April 30, 2012
Meditation & Freedom
Meditation only becomes real, powerful, authentic, and liberating when it is a practice of letting everything go. Otherwise it is reduced to little more than a psycho-spiritual relaxation technique. It may make you feel better, but it won’t set you free. Feeling better and being free don’t necessarily mean the same thing. Feeling better is relative; being free is not. Ultimately, spiritual freedom depends on how profound is your ability to let go of everything—and not just once, but over and over again. If you understand what it means to let go of everything, you know everything you need to know about meditation. Then your meditation is real. It’s the posture of freedom, the posture of enlightenment. It’s a profound existential stand you are taking in relationship to life and death; a spiritual position you are assuming in relationship to eternity.
Andrew Cohen just launched a brand new meditation audio called A Guide to Freedom: Discovering the True Purpose of Meditation. It’s a 90-minute audio, recorded from a recent retreat, in which Andrew guides you step-by-step on an experiential journey into the timeless depths of enlightened consciousness.
>>Click here to purchase and download now.
|
Join Andrew's email list
Sign up here to receive a free excerpt from Evolutionary Enlightenment, an exclusive video, weekly quotes, and much more.
|
|
|
We hate spam just as much as you
|
Andrew Cohen is a spiritual teacher, cultural visionary, founder of EnlightenNext, and the author of 
For the last week I have practiced “Choosing Again” you blog message really resonates with me. Real freedom is going through the narrow door to absolute oneness. Its a path we all must take. And I agree with Andrew that the practice eventually locks us in to our new all inclusive identity. This of course not the end but the beginning of appreciating out creative power.
Thanks Andrew.
As a PerformanceLifestyle practitioner who helps people learn the fundamentals of a lifestyle that works for you, not against you, that keeps you moving forward in a position of strength, and out of the downward spiral, which is always an ever persistent potentiality for forward moving achievers, from Soccer Moms to CEO’s, who don’t have a health and personal performance supporting (promoting) lifestyle, I was asked for years, “how come you don’t talk about spirituality”. My answer was always. “it’s all spiritual” yet never went deeper. Until that is, a teacher appeared – Andrew Cohen – who has legitimized spirituality and made it accessible by explaining the territory of spiritual practice in non-pseudo terms like he does in this weeks “quote of the week”. Knowing how to let go of everything in my experience is probably the most important posture for a successful lifestyle, for if you can’t drop the weight of the past, instantly and always, changing “improving” your lifestyle is very hard to do, and seemingly impossible. What letting go of everything means is profound in its truest sense,. Could anything be more profound, or revealing of who you really are. I don’t think so.
Dear Andrew, once again I come up with the same question: what you mean by “letting go of everything?” As I understand it is to let go of any attatchment & identification. Means to identify the conditionings and let go of them knowing that my real nature has nothing to do with it. Anyway, if you can clarify that a little bit more, I’d be grateful.
Thanks 4 everything.
You words are So True. I’m Blessed to be in a small group of meditators in Atlanta, GA (Don Simmons) ~ with so many in different stages of their journey. In the beginning, I probably used it more for relaxation; but as I opened-heart-wide into a safe zone, healing and freedom were found. Some of us need baby-steps, I suppose.
This quote resonates with me because I think I have always “stuggled” with meditation. After several years of meditation, sometimes not very dedicated, I wrestled with essentially what Andrew is spelling out here. It is quite true and is really the most meaningfull way to experience and look at the practice. In the end I am supposing we stuggle with freedom when in fact we already are.
thanks for your inspiration,
JJ
Re: Meditation and Freedom
I understand viscerally, the value of that state of letting it all go–it is transformative, and freeing, as you say. We are spiritual beings living an embodied existence–here to learn, create, love and feel through our bodies’ sensory input. How much time should we really spend in our embodied existence, trying to free ourselves of it? Once the experience of letting it all go has been, what is the value of doing it over and over and over again (besides the awesome feel-good aspect)? How deeply can one go into nothingness? The meditative state you speak of–letting everything go–connects us beyond the realm of embodied existence. It is the recognition of our achoring point. To take the spiritual position you speak of, why must the letting go happen over and over again? How much meditation is too much?
I agree that deep meditation helps us experience freedom, compassion, creativity, love, courage. I also agree that deep meditation involves letting go of everything, including our attachments, our preoccupations, our assumptions, our anxieties, our particular beliefs, all those features which are relative and contingent. But does not “letting go of everything” also mean giving up our notion of having a deeper self or soul having identity before birth and after death? I believe we can “have” soul anytime we are in touch with spirit, God, the eternal, but this doesn’t mean that we have “a” soul. Yes, each of us has distinct individuality as a result of spirit being manifested through our biological and cultural features, but this doesn’t merit thinking of ourselves as having “an” individual soul.
Meditation enables us to go beyond this physical dimension and reach our original home through the power of our thoughts filled with love for our creator. This is the true spiritual pilgrimage that makes us pure and holy once again. This is the true celebration of a meeting between the immortal souls and the supreme soul,the supreme father,the seed of the human world tree.
andrew- could you please tell me exactly what you mean by posture? where are you placing the mind? when you say let go, how do you do you do that exactly?its a nice idea but how do you actually perform that?
Through my realized experience, an “interior posture” or “position of freedom” is a cultivated capacity of meditation, one which is an intuition of “calm abiding” in relative “this worldly” existence, simultaneously experiencing and transforming via direct contact with deeper, higher “other worldly” spiritual dimensions.
In other words, meditation is the simultaneous “letting go” of everything, over and over again, and because so, the creation of greater reciprocity and union with the deeper/higher dimensions of the Nondual Self.
So it is BOTH “letting go” via sacrificing identifications, belief systems, ideas, fears and desires, all the while making real, actual contact with deeper/higher “reality”, identifying and transforming into that reality, until all is “let go” in Nondual Realization.
Meditation, then, not only profoundly confirms for the personal individual that Spirit IS, but, if taken as an interior posture, it is the aid and identity of the entire self-system that will “push” and “pull” that self-system into and through the transpersonal, spiritual dimensions, until all is radically realized in Nondual Awakening. The “personal” self necessarily takes on new, more inclusive, but more pointed, meanings and imperatives, seeing through all of it’s relative “unreal” identities, and so this interior posture and position is fearless support for the challenges that will undoubtedly arise in confrontation to the transformation.
A good “trait” or “sign” of having developed the meditative posture is that one will simultaneously feel “unbounded” from relative identity and “grounded” in spiritual intention. This is also when one feels a tangible “Otherness” in awareness…meditate and contemplate this Other, and you will perhaps someday find it is your-Self, the Higher, True, Authentic, Nondual Self…Not-two to any thing…
Light and Love