Om.

“The whole purpose of meditation in the East is to bring about such a state of mind – that is, to control thought, which is the same as constantly repeating a prayer to quieten the mind and in that state hoping to understand one’s problems.”

But that my friend is to dull the mind not to silence it.

As the world becomes bleaker by the day and new problems arise every minute or so, we humans look for peace. We try to create peace by many ways including by force and if we cannot obtain peace outside ourselves then we look for inner peace, peace within ourselves, a peaceful mind. This search for silence, for peace within our selves has led to a new trend, meditation. This is why Yoga as one of the forms of meditation has become an increasingly popular choice for people who are in search for inner peace or perhaps for people who are in search for just mere silence of the mind.

Yet, true meditation in search of a peaceful mind can be obtained everyday, every minute, and every second without the need to chant a certain prayer or conduct a certain move. The repetition of these prayers or these moves is mere self-hypnosis. Yes, of course by repetition our mind will become quite, silent, gentle and soft but all you have done is to actually dull your mind and close your mind towards the beauty of the world that will in fact create peace within us. We are merely concentrating towards a certain something. As J. Krishnamurti has said, “meditation is not concentration.” Concentration forces your mind to concentrate towards something that we sometimes do not want to concentrate on, this in the end does not create peace but in fact creates conflict within our selves. How can we force a mind to concentrate when it easily wanders to everything around us? How can we force a mind to concentrate when it easily wanders towards something that interests us? Meditation that enforces concentration will only create a conflicting mind and how can we have peace when our mind is conflict? Meditation that enforces concentration means to control the mind and when we try to control an uncontrollable mind all we have done is to imprison it.
Thus what is meditation?

Meditation is simple, meditation is observing the whole with complete attention.

Do not confuse this with concentration; attention does not require control of the mind. Attention is letting your mind free to observe everything around you as a whole. Not to focus and control your mind towards a certain object. What I mean to be attentive towards the whole means to be aware of every thought and every feeling.

So meditation can take place anywhere and anytime such as while sitting under a tree looking at the rays of the sun shimmering through the leaves or feeling the wind breezing gently through you skin or even perhaps while sitting on bus.

No one can teach you to be attentive. This is something you must learn by yourself. Only you yourself can understand what being attentive is. In the end when you are able to be attentive then you have understood meditation, this discovery of your personal attentive will also lead to peace. By understanding this then you will find meditation that creates peace but does not dull the mind. There are no chants, no movements, no repetitions. Your mind is at peace and a peaceful mind is a mind capable of great love.

And in love there is ultimate truth or what we commonly know as God.

And to achieve this we must be in peace not in pieces.

attentive towards the whole

the choice of insanity

A friend of mine once said to me, “life Ben, is about choices.”
So as I ponder on that frighteningly accurate statement while eating this four day old chinese food and drinking this not so fine wine, I reminisce on the choices I have made throughout my 22, almost 23, years of living on this godforsaken planet.

Though my ass like attitude has made me rather monstrous and hated by many, I am still as human as any of you reading this worthless note of mine. So I as a regular human being, also have regrets towards my choices but I have also been told that regretting is rather useless or so they say.

As many of you might have already known, it has been a couple months since I have applied for the summer school language scholarship to Turkey and the good news is I got accepted. Yes, my dreams of sailing through the Bosphorus strait and touching those 800 year old walls of Haghia Sophia while absorbing the knowledge of the Sufi’s will finally come true…..in another time (insert multiple F words here).

I, my fellow readers, have decided to finish my thesis instead. Well actually my parents “kindly” asked me to do so but truth be told I myself am a bit worried of not being able to finish my thesis on time for the October graduation. There is a certain sureness in me that I will certainly not be writing my thesis while chasing hot middle eastern girls..err.. I mean while visiting and studying historical places in Turkey. For that reason alone I am putting away momentarily this dream of mine whilst hoping that someday another chance will come by and once again take me away to the lands of the Ottomans.

Do I have regret after doing so? Slightly yes, but as I have said above, what good will regret bring?

But, be worried not! Like any other curious young man I have made other plans to spend my endless pit of money. Vietnam and Laos seems to be a rather nice destination. Perhaps compared to Turkey those countries are rather standard but maybe it’s due to my almost similar cultural background and geographical closeness to those countries. Then again we will never truly know what we will find unless we experience it first hand. So wish me the best of luck, hey who knows maybe I’ll be caught in some deranged child trafficking shit, (knocks on wood).

ahh..

Deranged.
A rather nice topic to talk about and talk of it I will.

–

Deranged, demented, mental, lunatic, insane.
My thesaurus came up with those words after I was searching for a more formal form of crazy.
It is easy labeling a person insane, we can just merely look at his or her actions and if it is still confined in our society’s way of life then that person is sane or plain ordinary.
But then again, if we sit down for a moment and think of the meaning of ordinary, usual, common, standard and so on then we will find that this meaning is based upon what our society has accepted and not accepted.

What pushes towards this acceptance? Is it perhaps the increase wisdom and knowledge humanity has obtained throughout the centuries? Or perhaps repetitions of once insane issues which then force our society towards acceptance?

Take violence for example, due to centuries of never ending wars, killings, mass murders and so on our society has taken the issue of violence rather lightly. Yes there has been significant growth of institutions, laws and other much needed systems to combat violence but what I mean by our society has taken the issue of violence rather lightly can be explained by this quote,

(said in the context of death)

“one is a tragedy, one hundred is statistics”

Is to accept such a thing ordinary? Can this be called sane?

Who are we to condemn a person insane if we the people who are said to be sane are able to take lightly towards the deaths of thousands around the world whatever the cause. Accepting death whatever the cause surely is insane and we seem to have done so. I cannot see any higher form of insanity other than this. Perhaps we all have a small amount of insanity in us but due to our high acceptance towards this issue, death be it one or in the thousands has become rather common.

insanity is vague
and death is underrated

am i insane?