I call it a class but it’s more like time together nurturing experiences. I know everyone in front of me is healthy at the level of their soul, I just need to show them how they can slow and stop the dark fury of their ego. After that the rest is entirely natural. No one asked you to learn to walk but you worked at it at every opportunity until you could do it. You’d learn this much the same way and yet you’d never recall actually learning it.
It actually isn’t that hard for me to poke holes in reality as most people would describe it. Now isn’t that strange? Something as elemental as reality is in question! And if reality itself is in question then so is everything in it. That means that almost everything you believe could potentially be a lie–and that’s my main point.
Things are not what they are they are how we see them. You’ve read things like that a million times, but enough time with the right meditations and you’ll be dissatisfied with your old version of reality and you’ll seek some new more reliable version. The more time you spend with this new, stronger more flexible version of reality the faster you’ll drop your illusory one.
It’s no coincidence that you’re still looking at 3,000 year old quotes, they do carry a special truth which is why I use the ones I see floating around to shape this blog. But you can’t learn this in an educational way. That’s outside-in. You want inside-out. You want to understand things differently so that different things make sense and that leads you to a different life. That happens inside you.
There is no way around the time and effort involved to cross this transom. Even those who do it by accident were unwittingly working away on their discovery for years. How could Eckhart Tolle have recognised his depression as a kind of Joy University? Yet it was those meditations on his own suffering that lead him to do what the Buddha did.
In the end I realise I’m more like a personal trainer. People know what they want and they know they’ll have to change some habits. It just seems easier to do when someone else is leading that process and giving you assignments. Meditation is hard. It can feel unfruitful for too long if it’s not guided well. Done well it can be fun.
The world is changing. We’re at the dawn of a new age of priorities for life. We’ve built a world that’s eating most of us up and most of the world wants something different for their future. Join that future by taking the process of your mental and spiritual health seriously. Don’t be casual or idle about it, it’s connected to everything.
You can have the change you imagine for yourself but not if you won’t make changes to create the time and space necessary for you to actually do the meditations that will lead you there. Prioritise your lifetime. Figure out life before you’ve lived it all. You’ll be glad you did.
peace. s
Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations locally and around the world.
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.