Meditation is Not About Controlling
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One thing about the troubled world as it is, that has been turning upside down, and then throwing curve balls at everyone for the last two years(and I am not just thinking about Covid, but also with some of the psychic contagion and disturbance between different parties and identity groups) is that it has required some sense of a ‘temenos’, which to the ancient Greeks was an enclosure or a precinct — often set around a temple or altar and characterized as a sacred, protected or enclosed place somehow set apart from the profane world and its harmful influences.
Psychologically, the ‘temenos’ is a means of protecting the centre of the personality from being drawn out and from being influenced from outside said Jung(and there is something to be said for being able to keep your centre, and not being thrown off kilter by all of the outside influences) and the ‘temenos’ could be characterized as a safe, private inner space deep within us, i.e. our sense of self, independent of the world, and in a psychological sense that affords some kind of a sacred boundary for the soul.
— Jon Wilson
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“I pay my karma, not by answering for how I hurt another, but by letting go of how another has hurt me.”
— Scott Maurer
“For the benefit of the flowers, we water the thorns too.”
— Egyptian Wisdom
Meditation is not about banishing unpleasant feelings or thoughts, it’s about establishing an island of learning and vision about who and what you are. That’s actually the last thing we want, which is why we try to use it to control and suppress parts of ourselves that another part — which we’ve identified as the “real me” — doesn’t like. We want to choose sides in our inner conflicts and rid ourselves of unruly energies that we judge unacceptable. We want to protect our identity, which we don’t realize is built on hopes, not reality.
Meditation won’t accomplish that particular errand for us, much to our disappointment. It’s useless for that purpose. It’s just a clear eyed movement of intelligent watching of the life processes flowing through us. After all, we see and understand very little of what kind of beings we are. We have a great deal to learn, if we could just take a genuine…
