Meditation – As A Journey Of Exploration Or Explanation?

Can Meditation Be Taught?

Teaching is an interesting concept. From one aspect, teaching can simply be seen as a process of transferring of knowledge. For example, a lecturer presents to you some informational research about what happens to the human brain of someone who meditates regularly long-term. You are amazed by the facts; you learn something new; the idea sounds pleasing to you; you like the information and you store it away. Now you have the information that you didn’t know before. But there is also another aspect of teaching that provokes an individual to uncover what is already there within. This kind of teaching is a process of direct experience. In this sense, meditation is not something to be taught but it is more of a practice to be experienced.

Explanations For A Logical Brain

For some reason, our minds are engineered to love knowing the reasons behind things. We’re naturally attracted to the answers – the missing piece to the puzzle. Don’t get me wrong -- it is a great mindset to have, and our civilization has advanced so much in the material world as a result of a curious thirst for knowledge. But there is this metaphorical story about an ancient warrior who got shot by an arrow. The scene simply is that the arrow has already pierced deep into his flesh, and he is in a lot of pain. One version of the story is that the warrior has a strong desire to know the answers first – “Who shot this arrow at me? Why did that person choose to shoot me? Was it an enemy? Was it a close friend who decided to betray me? What kind of arrow is it? What could I have done differently not to get shot by this arrow” So on and so forth. And there is also another version of the story where the warrior immediately finds ways to get the arrow taken out. Long story short, these two versions paint a picture of the difference between the theoretical and the practical when it comes to learning a new skill or finding a solution to a problem.

Instructive Path To Nurture Intuitive Awareness

This is not to disregard the importance of a diagnosis or understanding accurate facts about the reality of a situation before proceeding to take an appropriate medicine. The point here is not to focus solely on knowing the facts and getting carried away with them. Meditation is a beautiful thing and it’s very colorful to learn about the history of how the practice has been with us in one form or another since earlier days of our human existence. It’s also quite an engaging thing to study extensive literature written about it through the ages and millions of books written about it in the modern days as well. Nevertheless, the essence of meditation is the actual practice. After all, if we recognize that we are truly spiritual beings at the core, this skill of meditation is already innate within us. Lengthy explanations about how to meditate might just be some unnecessary noises.

Direct Experience

So you go find a place to sit quietly and comfortably now. Be still and pay attention to how you are breathing. Does the breathing change when it knows that you started paying attention to it? Who is doing the breathing, anyway? And who is the owner of this attention that is being paid to? That's it. Now you go on your own and the journey unfolds itself the way it is supposed to. My personal anecdote is when my wife was pregnant with our very first child. I remember the closer the due date for delivery got, the more I found myself getting nervous about the fact that I literally do not know how to become a father. After all, I had never been a father before and I was never trained to become one. But one of the happiest moments of my life was that night when my daughter was born. I have a clear vivid memory of that magical moment as if it was just yesterday. When I held my newborn daughter in my arms for the first time, my whole being – physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, and everything else – my whole existence in that moment was just overwhelmed by the direct experience that I have always known how to be a father. I just had to BE. It was this familiar warm feeling that has always been residing in me all along.

Meditation Practice As A Built-In Ability Already Within Us

Well, I say all these just to draw the parallel to the experience of learning or practicing meditation. If someone is explaining to you about meditation very hard, we are missing the point. Just as in that personal example I used above, if someone is explaining to me too hard about how to become a father right before my daughter was born, I would have missed the direct experience. The essence of it is not too much in learning or being taught in extreme detail. But the essence is in the actual practice of doing it and embracing it all fully to awaken this familiar skill that is already within us.