UG would have bashed the whole idea of meditation. Since I haven't had a calamity yet, I still don't brush aside meditation :)
208 karma · joined November 2, 2018
I have/had meditated for almost 5 years of my life for almost 2 hours a day(unless I am traveling/or sick etc), so I think I am experienced enough to help beginner meditators. Also being from a Sanskrit-derived-language speaking country, I can read Pali and Sanskrit texts without translation.(Being from a SA country doesn't mean anyone can do that obviously. My family was more religious than others I guess). I am not beating my own drums but I have to put in some credibility to be taken seriously on the Internet. I really have no other credibility to put forward than this so please take my advice with a grain of salt because I am not an enlightened man like the religious scripts depict.
If you are a beginner, forget Jhanas and these tricks. They are just there to confuse you more. The wanting of stages of Jhanas are actually a hindrance. Buddha has warned about it. But his warning has been treated like a footnote. But in modern context, the warning should be the introduction. Because people can rarely deal with any discomfort these days. They've read the Jhanas, they want it now. I am almost 45% sure we will see a AI for Jhanas in the next 50 years.
Anyways, here's my advice for beginners:
When you start meditation, sooner or later, maybe even after a day or two, you'll eventually feel a state of peace. It is bound to happen, you will just have to take words of countless meditation literature and gurus and see for yourself. And the peace will be short-lived. Then, you will want to extend this peace. You've read about the Jhanas, the bliss, the peace, the oneness, and all. But it's not working for you right? Because you have been fooled again.
Previously, you were chasing for drugs/media/TikTok/girls/whatever or some other forms of pleasure/happiness and now you are chasing for the bliss, the peace, whatever the texts say or you've been told. It's the same thing. You are still chasing, you are still desiring. The object of desire is "Jhanas" now but it's still a desire and in desiring there is going to be mental conflict and hopelessness and feeling of losing because obviously you desire only the things you don't have.
The best advice I would give to a beginner meditator, is to be interested. Become interested in the process of meditation, forget the happiness, the results. Oh spoiler alert, you will actually feel like you are being more sadder after you started meditating. You will feel like you are noticing more problems, more issues with the society/beings etc. You aren't becoming sadder or the world is not sadder, you are noticing the sadness that was always there. Let it ride, enjoy the process. Don't treat meditation like a chore like I did. Be really interested. You have to be interested because it's a lifetime work. Your brain is neuroplastic so it's been addicted to patterns and habits from your birth to now. Don't expect to change them in a single meditation session. It's okay to meditate for 5 minutes a day and 2 hours the next day or miss it for weeks. Do it when you feel like it and when you are genuinely interested and curious, you'll just come back to it more and more without needing to force yourself to discipline and hate the word "meditation" in the process. Unless you are genuinely interested you will never surrender to meditation and unless you let go, you will never allow "Jhanas" to appear, because remember everything appears in emptiness.
For some reason knowing that other animals exist just for the sake of existing and even sleep off when life gets harder gives a new perspective. I feel that we humans use too much knowledge and complicate problems even when there's a simple solution. I think that our bodies are highly intelligent and humans intrude a lot in it's natural functioning by inventing too much techniques and methods. Like I want to stay awake, drink coffee. Drink coffee, get insomnia. Insomnia leads to unhappiness. Take insomnia meds, get withdrawals. Generating more problems along the way while forgetting what the solutions were even for in the first place. If we just listened to our bodies signs, it pretty much tells us why you you are lethargic and need coffee in the first place.
Sometimes we should just trust nature to do it's work. This article was a refreshing read.
We have never lived with ourselves, we have continuously distracted ourselves with work and alcohol on weekends. When we see the futility of life, we start to get bored, and that boredom can manifest to anxiety and depression.
You need to learn to live with boredom. As much as you can. Some people call it meditation, some call if mindfulness but it doesn't matter what you call it. You need to learn to live with boredom because nature intended that way. Work is not absolute reality, games are not absolute reality, they were created by thoughts of people like you and me. What is real is the futility of life, and to embrace that you need to embrace the boredom, or the present.
If you are interested, I can tell/help you more, but my comment will get hidden somewhere down below. Still, reply to me, if you want some guidelines, because I smoked weed like you and drank and i am in IT too and now I have quit intoxication and learned to live with myself.