Meditation- By William Samuel

Transcribed excerpt from audio recording title

Woodsong #6 Meditation- Mentation

By William Samuel

There is a question that comes to me again and again that has to do with meditation. People say they can't seem to meditate, they are not able to get the benefits of meditation. They say they are never able to hear the little click of understanding that Goldsmith has mentioned so often in his work on his tapes. Some people tell me that they are not able to meditate because they can't stop thinking, or they fall asleep or something.

Well, let me tell you what I found for myself. Like many, I used to believe that meditation in its highest form was supposed to bring one to a non-thinking state and I tried in vain to stop all mental activity with meditation. I had concluded that meditation was to be - or that mentation, the thought processes, were to be brought to a stop completely, and that was after study in the orient with three different groups of meditators, I still believed that the purpose of it all was to stop mentation. But this isn't so, it's only partly correct. Now, while semantics can get all messed up in this explanation, please listen gently and I will explain something that I find that even long-time meditators can understand very little of, especially those who are meditating for personal benefit - you know, for their personal relief from tension or their personal refreshment of mind and body which would allow them to revivify themselves, and all that stuff, which is actually just froth and foam at the surface of meditation, only the merest beginning of what it's really about.

Now, when meditation has performed its greatest service, it leads to the recognition of the divine Mind, the Overmind, the Cosmic Mind, or whatever you want to call it, and its relationship to the world of tangibility. I emphasize that last part: 'its relationship to the world of tangibility', because this is what so often is left out. While meditation surely subdues one's thoughts about the processes involving the material world, while at the same time allowing a consciousness of pure thought, as one learns to maintain the meditative state of mind, he learns also about the appearances of illusion and why those appearances, and what to do about them, why the appearances and what's wrong with the world and what to do about them, if anything.

Mostly, when meditation reaches its peak within us, we find ourselves with a knowledge of what to do for our world, not just the personal stuff about how to relax and invigorate the body or how to levitate and all that absolute foolishness, not just the surface stuff about how to take care of one's personal affairs, his own body and his health and that of his family.

I would like to say here that, as I understand it, with meditation one doesn't stop thinking. The purpose of meditation and all the mind-stilling exercises in the world are not intended to stop thinking because they can't stop the divine Mind's thinking. At best, when they most nearly accomplish their original intentions, that is the meditative exercises, what they do is they end thinking, our thinking as a human being. They slow or they stop our thinking as a mortal, the subdued thinking as an egotistical self-centred misidentification, but they don't stop thinking, you see, they don't stop mentation. Awareness goes right on being aware and if the meditative exercises have done their job awareness continues without the misidentifications, inhibitions and all the baseless desires and anxieties and distortions and his concepts of power and his concepts of flows of energy and all of that junk. Please understand, we don't stop thinking, we simply stop thinking as that miserable, limited speck in space to allow the thoughts of deity to be heard. We think less as a person and allow the museful meditations of God-Mind to enter conscious awareness, to enter…well, to enter from where? From the sub-conscious, in one direction, or from the Overmind, Cosmic Mind, or whatever you want to call it, and a psychologist would still call this thinking but it is more musing, it is more like thought noting to me, simply because I don't know what to call it. But there is a grand difference between this and the ordinary thought process that we normally engage in, and which are stilled as a consequence of quiet musing or meditating.

This selfless musing is a little bit like daydreaming-I don't know how to explain it, it runs lightly, like a colt that has just been turned out to pasture. Or, a better illustration, the musing of the meditative state is like a puppy that is walking and running and frisking with his master. He's skipping freely… the puppy is…from interest to interest. He is led one moment by his eyes, sees something and runs, and then the next moment by his nose, he smells and runs, and the next moment by his ears, he hears something and he runs again. And yet all of his roaming and his rambling from thicket to cricket, from bush to bush, keeps naturally in a direction and a speed that is set by the master that he's walking with. Unbound freedom within the protective guidance of love.

And so it is with Awareness, awareness is the functioning of Mind. Awareness is the puppy of mind. Awareness runs freely and skips but it's kept within bounds, within the bounds that Mind is, within a limitless, boundless infinity that really has no bounds, but this is translated humanly, the musing doesn't allow us to go off half-cocked, running with the heart without any thought whatever of the consequences of our actions. And most certainly, it never allows our human actions to be hurtful or harmful to another.

Well, this is at least how meditation is for me. I run from wonder to wonder. I can't say that I do this on the wings of Awareness but as the very wings of Awareness Itself. And I'm not tethered by mind, not tied by mind but guided, guided with an assurance that I simply have learned not to doubt nor question.

This is a small part transcribed from William Samuel's audio tape Woodsong #6

If you want this Woodsong #6 transcript or the audio cd please email:sandy@williamsamuel.com

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