Author:Amy Torres

True Meditation is Without Effort or Purpose

Rupert Spira

The following essay is written by one of my favorite teachers of non-duality, Rupert Spira. Although Jesus in A Course in Miracles tends to use the word “practice” and “exercise” rather than “meditation,” he is always inviting us into the “quiet center” and the “stately calm within” which is meditation (only in workbook lesson 124 does Jesus explicitly use the word “meditation”).   Rupert’s view on meditation intersects nicely with Jesus’ view of  our natural state, and gives us another angle from which to relax into the truth of Being.

True Meditation is Without Effort or Purpose: Meditation as Being, Not Doing by Rupert Spira

You are already that for which you long. Meditation, in the deepest sense, is not a practice you take up or a discipline you perfect over time. It is the natural condition of being itself, available in every moment, prior to any effort or purpose. This essay explores what it means to rest in that condition and what stands in the way.

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Everything you do requires a degree of effort. And everything you do, you do for a reason – to bring about some change in the mind, the body or the world in the future. Meditation is an interruption of this flow of becoming.

If you are making an effort, you are in a state of becoming. If you are meditating for a purpose, for a reason, in order to acquire something, become something or understand something, then your meditation is taking you into the future. It is part of your project of becoming.

The mind is accustomed to always making an effort in order to achieve something. And it imagines that meditation is a refinement and a continuation of this project. And indeed, many meditation practices do give the mind something to do.

But what may be called meditation – or non-meditation – is not something you do or cease doing with the mind. Meditation is not what you do; it is what you are. Simply being.

How much effort does it take to be? And are you being for a reason or a purpose? Does the fact of being stand to gain or lose anything from the content of experience?

Ask yourself: am I being, or am I in a state of becoming? If there is any sense of becoming – meditating for a purpose, making an effort, trying to achieve something, even trying to achieve enlightenment or union with God – then you stand as the ego, the one who would derive some benefit from the effort.

Being is never enhanced or aggrandized by anything you might do or achieve. Being never wants to meditate. Being doesn’t want enlightenment. Being doesn’t seek peace. Being doesn’t want union with God.

If you are engaging in any of these activities, you stand as the one who feels a lack, who feels incomplete, and seeks something to complete or fulfil themselves. In other words, you stand as the ego, and your activity perpetuates that ego, that sense of separation.

There is nothing to do, nothing to achieve, nothing to become and nothing to understand. You are already that for which you long. Enlightenment is an idea created on behalf of the ego in order to keep it in a perpetual state of becoming – and, as such, to perpetuate its illusory identity.

The ego, the apparently separate self, can only exist in a state of becoming. So when you deprive it of the possibility of becoming, acquiring or achieving, it will feel redundant. It will feel like death to the ego. Indeed, it is a kind of death.

As a result, there may be some rebellion in your mind – a rebellion that persuades you to remain in a state of becoming. Don’t engage with this rebellion. Don’t do anything to it. Meet it with your understanding.

In time, the project of becoming gives way to the peace of being. The object-knowing mind that lives in a perpetual state of becoming will consider simply being to be boring. It will project a blank state onto being and experience it as boredom. And in an attempt to escape the discomfort of this boredom, it will do one of two things: escape into thinking, or fall asleep.

These are two subtle means of avoidance. If you are bored, don’t escape from it into thinking or sleeping. Sink down deeper. The peace of being lies just beneath your boredom. Boredom is like a blank screensaver that appears after all your other programmes have closed down, seeming to prevent you from seeing the screen as it is. Boredom is a blank state of mind that exists after the other states of mind have subsided, a thin veneer over the peace of being.

It is not so much that there is no effort, no practice, no purpose, but rather that there is no entity left on whose behalf any such effort, practice or purpose could arise. No one left to say: I want to be enlightened. I want to meditate. I want union with God. I want happiness.

‘I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope. For hope would always be hope for the wrong thing.’¹

Anything you search for, anything you long for, would always be the wrong thing, because it would always be an object or a state, and as such it would always disappear. Even if it were found, it would be lost.

In meditation – in non-meditation – the great search comes to an end: not a disciplined end, not a forced end, but a natural end. An end that is the natural consequence of understanding.

The project of becoming is outshone by the peace of being.

1  T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, Four Quartets (1943).

Forgiveness (some thoughts) by Peter Russell

I have appreciated Peter Russell’s work for many years now. He has a gentleness and humble intelligence that comforts and shines. Here is a piece on Forgiveness written by Peter.  It is not based on A Course in Miracles, so take what you like and leave the rest.  There is a lovely accompanying short meditation that can be found via his website: peterrussell.com

Forgiveness doesn’t always seem easy.  If someone has said or done something that has hurt us, forgiveness may feel like we’re letting them off.  “You did wrong, but I’m not going to punish you this time.”  But true forgiveness is far from letting someone off — or even thinking they did wrong.  It can be a profound healing process for both parties.

In the Bible, the Greek word that’s translated as “forgive” is aphesis.  Its literal meaning is “‘to let go” — to physically let go of something, as when we let go of a rope, or a rock, for example.  We’re releasing our grip on it.

With forgiveness, we are releasing the grip our mind has on some past event or experience.  We’re letting go of the judgments and grievances we’re holding; letting go of our beliefs about how others should have behaved or how they’ve done wrong.

