"Exhibit true superiority by virtuous conduct and exercise of reason. Meditate deeply on the vanity of earthy things and understand the fickleness of life." Gautam Buddha.
Tantra and occult Mahayana Buddhism bring a very radical understanding of meditation. The state of meditation is described as being immediately freed from their past. Hence, it implies coming out of all our past fears also, and living a courageous life within the present. Cultivating a meditative consciousness for fearless living is the foundation upon which the strength to overcome life's challenges arises, spontaneously and without effort. Masters such as Gampopa, and Tantric Mahasiddhas such as the Bengali Tantric Tilopa, pointed the way to such a meditative attitude in life.
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| Meditative Consciousness |
Meditation is to be looked at as a refresh system, a refresh button. You are to immediately surrender the past. You are immediately to discontinue with the whole content of your mind, which is really about the past. The mind is a great repository of memories, about mental impressions and karmic impressions, and the meditative state is freedom from that. That is the most dynamic principle of Tantra and esoteric Buddhism. It implies slipping out of those grooves of thoughts, anxieties, and fears which are generated from the past. And when you do that, you suddenly feel part of a great wholeness! A great universal feeling floods you. Because you are going beyond your individual memories, your individual consciousness and subconsciousness, and becoming aligned with universal consciousness.
The problem with the past is that it keeps you confined. It creates neural networks in your brain and leads to certain habits of thinking in repetitive patterns: hence, old feats and anxieties take Meditation is something which takes you out of that. It's discontinuous from that which you have known, that which you have experienced and so on. And in that way it takes you to a state where you feel released. It's like coming out of jail, it's like coming out of this enclosed house and coming into the fresh air! That is the beauty of meditation, and that is the most fundamental part about Tantra and esoteric Buddhism. Yet, how exactly are we told to do this: getting out of the mind's obsession with the past? Tantra and esoteric Buddhism say that you have to consciously drop your attachment to all your learning, all your memories, all your scriptures - everything that you've known and completely move into a situation where the curtain lifts for you and the real play of life starts happening. So far, you have lived in a situation where the curtain of memory, the curtain of past impressions, has kept away your view of the universal. It has kept away the view of your own entirety of energy. lt has kept you away from the divine. Coming back to your original universal self means cracking that boundary, breaking through that wall. Pull down the wall of memory, pull down the wall of the past, and then you become full of heartfulness! You become full of fearlessness. You become full of a different sort of courage.
Real Meditation
Hence, 'meditation' simply implies living naturally, simply, fearlessly, unburdened by the past. It implies living with a great deal of poetry within your heart, an appreciation for the present moment, and a great deal of bravery. It implies being completely aware and completely awake. And then you find that all the dimensions of life start coming to you and unfolding their gifts to you. The subtle sense of being engaged by the past has completely been thrown out of your system: you have thrown it out. You have completely emptied yourself from the pathological obsession with the past, and hence are lighter and freer to be your courageous self, acting dynamically.
Human beings are pathological when it comes to the past. A large part of our minds is stuck within it, and that is a great limitation. You see, in Buddhism the word for liberation is Nirvana, and that means utter freedom. It means the extinguishing of the fame, and it actually implies the extinguishing of the fame from the past. The Buddha or the Bodhisattva is one who's completely moved on: he's liberated from the bondage of the past. Such a being is truly dynamic. Such a being is one who really has entered the universal domain of things. And so doing, the very being of such a person becomes full of blissfulness. The person himself or herself becomes a great gospel of truth: because all the old gospels have dropped from such a person's mind-body complex. And there is massive fulfillment in this.
While the past may carry a lot of happiness, it also carries a lot of anguish. There is a lot of confusion-creating potential from past memories, a lot of dust on them from the mystical point of view. So what is the need for our over-obsession with the past? You don't have to keep coping with your past! Most people, you'll find, are coping with their past. That is the whole business of psycho-analysis, making you cope with the past. Yes, to come out of the past sometimes you need to deal with it and resolve it. But if you are obsessed by it, it becomes a completely limiting facto. Meditation is stopping this interference of your past with your current living, and coming to a situation where you enter the fresh light of the present day. You are to become a non-dreamer about the past, and become an awakened being. That is the whole emphasis of Tantra and esoteric Buddhism: awakened, enlightened, and non-frightened being, It implies the state of meditative consciousness, feeling, thought, and action. Through it, much energy is generated in you and, therefore, you can heal yourself. A new you is ready to be born. The whole magic of meditative being happens to you, because you are no longer obsessed with what happened, but are concerned more with the reality of what is happening. The yesterday can be made to completely disappear if you go into the meditative state, and that's how your intelligence starts moving in fresh ways, liberated and non-divided ways. It starts moving with a great deal of richness and awareness. It is not imprisoned by that which had happened: it is beyond the grasp of that.
