‘Mediterranean Seacost’ – Isaac Levitan, 1890 – WikiArt
When you have an hour in front of you given to meditation or contemplation, don’t ever think that you are engaging in something that is happening in time and place. It is not an hour that you have, that you occupy with an activity. Nothing is taking place, and nothing is lasting in time. Forget these well-rehearsed notions. Your meditation is a presence in which time and place cease to appear as a frame in which you live. They die out in yourself, are melted in your essence, to never reappear quite in the same way. They are washed by your living presence. You are cleansed of their conceptual limitations. Meditation is like a good bath, and you are the water. Nobody is having a bath. Presence is not what you are in. Presence is what you are, and you are nowhere to be found.
There is only a sinking, a deepening of presence. Borders are discovered to be not there. Walls falling all around. Divisions re-assembled. Your being ceases to be mistaken for a limited entity, but is solely the wild, unlimited, unlocated, dimensionless expanse of the nature of everything and everyone. You are in a place that doesn’t have any location, and where time cannot enter. Presence is the only thing in presence. Your life ceases to take place in time, which appears to be just a tool that finds its expression through your thinking process. And space is the illusion that perceptions are creating for you to have a location. Presence provides you with all the necessary appearances to create a body-mind-world. Meanwhile, you as pure being remain untouched, changeless, massive, solid, teeming. Meditation as an activity has ended. Who could possibly meditate in the absence of a meditator?
You have now landed in a spot where you have no need to be a separate entity, and no advantage for it. You have ceased being a person with a story and a destiny. Your body doesn’t qualify you anymore, and is not the recipient of your self. You have become independent, free, non-aligned. You acquire the proportions of a whole world, which has now become your most intimate body. You have lost all qualifications, all identities, and have surrendered to the one all encompassing, all pervading being. Nothing could describe you now. What you are has been relieved of every objective substance. You couldn’t worry the least for your self, which you discover to be devoid of even the possibility of being harmed, diminished, or impaired. Suffering appears to you like the most exotic thing there is. Hope is not even on the list, and all impulse of seeking is gone and forgotten. Wholeness fills you all, and makes you the thing you had previously sought, hoped and suffered for, in every possible direction except in the direction of your own present, inescapable being.
What you have longed for is what you are, which is being alone. When you have been stripped of all the attributes that pertain to time and place, to qualities, conditionings, situations, objects, including the body-mind-world you apparently live in, then you may come upon what you truly are. A being alone, unattached, empty of place, devoid of time, fierce and fearless like a peaceful, unmovable, gargantuan warrior. Why a warrior? Because you as being have subdued all forms, and have been made the vanquisher and pacifier of every division, limitation, separation, and defect. You have consented to your formless nature. This verily, is meditation in a nutshell.
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Text by Alain Joly
Painting by Isaac Levitan (1860-1900)
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Website:
– Isaac Levitan (Wikipedia)
Suggestion:
– Other ‘Reveries’ from the blog…
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