Radios and Mantras

There are certain things that are a waste of time to try to understand – a vanilla-cream cake, hugging a baby, the blossoming of the cherry tree in your backyard, and also meditation. Sometimes experience is everything, and understanding is not even necessary. For this reason, in Japanese monasteries, they will make you sit for two weeks facing the wall, and only then the teacher will have a word with you.

After the first two weeks, most newcomers still do not exactly understand what meditation is all about, but one thing they do understand – it is not an easy thing to sit quietly. The only instructions you receive are to rest in the gap between the thoughts, but there seems to be an Inner Radio inside your head which continuously broadcasts, and the space between the thoughts is very difficult to enter, much less rest in.

You sit motionless, but your mind cannot stop working: What is the purpose of doing nothing? How can you get wiser by sitting in front of the wall in a quiet room? Isn’t doing nothing a complete waste of time? What can be gained by such an autistic pastime?

From its own standpoint, Reason is right. You could have used this time more effectively – to water the plants, do the laundry, or read the weekend magazine. If it was up to your Reason, the rich cream cake, dancing madly at a party, or peacefully sitting by yourself – are all unreasonable.

When you put aside both desire and thinking, some of the benefits of "just sitting", doing nothing, start to be revealed; and a gateway is opened, leading to a pleasant feeling of happiness.

The Taoist symbol of Yin and Yang describes two complementary opposites that balance each other into one circle. According to this teaching, the two contrasts we need to balance are "Outside" and "Inside".

"Outside" includes our home, work, family, friends, arrangements, problems, pleasures, and everything that occupies us during the week. "Outside" is the role that we have in the theater of life, the role which repeats itself daily and thus gives us a feeling of stability. And yet, this is just one role out of an infinite of others that we could also have taken on.

Meditation will take you "inside", to the actor itself, regardless of the role he or she is playing on the stage. It is a journey to strengthen your inner core, a journey to touch something which is neither your head nor your body. These two are only temporary costumes that you wear, and they are part of the general setup of your environment. They are not who you really are.

So you buy yourself a plane ticket, say goodbye to everyone, arrive in Japan, and get accepted in a Zen monastery. For the first two weeks, you sit in the meditation posture on a black cushion, and your head keeps showing you scenes from the play you wish to leave behind. Meditation is an inner exploration, but before you can have a pleasant time on the black cushion, surfing freely above time and space, there is one great difficulty to face and one great fear to overcome.

People fear that by going in, they might uncover memories that they normally attempt to forget, dreams that they have given up on, and anxieties they might usually prefer to overlook. It might be like opening Pandora's Box. This is a fear one should overcome.

The big difficulty is in trying to mute your Inner Radio's voice. Every one has his own Inner Radio, and usually it is fixed on a station which does not broadcast many optimistic programs, and it is almost impossible to switch the radio off. The Indian yogis have investigated this issue deeply, and the conclusion they reached was that if you cannot switch the radio off, you can at least change the station. According to the Yogi method, all you need to do is to play a mantra disk on the inner recorder. The meaning of the mantra is irrelevant; but by doing it repeatedly, eventually you will achieve a more relaxed station.

The mantra technique is widely in use, both in Hinduism and in Buddhism. Usually, it has a very open meaning and a very abstract message. This way, it offers a gateway to places which are beyond words, sentences, or daily thoughts. The modern "positive thinking" methods (autosuggestion) are a development of the old Indian trick. The modern idea is that the content of the disk you are playing in your mind can make a difference. You can include clear messages that will support your self-confidence and remind you of your recent important spiritual decisions.

After realizing that the solitary listener of your radio station
Can actually change the station if he is fed up with the old one,
New possibilities open up with new channels – happier ones.
The next stage on your journey will be to "zoom out",
Calmly looking from the outside at the whole play of your mind.
When this happens, you can choose to hear yourself think,
Or you can choose to hear reality itself,
Without the background sounds of thinking.
The greatest discovery is that the best mantra is "No Mantra":
Just keep your mind quiet
And allow the two contrasts of "Inside" and "Out" to become one,
The same one who is reading and breathing right now.