Meditation - Merging With the Formless Truth

Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings, vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle, unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat. Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear it nor tongue utter it; only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure and silent, merge with the formless truth. As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found yourself; you have solved the great riddle; your heart forever is at peace. Whole, you enter the whole. Your personal self returns to its radiant, intimate, deathless source.

~ Mundaka Upanishad

This beautiful passage from the Mundaka Upanishad comes perhaps as close as written words can to "speaking the unspeakable" ~ to pointing to that which the tongue cannot utter (nor the ear hear, nor the eye see) ... and giving us ~ its fortunate readers ~ a "prescription," a practice for experiencing this that it is pointing to, directly:

... only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure and silent, merge with the formless truth.

The prescription, the practice being offered by the Mundaka Upanishad is the practice of "deep absorption," a state of Being that can be accessed (perhaps most effectively) through meditation practice. So what is "meditation practice"? Let's explore ...

In the same way that the practice of Hatha Yoga includes (at least potentially) thousands of asanas, and in the same way that there exist thousands of different forms of Qigong (Taoist energy-cultivation practices) ~ so also are there thousands of different forms of meditation practice. (I'm using the term "meditation," in this context, to describe mind-training practices performed with the physical body held in a relatively stationary position.)

Within the Mahayana vehicle of Buddhism, meditation practice is divided, most generally, into two categories: Shamata (calm abiding) and Vipashyana (clear seeing). The most basic form of Shamata/calm abiding meditation ~ and a good place to begin, if you're new to the practice ~ is simply to sit, in a location where you're not likely to be disturbed, with the spine in an upright position, relax (body & mind), and do nothing else at all. Easy! Try not to even think of it as "meditation" ... but rather a time to just sit and be at ease, to cultivate stillness, with nothing at all to "do," for five minutes or ten or a half hour. This is called "Shamata without support."

If this was too easy, you might like to explore "Shamata with support." In this form of meditation practice, you use a particular "object" as a "support" for you practice. You can, for example, use your breath as support: letting your awareness rest gently on the inhalations & exhalations, perhaps counting the cycles of the breath, from one to ten, and then beginning again. Mantras (strings of Sanskrit or Tibetan syllables) or mandalas (visual representations of aspects of mind), candles, or objects from the natural world (e.g. a shell or a beautiful crystal) can also be used as support for your meditation practice. The idea here is that the "object" acts as "support" by helping us to keep our attention in the present moment (instead of drifting off into thoughts of the past or future).

A more advanced practice is to use as "support" whatever happens to be arising in the fields of the senses. So, for instance, you could decide to use as support every sound that you hear, or the smell of incense or perfume or food in the room, or whatever taste happens to be in your mouth ... Emotions and thought-patterns and eventually anything at all that is arising, can be support for our practice. How exactly these things become "supports" (as opposed to distractions) is a subject for a future essay ... or perhaps is best left to personal interaction with a meditation instructor. For now, the point is simply this: eventually, every single thing in your experience can act as a support for your meditation practice, for your becoming more Present, more awake, more "alive" in the here and now.

Vipashyana/clear seeing practices (also know as analytic meditation) are meditation practices often used in conjuction with hearing a Dharma talk or studying a particular text/scripture. In such forms of meditation, a particular idea or concept is taken into the space of meditation, and within that place "held" and "examined" in a deeper way than is possible when we're engaging only with conceptual mind. A certain kind of clarity and certainty can then emerge, with respect to particular aspects of the teaching. This sort of meditation is also a means for yogic exploration: for exploring, in very specific ways, the working of mind, for "going inside" and having a "look" at aspects of ourselves which we may, in our day-to-day living, be quite unaware of.

But if you're able to be happy with the very first Shamata( without support) practice ~ the practice of simply sitting, relaxing, and "doing nothing" ~ this is excellent ... and will serve you well, on your journey toward [merging] with the formless truth ... [solving] the great riddle ... and [returning your personal self] to its radiant, intimate, deathless source ... Sobeit!

Elizabeth Reninger, M.S. (Oriental Medicine) has been exploring Yoga/Qigong - in its Daoist, Buddhist and Hindu varieties - for upwards of twenty-five years. She maintains a private acupuncture practice in Boulder, Colorado, and is a published poet. For more of Elizabeth's writing, on related topics, please visit taoism.about.com taoism.about.com