When someone doesn’t behave as we expected, or as we would have liked them to behave, we might well feel angry.  It’s easy, then, to think that the other person has made us angry.  We make them responsible for our feelings.

But when we look  more closely, we often find that our upset comes from our interpretation of their behavior.  We’re telling ourselves a story about what happened, how they were wrong, and how they should have behaved.  So instead of saying they have made us angry, it would be more accurate to say we’ve made ourselves angry by how we judged their behavior.

True forgiveness comes from letting go of the judgments we’re holding — releasing the grip they have on our mind.  It’s something we do for our own benefit as much as for the other person.

One thing that can help is to put ourselves in the other person’s position.  If we could truly understand their motives — why they did what they did, what they might have been thinking and feeling, their own background and conditioning, their fears and pain, and the judgments they might have been holding about us — then we might begin to understand why they acted as they did.

We can begin to recognize that although they may not have behaved as we think they should have, they were, in a sense, behaving exactly as they should have — given all the factors that led up to their actions.

Forgiveness begins when we recognize that the other person was, deep down, wanting exactly what we want.  In their own way, they were seeking to ease their suffering and be more at peace.  But they went about doing this in ways that happened to impede our own search for peace.  Putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes fosters understanding, which leads to empathy and compassion.

This is not to imply we should accept someone’s bad behavior, or even condone it.  We may well feel the need to give them feedback, or make suggestions as to how they might behave better, but let’s do so with a compassionate heart, rather than from a judgmental mind.

Thank you, Peter Russell!

Recognizing Happiness by Daily Om

Daily Om is a platform full of wisdom and generosity. They offer a diverse array of online courses for minimal cost, and I have gratefully partaken of their offerings for years.  Here’s one for you:

When we take the time to recognize when we are happy and what that feels like, it becomes easier to recreate.

Those of us on the path of personal and spiritual growth have a tendency to analyze our unhappiness in order to find the causes and make improvements. But it is just as important, if not more so, to analyze our happiness. Since we have the ability to rise above and observe our emotions, we can recognize when we are feeling joyful and content. Then we can harness the power of the moment by savoring our feelings and taking time to be grateful for them.

Recognition is the first step in creating change; therefore, recognizing what it feels like to be happy is the first step toward sustaining this feeling in our lives. We can examine how joy feels in our bodies and what thoughts run through our minds in times of bliss. Without diminishing its power, we can retrace our path to discover what may have put us in this frame of mind, and then we can take note of the choices we made while there. We might realize that we are generally more giving and forgiving when there’s a smile on our face, or that we are more likely to laugh off small annoyances and the actions of others when they don’t resonate with our light mood.

Once we know what it feels like, can identify some of the triggers, and are aware of our actions, we can recreate that happiness when we are feeling low. Knowing that like attracts like, we can pull ourselves out of a blue mood by focusing on joy. We might find that forcing ourselves to be giving and forgiving, even when it doesn’t seem to come naturally, helps us to reconnect to those positive feelings. If we can identify a song, a picture, or a pet as a happiness trigger, we can use them as tools to recapture that bliss if we are having trouble finding it. By focusing our energy on analyzing happiness and all that it encompasses, we feed, nurture, and attract more of it into our lives — eventually making a habit of happiness.

To explore their offerings, go to dailyom.com

For those of you who do not have children, on Mother’s Day

For those of you who do not have children, this is for you on Mother’s Day. It’s from my human heart to yours. I trust it is infused with the divine love of the Divine Mother, but no preaching, no teaching, just heart-to-heart caring.

If you do not have children, and find Mother’s Day a painful reminder of that, I am here to hold your hand.  Maybe you have nurtured and, yes, mothered people, but no one counts you as a mother, because you do not have children.

Maybe you have taken yourself for granted, and not even realized how many lives you have warmed … even in a brief encounter, smiling at a stranger on the bus or in an elevator, and very likely, changed the entire course of their day.

How many times have you reached out a hand, yet no one celebrates you on this day?
Perhaps you continue to celebrate your own mother, yearning to have children but not sure that will ever happen … who understands this?

I want you to know that I do.

Maybe you were born male, but identify as female, and no one ever appreciates you on Mother’s Day.

I want you to know that I do.

Maybe you have had a stillbirth, miscarried, had an abortion … or worse … and, if anyone knows, they don’t know what to say. Especially today.

I say to you, with tears in my eyes, and a tender ache in my heart, I see you, I feel you, I appreciate you. You are beautiful. You are important. I care about you on Mother’s Day.

It is impossible that you have never mothered anyone,
so if you want to savor that title today, I say to you, “Thank you for your kindness, your nurture, your unsung deeds. Happy Mother’s Day.”

To those of you who have never given this a thought, please, think about it now. Open your heart to someone who may need to hear, “Happy Mother’s Day.” Look in their eyes when you say it, and show them you mean it.

We all need to be celebrated.
What about those of us who have nurtured and given selflessly but never had children, for one reason or another? What’s the name of the day that celebrates us? Maybe we should come up with one.

In the meantime, give the sweetest, most delicious gift you can give today … “Happy Mother’s Day” to all who deserve it — not just the obvious choices.

Love, Amy