Art as Story eating Story
Clarifying Real Meditation
Meditation is an action of non-action, an un-doing which many interpret as being. This is perhaps overly reductionist. It takes quite a lot of actions to allow non-action to occur. Some of these actions are the preparations for meditation. Some of those actions are basic survival patterns of eating, securing shelter, communicating, etc. Some of those actions are of another sort entirely, which we could call recreational activities – artmaking and crafting for an inherent sense of exploration, discovery, insight and self-satisfaction.
All of these various sub-divisions and differentiations do lead us back to the same “place”, a non-place that meditation opens. Why is that non-place closed? Well, it isn’t, yet appears to be. This appearance of restriction is exactly the primary human addiction, we create it via perception and then reinforce it via the systemization of our beliefs and cultural ideas. Our “cultural institutions” & Norms.
We create stories, habitually act as if those stories are true, and cease to remember or even examine that they are even stories in the first place, much less that we or others generated them out of opinions.
In the western view, meditation is co-opted to reinforce the propaganda of dualism and materialism. Therefore, we must untangle many layers of wrong story to get back to the path which leads to and is liberation, all the while catching ourselves when our own bad habits attempt to trick us back into wrong story.
It’s very hard to have right story when culture is continuously indoctrinating and threatening you into its version of reality. If you take my position as potential truth, that Meditation is Real Liberation, beyond the mere concept of liberation, then by this definition all real practitioners are terrorists in the eyes of the state.
Real Meditation is not a process of gaining more stuff, more status, more power. It is not about increasing productivity, escaping to some magical heaven elsewhere, becoming stronger, faster, richer. It is not an additive process, but a subtractive process. It is not an addictive process either but untangles the root causes by which one would engage in addictions at all. The reasons why we would contract, avoid, or dissociate from perceived unwanted and unpreferred phenomena. So-called “negative feelings” in the western definition of “negativity”.
To even unpack that last bit a touch more, we must re-define western ideas of negativity (an opposition to positive phenomena). We must instead see negativity as what it really is: absence, spaciousness, potentiality, allowance, non-action. Absence is also the absence of the concept of problems.
This goes against every fiber of western ideology. Which means it also goes against western therapeutic ideologies. What would “healing” even mean if one was taking a subtractive view of reality and no longer forcing false narratives onto perception?
The dualistic virus also defends itself by flinging the mind and body into intensely painful and fearful states of dreaming when confronted with these openings. A practitioner must be able to observe and witness these automatic habits to even begin to unwind the knot at the center of the indoctrinated identity. An identity that only exists as a cluster of shared hallucinations that are enforced through violence, restriction and oppression towards a goal of slavery and control.
The default is the dualistic virus. To detox or heal from this default is an act of great mercy and compassion, one that risks murder and poverty, one that opens one up to more intensity, not less.
I have a lot to say on this and much of that feels like wasted breath, attempting to convince addicts that they are in fact, addicted. An addiction that was forced onto us at birth, culturally, that locks snugly into our natural biology so that it appears to be “normal”, “protective”, “rational” and “good”.
Real Meditation, by that i mean a process by which true liberation is revealed to be basic nature, is the ultimate “detox” … anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-fascist by its very capacity to perceive through all of those constrictive social constructs and locate fundamental reality regardless of their negative reinforcements.
But this requires a determination and deliberateness that is not rewarded by culture at large and actively punished: hence the term negative reinforcement.
In the west, meditation is actively replaced by a quasi-mystical term called “mindfulness”, which is really a gussied-up version of paying attention. Because this simple quality is placed upon a pedestal and sold as a capitalist improvement and self-development method, then real meditation can continually be mis-appropriated and fed back into the solipsistic and remedial project called “mindfulness meditation”.
Once we perceive the battlefield we are actually on clearly, we can get closer to the actual goal of liberation via the practice and process of Real Meditation, and also weave those experiences we have of Real Meditation into our so-called non-meditative experiences and activities such as survival actions and artmaking experiments.
None of this was told to me when i started on this journey decades ago. I pray that this helps you avoid the disastrous and bloody experiences of propaganda, corruption and misperception that are so rampant within so-called spiritual institutions.
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