{"id":7561,"date":"2014-11-24T04:22:58","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T04:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/11\/24\/meditation-is-hard\/"},"modified":"2014-11-24T04:22:58","modified_gmt":"2014-11-24T04:22:58","slug":"meditation-is-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/11\/24\/meditation-is-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"Meditation is Hard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thoughts don't like to subside.  One leads to another, and another.  You would experience the thinker behind the thoughts, but instead you have thoughts about this thinker while knowing full well that the thinker is not just another thought. Or you lovingly elaborate your brilliant thoughts about meditation, its purpose, its methods, and its difficulty, thoughts that you will soon post to your weblog, all the while realizing that mental blogging is not meditation.<\/span><\/p>\n

"Man is a stream whose source is hidden," said Emerson and you would swim upstream to the Source.  So you make an effort, but the effort is too much for you.  Perhaps the metaphor is wrong. One from al-Ghazzali might be better.  <\/span><\/p>\n

A cooling evening breeze is more likely to come to the desert dweller if he climb to the top of the minaret than if he stay on the ground.  So he makes an effort within his power, the effort of positioning himself to receive, when and if it should come, a gust of the divine favor.<\/span><\/p>\n

He waits for the grace that may overcome the gravity of the mind and its hebetude.<\/span><\/p>\n

To meditate is to wait, and therein lies or sits the difficulty.<\/span><\/p>\n

This morning's session<\/em> (sitting in plain English) was good and lasted from 3:30 to 4:25.  Fueled by chai<\/em>: coffee is too much the driver of the discursive.  But now the coffee is coming in and I'm feeling fabulous and the thoughts are 'percolating' up from who knows where.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thoughts don't like to subside.  One leads to another, and another.  You would experience the thinker behind the thoughts, but instead you have thoughts about this thinker while knowing full well that the thinker is not just another thought. Or you lovingly elaborate your brilliant thoughts about meditation, its purpose, its methods, and its difficulty, … Continue reading “Meditation is Hard”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meditation","category-spiritual-exercises"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}