BMC Newsletter #43

To those who practice meditation and search for wisdom's way

How to defragment

It’s been awhile since the last newsletter—I shouldn’t call this a “news” letter because it isn’t news—and as I was sitting here the impulse rose to begin writing to you. Now that computers have become out extension, we all know about de-fragmentation and the need to “optimize” our machines so there energy flows efficiently instead of getting lost among the fragments of data. There is special software that does this job of optimizing for us, and I can always tell a difference in the machine’s speed when it is done.

Well, guess what? Meditation is the mind’s way of de-fragmenting. It is no accident that the computer is a mirror of the human mind that invented it. We get into trouble, however, when we think we can make our lives more efficient and peaceful by improving our computers and not the mind’s that made them or use them. It is a great joke on us that we neglect our mind so we can put all our attention on the technology that we believe will solve the problems caused by neglected the mind. This is a bottomless vortex and it only ends when the computer and/or the mind crashes.

So when it comes to the mind, why wait until it crashes in a nervous breakdown or some tragic situation that shakes the daylights out of you, as if the world was trying to wake you up. Everyone is in the process of crashing, and we spend much of our gossip energy discussing who has blown his hard drive and has to rebuild his mind/world.

The primary illusion that creates this very human condition is that we don’t believe that the world is in our mind. We are conditioned to believe that we are in the world and that the world is doing us in. But all the wisdom teachings of the sages and saints turn this belief inside out. Each of our worlds—and we each have a world—is as we perceive it. Change your perception and you literally change your world, and I mean literally.

To follow through with our metaphor of the computer, meditation is the software that makes our mind whole by dissolving the fragments. The fragments are not destroyed—that is, our likes and our dislikes, our fears and our doubts, our pleasures and our pains—they are just integrated into our wholeness and the energy that was locked and blocked in the fragments becomes available as potential consciousness. The experience of the available energy is creativity, joy, and peace.

Potential consciousness is pure consciousness—or just plan attention. When your mind is optimized, you can focus your entire mind on a problem or project, and when our conscious energy is free to focus, we experience life as a state of spontaneous play.

The experience of fragmentation is what you call stress. Perceive your world from your center of awareness and the world becomes your friend; perceive the world from a fragment of your mind—such as a desire or fear—and the world becomes your enemy. Meditation is the path to your center and your peace.

Om Peace. Meditate.

 

 

Thank you,
Ed
Om Peace
10/9/07
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