Meditation, a sacred space

While physical yoga practice is a refuge for the body and mind, meditation provides a sacred space for the heart and mind, the one and only common ‘church’ to all people. Meditation provides us with a portal to inner world, our sacred space, providing us with inner reflection without the intellectual and personal limitations of normal day to day living. This meditative state that can be achieved in all aspects of yoga practice is in many ways what yoga is really about. Yoga can help the individual to be free from being victimized by the conspiracies we see on the TV network, to ridding his or her life from domination by power freaks, to relative freedom from pharmaceuticals and from worrying about what the neighbour has for dinner.

Living in what is referred to as ‘the real world’ more or less effectively excludes all that which is not tangible, and according to most spiritual or religious teachings, exactly that which is real.
The reflective state reached during meditation allows us a glimpse of a place that is not governed by the laws of our ‘worldly’ experience of grind and pleasure. Meditation provides us with a sense of the infinite, a connection with the soul and the cosmic insight. This insight should be used to see the bigger picture of our small and finite existence, to enlighten us to expand our finite possibilities when we become aware of the magnitude of the infinite.

This does not at all mean that we should try to live our lives in a cloud of never-never land nirvana, but rather to live more consciously, making our normal life a more profound experience and a more positive one. The clues to all troublesome issues and and a way of ‘enlightenment’ through ordinary living can be found within. All sages, prophets, gurus, artists, visionary figures of all religions or belief groups including Zen, mystic Christians and Buddhists practiced some form of meditation, and claimed that the divine without an only be experienced through discovering the inner world.

Meditation provides us with a mirror to the soul, with the silence and solitude that uncovers the veil of ignorance and short sightedness that is inherent to our earthly dimension. Meditation is a mental looking glass, a place where the gods and spirits and secrets of the universe can be found, a place within where the deepest spaces and spheres of the universe can be probed.

It precisely these qualities inherent to meditation that is frowned upon by the masses of our society, that is criticized by our church fathers and filled up by the capitalist machine of consumerist marketing exploitation. Meditation is a deliberate attempt to dislodge opinion maker’s opinions, to seek a personal vision free from the fear and bondage endorsed by institution. All institutions, governmental or religious, corporate or artistic, oppresses the threat of the free mind, as the free thinking individual mind challenges the authority. Ironically enough the churches, new age groups, drinking clubs, money making schemes and small minded people that populates causes and capitalist ventures are all trying to sell something to that inherently belongs to all people anyway. If freedom is just a state of mind, how can it be the exclusive domain of anyone in particular?

The bombastic fundamentalist church father, the idealist hippy, those with excessive business interest all can lay claim to the same ignorance of ever polite and correct behaviour with undercurrents of manipulation and aggressive stances of ego driven behaviour. Wars cannot be fought by non-patriots, and an organic product consumer will eat less hamburgers than will keep Mac Donald’s in business. You do not need an intermediate to speak to god, and you certainly do not need any pre packaged consumerist trappings to meditate.

Of course meditation does not claim to solve all problems of the world in a matter of a few sessions under a tree, nor does it lay claim to a pointed plant to make the world a fine place to live free of all conflict. The ‘enlightened’ minded individual simply strives to be in harmony with the universe, hereby literally creating the possibility of a planet filled with more fun and less destruction.

Bruce Cockburn, Canadian folk-rocker par excellence, sings defiantly in one of his songs: “You can wave your flag, wave the bible, wave your sex or your business degree -
whatever you want – but don’t wave that thing at me” (‘Mighty trucks of midnight’, from the album ‘Nothing but a burning light’). True freedom indeed.

Stellenbosch, 08/11/2002.

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