**Happy New Year from all of us at UDL**

 

…and let’s start with preserving our mental health.

It’s 2019 -:¦:-•:*'”*:•.-:¦:-•* *¨¨*:•. and it sounds like the celebrated 2020 is upon us. It seems a great way to begin the year is by becoming aware of our actions regarding our health.

Meditation is one of those words that have a very personal definition, based on our tailored experiences. However, the word itself is quite revealing as to its definition outside of our fancy. It’s quite obvious that the prefix ‘med’ is related to middle and medium, etymologically speaking. The ‘tate’ bit…well, I guess it could mean many things that I’m not able to go into here but the key is medium, which is to be ‘between’.

The medium is a go-between for the spirit world and the physical/animal kingdom, connecting an understanding beyond the tangible or physical proof.

As a medium and an advocate for the end of strictly physical standards as a qualifying measure, here’s a lengthy piece of common ether transference that you’ll have a very hard time proving and hopefully a much easier time feeling.   

  

 

Did you know that our cells are all connected within by a type of liquid in something called an extracellular matrix structure that behaves in a connected way that we have consciously forgotten? Well, that’s what I was told by Delbert Skeet, the Bowen Technique practitioner, who helped wake up my body’s cellular memories, giving me back the keys to my vehicle.

Can you believe that I had left the keys at the doctor’s surgery for years and didn’t even know it?

No, in reality, I have only seen a doctor on the odd scary occasion, for as long as I can remember but, I admit, I was once of the belief that he was the guide to my body. Today, I am generally my own mechanic unless the issue is a little beyond the scope of my knowledge. 

As solid as the physical benefits of meditation are, over the years, my doctor never once uttered this to me throughout all my physical issues.

Well, don’t we all want to know how to meditate? Sadly, this ideation is full of home truths about the practicality of western meditation within a thick, noisy environment.

I’m sure with that statement you can work out already that it’s not a practical thing or even close to a reality doing this in any major city, unless you are homeless or dying, in a strange expression of *Lews’ law.

Why do I say this?

It all started after watching a video that was entitled ‘There Are Only 2 Genders, Change My Mind’. Immediately after watching I felt as though I could have hosted the debate. I learned quite a lot about human emotions and the desire we all have to validate our personalized reality by having our peers accept it as real.

Of course, there are various visions of reality but most are expressed in one dimension which, in most cases, are disillusion based on self-qualifying entitlement hailing from the west. Or even more specifically ‘English speaking’.

Not to stray too far from the topic of meditation but look at the systemic stripping of qualifications that an immigrant faces when she becomes a citizen of one of the ‘major’ western cultures. Immediately all her studies are disqualified, setting her back to ground zero. Because we, over here, know everything. Not.

In the face of this, I must say that our culture thrives on the idea of knowing more than other cultures when in fact all that this view achieves is to feed a collective ego and… well when someone is brave enough to penetrate the shared entitlement brain, it all collapses with ease. Hence why the need to be one of the pack creates grand illusions that can be challenged swiftly by even a child. Well, that’s if they are honest and confident enough within themselves, unafraid to speak the truth and to be viewed as different.

Anyway, the host of the debate stuck strictly to his point and left his guests leaning on emotional sympathy rather than the using science-verified evidence that confirms the ongoing historical habits of animals on earth since the beginning of time.

This emotional argument would seem obvious to a psychotherapist, a councellor or anyone else that stays on the path of reason, logic, common sense and steers away from the need to be part of the clan-ego.

All this is to say that it is a day of reconstructing our thoughts and accepting new ideas. But we must realise that one of those new ideas is the idea of an old idea called eastern wisdom that is emphatically supreme. To hold such a view outside of the consideration of the planet’s lifelong cultures and ways (including dinosaurs) is pure pompous disillusion, spurred by illusionists. There, I said it.

Western views on meditation outside of the essence of eastern thought are exactly the same–it’s just a second-hand idea told by the student and not the master. They are just mouths moving without substance. It appears as though we desire the fruit without the root.

 

 

So, mediation in…let’s say New York City or London city.

The idea of clearing the mind, in itself is a thought that can only be entertained for a short amount of time before returning to what we call reality: our duties like extinguishing the green WhatsApp circle on our phone screens.

True divorce from the mind requires the abandonment of time, as there truly isn’t any. But living on a circuit board, we must allocate and receive at least a few numbers to make it appear real. This is not to say that true meditation cannot be achieved but it is very unlikely with that over-consciousness of time. Even if it’s not at the forefront of the mind but way in the back, one is still too present.

How do you pause the subconscious mind and make it unaware of your worldly ‘commitments’? Ironically, isn’t it a dead line what we wish to achieve when we hang up from our presence?

You take time to detach from the hustle and bustle of city life from within the city. It’s difficult enough to ignore the Id with the undisputable fact that your stomach is telling you that lunch is normally in an hour and a half and to brush off that gurgling sound in your belly as nothing at all.

But even the (external) city demands you have to pick back up after your idea of detachment is over, like that call that you have to make to confirm your meeting tomorrow at six.

Can one truly lose themselves outside of time while living on a clock face? We are merely the second hand on a watch, not even the minutes, far less the hours. No, not in the city and I don’t care how many Apps we have that bring us to believe that we can. True meditation cannot include commitments to anything but ‘you, being, now’.

It’s both selfish and selfless at the same time.

