Ed Gabrielsen

The rain is pouring down,
Like all the souls you send here.
Coming to this earth,
To find healing.
--Snatum Kaur, "Ong Namo," 2011.

This April morning, it’s pouring rain here in Camden, Maine. I am upstairs in my little office overlooking the street. Rain drums on the roof. A few cars slosh by, splashing puddles. I’m learning how to write a blog.

I noticed that 31 people read my blog entry last time. Or, at least, gave it a cursory glance. Thank you for being my readers. It’s amazing that so many people showed interest. I decided to write a blog to practice my writing. I don’t have any delusions about becoming rich and famous, or developing a huge following. I simply wanted to write as a way of exploring some things that interest me; things I have been thinking about and exploring for a long time. And I wanted to try to express some things I have learned, and, hopefully, my readers will find something helpful here. But, just to be clear, I am a beginning writer with no delusions of grandeur.

It’s gratifying to help. I remember once, in a meditation class I was teaching, one of the students had a breakthrough during the first practice session. He experienced some immediate relief from his stressful thoughts. He was astonished at the sudden realization that thoughts were simply thoughts. His body and breathing immediatly relaxed. It was as if he put down a heavy weight he had been carrying for a long time. And for me, seeing him find relief made the entire class worthwhile. I knew that meditation had something to offer people. The relief from suffering meditation offers is real. Not just a joke or a hoax. Not just a gimmick for making money. Discovering peace, finding relief from suffering: that’s what I’ve been interested in for a long time. That’s why I decided to write a blog.

It’s no big deal these days to be a meditation teacher, or to write books about meditation. Books on meditation and teachers of meditation are everywhere. The cool yoga-meditation teacher has become a cliche. One online group of “meditation teachers” had 7000 teachers. As more and more people set up shop in the meditation market, I sometimes wonder who their clients will be. People have a powerful experience in meditation practice, and then they want to tell the whole world. Then, the teaching turns into a business. Publicity, marketing, branding, websites, books, classes, teaching gigs, all generating a flow of money. Meditation has become big business.

To me, the commercialization of the teachings on meditation is legitimizing. That meditation has become mainstream reveals the depth of our collective dissatisfaction. The stories we grew up with, the things we were told would make us happy, have turned out to be dissapointing. We are disillusioned. Suffering continues. And people are still searching for relief from suffering. But what happens so often is, in the search to find relief from suffering, instead of finding the relief and freedom we seek, we simply create more suffering for ourselves and others. Looking for peace and happiness, we create the opposite.

One of the methods used in meditation to help free us from the prison of our suffering is to explore our direct experience. Investigating direct experience can lead to new insights about who we are. And the purpose of new insight is to find relief from suffering, specifically, the suffering we create for ourselves with our afflicting thoughts and emotions. The Buddha once said, “With our thoughts, we create the world.” Exploring our direct experience in meditation offers possiblities for deconstructing the world created by our thoughts. What remains is simply this moment, this present experience. The extraordinary ordinary.

Sometimes meditation practice involves chanting, the repetition of words which convey the tradition and the teachings. Most of the major spiritual traditions have some form of chanting practice. Chanting can be a way to remember the teachings, to allow the wisdom of the tradition to percolate into the daily stream of thought. One line that I find to be a particularly useful reminder comes from the “Supplication to the Takpo Kagyu,” a traditional chant outlining the main points of instruction in meditation from the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. The line is, “Awareness is the body of meditation, as is taught. Whatever arises is fresh–the essence of realization.” Many of my Buddhist friends will immediately recognize this line. We used to chant it together in our meditation group.

We could strip away all of the cultural overlay of Tibetan Buddhism. In fact, we could entirely bracket Buddhism altogether, and simply look at this line: “Whatever arises is fresh–the essence of realization.” Taking a bare-bones look at this sentence, we see that it refers to a universal human experience. It is talking about our direct experience, and the truth of our experience as human beings. This is not necessarily a “Buddhist” teaching. Rather, it points to the way we all experience the present moment. We can investigate this, and find out that it is, in fact, true. Whatever arises in each moment is fresh. This present moment is always present. And it is always new, always fresh. This is the essence of realization. While it may seem completely ordinary, the experience of this present moment, the “suchness” of this present moment, is extraordinary. It is fresh. The essence of realization.

I think what I am trying to communicate here is that meditation, and the truths revealed in meditation, are available to everyone. They are in some sense, an open secret, because they require some investigation to be recognized. But this does not mean it is necessary to spend a lot of money, or convert to a different religion, or abandon one’s heritage, or move to India and live in an ashram. Of course, those experiences might be useful, too. Nothing is ever lost. A person might feel drawn to explore different religions and cultures. There could be value in a complete immersion experience. But it is not actually necessary. The teachings on meditation are here. They are mainstream. And they are our birthright. They are more available than ever. And they offer relief from our suffering. There is a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering these days. But the extraordinary nature of our ordinary experience is available for every human being to discover. This discovery does, however, require dedicated effort. Here, I am specifically refering to the realization that each moment arises fresh to awareness. Eventually, even the concept of successive moments falls away to reveal the simple truth of ever-present awareness.

But more on that later. Thank you for reading my blog. Feel free to share and leave comments. And have a great day, today! –Ed