Meditation (selected excerpts) – by Sparrow

I’m going to share something wonderful with you that I just discovered, written by a friend. I read, and write, about meditation, all the time, and have been doing that for most of my life. But I’ve NEVER come across anything like this. I feel utterly compelled to share some of my favorite bits from this amazing article by Sparrow.​​​​​​​

Prepare to be highly entertained, weirdly illuminated and just slightly terrified:

MEDITATION IS SLOW — as slow as the moon crossing the sky. If you want to change quickly, use drugs.
THERE IS A deep and hideous truth that we all spend our lives avoiding. That’s why we constantly chatter with friends, go to Lakers games, and spend hours on Facebook: we’re desperate to distract ourselves from this one heartless fact.Meditation asks: Suppose we stop running from the nameless demon. Suppose we turn and behold its twisted, ugly face. What will happen?

“STRUGGLE IS THE essence of life,” my guru used to say. And meditation is certainly a struggle. For eight years I was a substitute teacher. Meditating is a lot like forcing a class of unruly thirteen-year-olds to study irregular verbs.
MEDITATION IS AN elusive subject to describe. It’s like writing about the color blue.
MEDITATION IS LIKE practicing the guitar, but without the guitar.
THERE AREN’T MANY synonyms for meditation in English. Ananda Marga uses the term sādhanā, which derives from the Sanskrit for “effort.” I’ve invented other phrases to describe meditating: “brain-cleansing,” “cross-legged nonthinking,” “silence-chewing,” “mind-yoga.” Sometimes I refer to meditation as “self-kidnapping”: you stick a revolver in your own ribs, throw a bag over your head, and drive yourself to a warehouse where you sit in silence, awaiting ransom.
MEDITATION IS LARGELY a pretense. Sitting with eyes closed and legs elegantly folded, you resemble an ancient sage. Inside, you’re still the same idiot you always were.
WE ALL LIE to ourselves every day, especially about our emotions. We tell ourselves we’re happy when we’re actually anxious, dismayed, resentful. When you close your eyes and listen to your breathing, you discover what a liar you are.
EACH OF US feels that we are separate from our environment, an island of ego looking out through eyeholes. In fact, our lungs are in constant dialogue with the atmosphere, and with all the earthly plants and animals producing that atmosphere. This dialogue literally gives us life. Separation is illusory; atmospheric unity is truth.
HAS MEDITATION IMPROVED my life? I can’t tell. There’s only one of me. If I had an identical twin who’d never meditated, scientists could examine the two of us and analyze the differences. As it is, I can only guess. I do suspect that, had I never performed sādhanā, trees would not speak to me.

ACTUALLY ONCE IN my life I did feel empty. In 1975, the day after attending a retreat with Swami Muktananda in Ocala, Florida, I was walking down a sidewalk and saw an azalea bush. Suddenly I had no thoughts! I could see the azaleas lucidly, without any interference from ideas, concepts, memories. I felt fulfilled, timeless — and a little scared: What if I never had another thought again?Since then, I haven’t stopped thinking.
MEDITATION IS THE closest humans come to purring.

BOB JACOBSON WAS an artist who lived in a trailer near me in the Catskills. The outside of his home was an art gallery of sorts, bedecked with paintings he’d made on aluminum panels. He also carved abstract wooden sculptures in his front yard.“No one knows how to look at art anymore,” Bob once told me. “You should be able to gaze at a painting for an hour.”A few months later he elaborated: “You can look at anything as if it’s a painting. Sometimes I’ll go into the woods and just stare at the scene in front of me as if it were a Cézanne canvas.”Bob Jacobson died a few weeks ago. I just realized he was teaching me meditation.

THE MESSAGE OF meditation is: “You already have everything you need — if not forever, at least for the next ten minutes.”

I hope you enjoyed Sparrow’s playful wisdom as much as I did!