The amount of time allocated to achieving such meditation is already dependent upon firstly: ignoring the body and its natural functions, and then secondly the ego–awareness of self, then its relation to the other-self: those all so intrusive, peers.

Returning to my point, Ironically, the only tribe of people within the city equipped to perform such a graceful, engaging and refreshing act of detachment are the homeless, if they can just quiet the mind. Besides the desire for food, lack of phone doodling, commitments, expectations, nobody to wait on a call from, no real ego (being used to being viewed as the bottom of the ladder) and no expectations from society they’re quite perfect. In fact, apart from thoughts of getting out of our way they are hardly seen for more than a second in our rushed illusion of detachment. And getting out of the way is precisely the essence of the exercise, but who can get out of their own way?

Meditation and most other spiritual exercises within the concrete are largely practiced as an accessory to attach to the perceived individual and their need to be seen as more than a ‘base’ animal. I’m sorry but it comes with the territory. It makes for good conversation; walking to the gym, carrying a yoga mat and a reusable coffee cup says a lot about you. But do you see the contradiction?  You could ask, why even be in the crowded city if it isn’t just a desire to live amongst a massive surge of noise in its various forms?

What about the terminally ill?

The person that suddenly has a finite number of days left on earth instantly becomes a completely different animal–the perfect candidate for pure meditation. One suggestion to die in a few months because of a diagnosis by their trusty witch doctor and as if by majik: the psychic ability to shed away the entire matrix of people-pleasing activities–gone.

The thought of permanently changing from human form to a dried carcass is pretty sobering; it doesn’t take much of an imagination to know that. But maybe it’s a book I once read on a very spooky trip to Morocco, ‘A Time To Die’, that temporarily morbidised me. I looked death in the face and said ‘No thank you’. Or it could be watching my mother’s final departure that brought me, at least for a while, back to simple basic needs. Otherwise, humans, of which I am not, are preoccupied with such superficiality as a default setting that they rarely have time to question the philosophy of what they are being and doing, without creating an emotional wall to protect their wrongness in the illusion they’ve built; until such time when they are facing death.

Nobody to please, nobody to be, just to truly find out who, why and what we are. 

To do this and carry this approach through even seemingly factual b.s. without drinking it up takes a separation that doesn’t need to be anything but a capsule outside of time and need.

Dying/the threat of dying is letting go to die or letting go to then live. Illness is a form of a conundrum also. With nothing but emptiness, the body does what it wishes without need or desire. You know like when a predator decides to ambush a herd of cattle because the menu is sparce. As long as it’s edible, it’s hungry and facing starvation, it’s not concerned with the audience or whether it looks fat while doing so.

 

 

If we can accept that our culture has become so fixed with egocentric, external stimulus we may then see the impossibility in fruitful healing and meditation within this space where healing is replaced with dealing and meditation with medication.

So we have this primitive animal as a model that our we-stern culture observes as inferior to our Einsteinus giganticus brain. So much so that we subject it to brutal, animalistic treatment to resolve our fears in the quest to know.

In another poetic twist and display of Lews’ law the animal, in this case, is the recipient of less stress than we are, even in the wild, as it doesn’t live constantly in this state of emergency. We, on the other hand, with the introduction of wifi (why fly) and mobile divisives, have sealed our fate as being the most highly strung animal on earth–we have overthought cleverness to the point of stupidity.

So as we have ignored the ancients from the east and their clever observations within animals’ characteristics we have now become them and in most cases less than them. I guess it was through not truly understanding the horoscope and only when realizing this we have tried to observe the animal wholly (unsuccessfully) to find our way back to purpose.       

Rather than observe the nature of nature through the animal kingdom, man has exploited choice and offered the world recklessness as freedom, justified by the animals’ limited choices. Even though a bird can fly west at any point in time, it flies east moving with the armadillos, badgers and whatever other animal feels conscious of the connected, collective wise decision–no vote needed.

It’s an order and discipline that keeps it all going. But  they do not try to duplicate each others mating habits or their hibernation laws as a part of this, they abide to the grander movement and leave the microcosmic culture of other creatures alone.

Man, on the other hand, sees that there is a shortage of crops and rather than do as any other sane animal would do and harvest, store, uproot, fast, plant more or simply move, he decides to use that out of touch brain to try to improve on mother nature as though she didn’t have the advantage of that huge quark of a connected brain. That’s the problem–that overactive western brain that cannot relax.

Only a man detached from understanding nature can see big in terms of mass. All his future planning to reach the final frontier space can be halted by something mass-deficient like a, one centimetre, poison dart frog.

In a nutshell, it appears that the west holds information and the east holds the ancient wisdom. One could complete the other but… So no, you cannot get the traditional benefits out of meditation here in the city, simply because you cannot truly quiet that scheming mind, you just don’t have the time.

 

 

Can I meditate before my sea moss has finished boiling on the pot, or get one in before I have to call Tony to give him my acupuncturists number or maybe one before Amazon delivers my parcel between 9 and 4pm?

Can an ant sleep peacefully in a boiling oven?

Sorry but no. As many arms as Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu don they still aren’t enough to juggle the everyday activities that we have worked into our day, sacrificing the potential of calm. The most you can expect is an eventual understanding of self and possibly the reality that provides you only with the question of whether you value the noise of the city more than the tranquility of the burbs. Good luck with that and have a very real new year.

 

 

Angel Lewis

 

 

*Lews’ law/point

The extreme point where one state becomes another, in some cases without realizing the loss of the whole point.