From the spiritual angle, the past is to have a certain shelf life. Beyond that, it starts wearing you down. It's like a commodity on the food shelf in the mall: it has an expiry date! Let it be expired: once it's expired, throw it out, else it will keep rotting! You don't need it. Go fresh, enter fresh dimensions, be dynamic! Be in a situation where you're completely listening to what is evolving now, and through that you become not only relaxed but you also become Concentrated. You become intense, you become passionate. You become formed of the complete light of courage, intelligence, and consciousness. Through that a great beauty happens within your being. You come into a situation where all your weaknesses start evaporating. You see, our weaknesses are actually our sense of weakness: it is our consciousness attached with the notion of weakness. So if you feel you've not been good at something in the past, you'll also feel that you cannot do it in the future, that you cannot be good at at it ever, perhaps. That is the mechanism of fear-creation within the mind. Your brain will suggest to you that you are afraid through a kind of autosuggestion ot auto-hypnosis. This is what keeps people limited.
Real Winning
To be a real victor or a real winner in anything, you must discontinue the nonsense about what happened in the past and come to a new consciousness. This is the most essential part about meditation. Meditation is not about sitting down and doing a 'meditation'. It's about one's state of consciousness at any given moment. Disconnect yourself and be discontinuous from what happened in the past, and then you come to a situation where meditation is spontaneous. So you can do meditation without even meditating! That is the contribution, the vision of esoteric Tantric Buddhism. So while you'll see statues of the Buddha in meditation, actually every moment of bis was in meditation. It is about being discontinuous with the past. It's about taking the next step without thinking of the previous step. It is said in esoteric Buddhism, that the Buddha leaves no footprints on the sand: the footprints get washed away by the sea, and that's the way we should be. Let the footprints of our past get washed away by the sea of consciousness. It is said in Tantra that the birds leave no footprints in the sky: they keep flying, and are not weighed down. They can attain greater heights, they can fly faster, they can fly freer without looking back. Hence, the symbol of esoteric traditions around the world is often a bird of some sort, because the bird is free to fly into the open sky. It is not limited by the earth; it is almost otherworldly because it has the ability of flight. So, if you want to fly in your inner domain of consciousness, higher and higher, be like the bird. There is no need to think about what happened in the past. Yes, your intelligence will take you where you need to go. It's like birds migrating: they have an intuitive inbuilt system about where to migrate. So, the Siberian cranes used to come to India. They have an intuitive system. It's not because they're recollecting the past, but intuitively the past has taught them something. Before their numbers dwindled, they made their way to the great lakes of the Indian subcontinent during the cold of winter. And they went back to their original homes once the winter was over and summer came. They migrate to warmer and hospitable climes when need be, in a cycle. So too, in Vedic mythology, goes the lore about the swans of the sacred Lake Mansarovar (Swan Lake) of Tibet.
The phenomenon of enlightened and fearless living is all about getting rid of the repressed past. And much of our past is repressed. It rankles, it eats away at our greater consciousness. It eats away at our intelligence, and it keeps us fearful. What is the root of fear? The roots of fear are in repressed anxieties. The present-moment fears are simply a result of past repressed anxieties and fears. You might not even be aware of those past repressed fears, but they come back again and again. They resurface in your life. The whole art of psycho-analysis is to get rid of the trauma which you might have gone through in the past, but the problem is that very often psycho-analysis does not really work because it takes you back to a very self-conscious way of looking at life; and in that self-conscious way of looking at life, you are not able to come to a situation where you can appreciate yourself as you are. Meditation means celebrating yourself as you are, of leaving the past expressions behind, of coming to a deeper understanding of life as it is non, as it is without the burden of the past gnawing at you. Then, you find that you are in a situation where the real inner part of yourself can move towards joy, can move towards happiness, can move towards intensity and passion for action! And through that comes about the successful, fearless fulfillment of life.
"Hidden in the mountains is a mysterious market... There, you can barter the noise of common life for endless light!" Milarepa
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