Meditation used to be what I had to do in order to be good. Being good is, of course, a relative measurement. One can try to be a good artist, a good father, a good citizen, a good employee, a good Christian or Buddhist, and finally, a good human being. Each of these goods has a standard against which one is measured. I wanted to be a good yogi.

I’m reminded of the marks on the kitchen door jam where children have their inches measured. “Oh, you are almost up to your brother’s mark.” Some kind of measurement begins at our earliest age. And we spend our whole life trying to measure up to something. And we are always looking for new and more promising methods to help us reach our goals of “being good.”

Meditation, while it usually finds itself being used as a means to “being good,” is specifically designed to unravel this fabric of “good” which keeps us in a straight jacket. We start the practice of meditation because we want to get some benefit that a teacher or book tells us we should have. How long we continue the practice depends on how strong our desire for the goal is. Many do not last very long, because trying to meditate and make one’s mind still is like one hand pushing against the other. After awhile, it becomes absurd. We drift away, looking for some other “good” to become.

The mystery in meditation is really a paradox that can’t be solved by the mind. Meditation is the effort to end making an effort. Telling the mind to do something without trying gets a very puzzled look, the look of a child when told to be happy.
Meditation can be understood as an ice cube in a cup of water, the mind just dissolves in meditation. If we could look inside the cube of ice, we would see a subject and an object, a knower and a known, or a meditator and the object of meditation.

But we, watching this, know that there is water floating the ice cube. The ice cube, with its attention divided into its dialogue between the knower and the known, is not aware of the warm water melting its boundaries. But it senses that something very significant is going on, and it feels threatened. It resists melting by thinking more because melting is totally beyond its known world. Sounds like Columbus trying to convince people the earth is round instead of flat, doesn’t it? "Oh, you can't go there. You'll fall off!"

If the ice cube is the thinking mind, what is the water? Here is the realization that meditation can bring to those who dive deep. We are the water of pure awareness. But we can never know the water as an object of knowledge. We can only BE the water...and, what’s more, we have always been the water. We just thought we were the mind and its limited knower and the known. We are so much larger than that!

Meditation unlocks the eternal mystery of human existence framed in the question: Who Am I? This is the great question behind all questions: the goal of all striving for the Promised Land, the Kingdom of God, Nirvana, the end of the rainbow, and all the buried treasures known to movies and fairy tales and our dreams.

As long as we are locked in the ice cube of the mind, our life will be just one struggle to be good after another. “I’ll be good when I get this car, job, relationship, through this holiday, this day, this moment,” we tell ourselves as we squirm to get free of our straight jacket the mind calls the present moment.

Meditation is the practice of effortlessly witnessing the mind’s moving ice formations. Every thought, including the thought of me, is a frozen energy form..... while we are nothing..just formless spirit...just awareness...without the me.

To not be bound by ME.... is to be free.

So, let's take the wrappings off our gift of freedom right now....and have an early Merry Christmas.

Thank you,
Om Peace
Ed Conley

12/19/06

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