No research on aging is complete without some amount of fund and fuss spent on meditation and its values. It is intriguing just how many very clinical tests have taken this spiritual and psychic aspect to see if it has any impact on your body. And for a large part, there has been a resounding,"Yes."
For some reason, and I would think simply because they are more organised that way, most meditators subjected to scrutiny have been Tibetan monks.
So, this very intense book on this form of meditation, The Tibetan book of the Dead, translated by Robert A.F. Thurman, has simple tips on how to go about meditation.
There is a lot of resistance to meditation, including from those who do related activity like yoga. And even those who meditate have different ideas or conclusions about it. And in fact, most people who meditate love nothing better than share the intense experiences they have while meditating.
I myself am very embarrassed to discuss my meditation practice with anybody, simply because it is very intimate and often not conclusive. It will always be a work in progress.
So, I was rather enchanted by this para in this book:
"Another kind of daily-activity meditation is the conscious association of an ordinary activity with a spiritual practice. When you wash dishes, associate their cleansing with clearing away mental addictions, making their washing into a prayer. When you build a building, associate it with building a pure land mandala. When you observe a person in the subway, associate the encounter with being there for him, when you are a Buddha. When you open a door, associate it with opening the door to enlightenment."
I think most of us have demarcated the humdrum from the sublime. And we want to finish with the boring, to rush to the exciting. The suggestion above however is for making the humdrum sublime. And there may be something huge there.
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