Enter the Nothingness with Contentment – 01.24.13

Excerpt: “Tonight’s gathering is about meditation, which is the core activity of this community. The goal of meditation is a simple one – it’s to reach the state of contentment. You’d think that would be very easy, and yet contentment is probably the highest state that the human being can reach. And it’s a virtue that contains all other virtues. Because if you’re really content with what you have, and are not seeking from some state of lack, then you are beyond suffering; you’re at peace. You are liberated from most of the ills that plague human kind. How many people do you know who are in a state of contentment, real contentment? And so it’s a very odd paradox that here we are aspiring to be content. Is that possible? To want to be in a state in which there are no wants. And to understand that paradox we have to recognize that the ego mind, the ordinary state of consciousness that most people take for granted as their real self is not the real Self, but is a construct; it’s artificial. You weren’t born with your current identity – you built it; it was a work of art. Of course you did this work of art when you were about three years old, and so you might want to redo it. Because you put together – to create your identity – a little bit of your mother, a little bit of your father, a little bit of other family members, a little bit of the community, a little bit of the information overload that you were getting from TV, etc. And you created this, modified it over the first five or so years of your life and then you assumed that that’s who you were – and even when you repressed that and created a more adult-like personality, that remained underneath, a child, wanting to be an adult and feeling lack of power, lack of worthiness, lack of capacity to achieve your goals, lack of a sense of feeling lovable or deserving. And so the lacks get built into the structure of the ego mind, even if you’re not aware of it because it’s repressed to a lower level of consciousness, it’s usually there and arises either as symptoms or anxiety or inhibitions, or other pathologies of behavior of attitude of thinking and of emotion. And so to be in a state of contentment, which is our real state, we have to find out who we really are underneath this ego construct, and then, if we wish, we can modify that construct and make it reflect the contentment of our real Being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 24, 2013.