One way to think about meditation\u00a0is that it’s like a cat basking in the sun. \u00a0Gradually our minds dissolve in the sunshine. \u00a0The sun does the work. \u00a0All we do is enjoy the warmth.<\/p>\n
The sunshine is consciousness or love. \u00a0The cat is the mind.<\/p>\n
The mind basks in consciousness or love, soaks in it, rests in it, abides in it.<\/p>\n
Once\u00a0the sun’s work is complete, meditation of this kind is no longer possible because after\u00a0our minds dissolve, we realize that we always feel sunshine.\u00a0\u00a0More exactly, we realize that we are<\/i> the sun. \u00a0We can’t ever not be the sun.<\/p>\n
Somebody who always feels\u00a0the sun is in sahaja samadhi, <\/em>the so-called \u2018natural\u2019 state, the state of an enlightened person, a state of unbroken consciousness and uncontrolled attention.<\/p>\n The kind of meditation I’m describing is a simulation of sahaja samadhi.<\/p>\n We don’t create the sun. \u00a0It’s already there. \u00a0All we do is notice it and keep noticing it.<\/p>\n This isn’t the only kind of meditation. There are other kinds too.<\/p>\n Some types of meditation are purely mental. The person focuses on thoughts and never places the attention on anything beyond the mind.<\/p>\n The kind of meditation I described above, \u00a0bask-in-the-sun meditation, is different because it focuses on things that are beyond the mind:\u00a0love and consciousness. The mind does the meditation — the mind is the cat — but our attention is on something beyond the mind. Consciousness and love are not thoughts. They are real. We do this kind of meditation to simulate\u00a0enlightenment. \u00a0When enlightenment\u00a0arrives, we no longer need the simulation and we stop doing it.<\/p>\n Photo by Huixiang Qiu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One way to think about meditation\u00a0is that it’s like a cat basking in the sun. \u00a0Gradually our minds dissolve in the sunshine. \u00a0The sun does the work. \u00a0All we do is enjoy the warmth. The sunshine is consciousness or love. \u00a0The cat is the mind. The mind basks in consciousness or love, soaks in it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,18,8,22],"class_list":["post-598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-consciousness","tag-effortless-thought-free-state","tag-sadhana","tag-self-enquiry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6YVpx-9E","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":632,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions\/632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}