Inside a Meditative Mind by AOM
The outline of the head and ears
is formed by the outline of two violins
The design around Buddha's head is formed
By twenty violins manipulated to form the circle
Look close - You'll see they are violins
~*~
This is a post from a wonderful Tumblr blog
I highly recommend regular visits to his blog
To enrich yourself with his wisdom
A QUESTION:
"Why should we meditate? Why should we be so conscious of our inner voice, thoughts and feelings? Why should we have a spiritual practice? Wouldn’t it be enough to just live, and enjoy every moment as best we can? Could this whole spiritual/ mindfulness movement just be another mask of the ego?"
AN ANSWER:
"Until you break through your ego, everything is a mask of the ego. We meditate to learn how to live with the ego. We learn about our thought habits and how they relate to our feeling habits. If we could just live and enjoy the moment, we wouldn’t need to practice skills that help us do that.
A spiritual practice helps us make sense of our physical existence. As we try to make sense of the world and our place in it, we find that there is a lot we don’t know. What we don’t know is so huge it is overwhelming, so we pretend to know things instead. Spiritual practices often put large chunks of what we don’t know into a smaller, manageable package that we can pretend to understand. The term “ego” explains a lot of mental processes that create the sensation that we are something separate from everything else. Having a word to describe an invisible mask that we wear helps us pretend to understand that such a mask exists.
We meditate to see what is happening. When we are not mediating, our minds do their things and we follow along with whatever beliefs and habits drive us. Meditating gives us a different perspective into our mind and trains our mind to function differently. It changes the structure of our brain to support the different kind of functioning.
A meditation practice is like binoculars for bird watchers, or telescopes for astronomers. It helps us focus on things that are hard to see without it. As with anything we do, our egos will find creative ways to be involved. So we sit, and watch, and see what is happening."