognize it as such to avoid both idealizing meditation by making it something disembodied and almost inhuman, and also to recognize in ourselves a natural capacity intrinsic to our deep nature which acts even when we do not realize it.
Preferences
A question that naturally arises is that if it can be almost easy to flow with “pleasant” things, is it much more difficult, if not impossible, to flow with the “unpleasant” ones? I think it is clear that the terms “pleasant” and “unpleasant” are relative, to the person, to the situation, to the event, to the state in which we find ourselves, to the need we feel, etc. Things that are unpleasant under certain conditions are easy to deal with if we have a strong motivation or if the conditions (even mental) which implied that judgment change. For example, putting yourself in a dangerous situation can sometimes be pleasant, feeling pain can sometimes get us into expanded states of consciousness. Empathy with the suffering of others can create a state of fusion both inside and outside; if I am hungry, I can ingest and even enjoy food that until recently I would have avoided, and so on.
In many mystical traditions a highly touted technique has to do with acceptance. I’m not a fan of this technique, quite the contrary. I will not go into the deeper implications, but I merely observe that it is a temporary technique that can help to peel our densest layers of resistance and rejection of reality, but that in the long term it implies a constant attention to the objects that we reject. It is ineffective and fundamentally lacking. In addition, especially in countries with a strong Christian tradition, it often coincides with a victimistic and fatalistic ideology: I have to accept, I carry my cross, it is my burden… Much more efficient is to get out of the pleasant / unpleasant dualism by recognizing that it is a mental mechanism, based on cultural, religious, social conditioning (in addition to being one of the fundamental fuels of narcissism), and to radically free ourselves from the mechanism that operates unknowingly creating this division.
For starters, it’s about doing something very simple: recognizing that reality is indifferent to whether we accept it or reject it, WHAT IT IS, IS WHAT IS, EVERY MOMENT. So instead of having our attention on the object, event, situation and judgments we have about it, our attention shifts to ourselves, to that “I” who is experiencing: I open all my senses, and I am PRESENT in the recognition of what is there, whatever it is. Practicing CHOICELESS AWARENESS. And I emphasize the word practicing because it is not enough to understand intellectually, it is necessary that we notice as often as possible how we divide reality between good and evil, pleasant and unpleasant, beautiful and ugly, and how we continually cling to our preferences, which are being dictated by the past, and how this prevents us:
- to perceive directly the present moment.
- to respond creatively to what is present and therefore destroy EROS, the divine spark of the new that is present at all times.
- to grow in our ability to include new aspects of the real and new possibilities.
This means using meditation to become aware of resistance and preferences.
And look, I’m not saying that you have to change them, fight them, manipulate them. What I am saying is that by practicing presence with what is, dualism tends to dissolve, boundaries to melt, and we discover the fundamental unity and interdependence at the core of the Great Ground of Being. Flow is a manifestation of an inner state of non-separation and is independent from the content of the experience.
Excerpt from Who is in? Beyond Self-image
Who Is In? Beyond Self-image
by Avikal Costantino
O Books, 2022
Paperback and Kindle version
Paperback: 208 pages, ISBN-10: 1785359479, ISBN-13: 978-1785359477
Kindle: ASIN: B0BHTXZQL5
Available via Amazon – waterstones.com
Related articles
- Who is in? Beyond Self-image – Sudasi reviews Avikal’s latest book: “A wonderful resource for everyone who seeks to deeply connect to the moment, and increase their awareness and understanding of themselves.”
- Completeness – An excerpt from Who is in? Beyond Self-image
- What do we need identity for? – An excerpt from Who is in? Beyond Self-image
- Beyond the search – An excerpt from Who is in? Beyond Self-image
Comments are closed.