Yoga in the Kashmir Tradition
with Billy Doylestillness

MEDITATION

“Meditation is not a state where you go in and you come out, neither is it a function, nor an activity. Before you go towards meditation you should first become acquainted with your nearest environment: your ways of thinking, your feelings, sensations, your fear, insecurity and so on. This calls for a quality of attention free from expectations, anticipations. It requires an innocent mind, an innocent attention. In this innocent attention the mind has no role to play for it has nothing to gain. This quality of attention of which I am speaking is a very deep relaxation.

Pure attention is not localized anywhere. When you are familiar with your nearest surroundings, how you function, you will find you are no longer involved in them and you will have the impression that all that appears in your daily life appears in this pure attention. There will be a kind of transformation of energy where you no longer emphasize the object aspect but feel yourself more and more in attention, what could be called the subject aspect. This attention will unfold, it will become alertness, it will become awareness, all your body will be present in it.

I would say, the inner need to meditate comes from the experience of attention without tension, as in deep sleep. In the morning when you say I slept well, the feeling of having slept well does not mean because your body was relaxed, it has a deeper meaning, the deep experience of peace.

Attention is not inside nor outside, so you can never go to meditation. When you try to meditate you create a state, you have a goal you are trying to achieve. Meditation is not a reduction, not a kind of interiorization. Meditation is an instantaneous apperception. So that when there is still even the slightest anticipation of going somewhere, or achieving something you go away - because meditation is your natural state, presence IS. The mind can be still from time to time, but the nature of the mind is activity, is function. Your body can be empty, relaxed from time to time, but your body is also function. It is therefore a violence against nature to attempt to stop the mind or body functions.

So when we speak of this stillness, of attention, presence, it has nothing to do with the stopping of the function of the mind, or the stopping of the activity of the body. What we understand by meditation, what we understand by presence is behind activity and non-activity - and even the geometrical term "behind" is wrong - meditation, attention, presence is the vastness in which all activity and non-activity happen. This vastness is directionless, and in it the functions of the mind and the body appear and disappear because these functions are expression, an extension of our real being, presence.

Don't forget that in meditation there is not a meditator. So if you are drawn to meditate take it only as a laboratory experiment where you explore, you look at the facts. You will see as you begin this experiment that you are looking for the meditator, but that the meditator, is nothing other than an intellectual construction. When you see that there is no meditator, then there is a stopping of meditation and there is only beingness.

And as one cannot find a better word than the word current, I would say it is a current of love.”

Jean Klein