Heavily Meditated Quotes

Sit in such a way that you feel light, relaxed, happy, and free. Many of us have so many anxieties and projects that weigh heavily on us. We carry our past sorrows and anger and they become a kind of baggage that makes life heavy. Sitting meditation is a way to practice letting go of the things we carry needlessly.

Ideologically mindfulness serves very well the neoliberal-capitalist’s construction of reality which softly dictates that one must deny the roots of personal and social issues. We are manipulated into the self-repair mode, but what is actually broken is the system. Therein, the problem we face is our own selves and not a world based on oppressive values which leave us feeling oppressed and powerless. You must be meditation 24/7 for the rest of your life to deny that meditation alone won’t house the homeless, will not end contemporary social and physical apartheid. It will not provide free health care to all in the community and it will end social exclusion. Said that, yes, you might feel that you are feeling less anxious, but only because you are being ‘drugged’ and you are being denied your full humanity. We need to feel more, sympathise more and act moved by our love for humanity – those who are outside of ourselves. Here’s something that you will not find in a self-help book that might help you: the problem is the oppressive system and not you. It is the system that violates us by imposing since birth to us that there is one way to be and feel human. And it involves heavily looking good, competing against others and to compete against your own self – the system says that we must be functional machines to fulfil the system’s need. Our body is controlled and our minds, our being controlled via instruments of normalisation such as self-help books and mindfulness meditation.

The deeper minds of all ages have at all times felt sympathy for the animals because they suffer from life and yet do not possess the power to turn the thorn of suffering against itself and to understand their existence metaphysically; one is, indeed, profoundly indignant at the sight of senseless suffering. That is why there has arisen in more than one part of the earth the supposition that the bodies of animals contain the guilt-laden souls of men, so that this suffering which at first sight arouses indignation on account of its senselessness acquires meaning and significance as punishment and atonement before the seat of eternal justice. And it is, truly, a harsh punishment thus to live as an animal, beset by hunger and desire yet incapable of any kind of reflection on the nature of this life; and no harder fate can be thought of than that of the beast of prey pursued through the wilderness by the most gnawing torment rarely satisfied and even then in such a way that satisfaction is purchased only with the pain of lascerating combat with other animals or through inordinate greed and nauseating satiety. To hang on to life madly and blindly, with no higher aim than to hang on to it; not to know that or why one is being so heavily punished but, with the stupidity of a fearful desire, to thirst after precisely this punishment as though after happiness — that is what it means to be an animal; and if all nature presses towards man, it thereby intimates that man is necessary for the redemption of nature from the curse of the life of the animal, and that in him existence at last holds up before itself a mirror in which life appears no longer senseless but in its metaphysical significance.

are agreeable. They deeply want to please, but pay for that with a tendency to be conflict-averse and dependent. Others are tougher-minded and more independent. Those kids want to do what they want, when they want, all the time. They can be challenging, non-compliant and stubborn. Some children are desperate for rules and structure, and are content even in rigid environments. Others, with little regard for predictability and routine, are immune to demands for even minimal necessary order. Some are wildly imaginative and creative, and others more concrete and conservative. These are all deep, important differences, heavily influenced by biological factors and difficult to modify socially. It is fortunate indeed that in the face of such variability we are the beneficiaries of much thoughtful meditation on the proper use of social control.

By withdrawal from ordinary duties, by fasting and meditation, the new leaders had found within themselves the possibility of living a new kind of life which reversed the previous scale of values, even that of archaic agricultural society, with its over-emphasis of sexuality, its exclusive concern with kinsmen and neighbors; but even more emphatically they rejected the standards of civilization. Facing the heavily armored personalities produced by kingship, these prophets were spiritually naked and physically unarmed; so man Davids confronting the brass-bound Goliaths of the megamachine. The new leaders were bold enough to present the stripped personality as a model for imitation. For Confucius, one of the most influential of these new prophets, only those who sought to perfect the personality, with the aid of music, ritual, and learning, could be called 'complete men.

Now, it is important to control the mind, because happiness depends heavily on one’s state of mind.

Consider this analogy. When it rains heavily, the water does not necessarily penetrate the earth. If the surface is dry and hard, the rain water floods the surface and runs off. But if it rains gradually for many days continuously, and the ground is moist, then the water seeps deep into the earth, which is good for cultivation and for life. Similarly in ourselves, we must moisten our muscles and nerves through the expansion and extension of the various asana. In this way, the stress that saturates the brain is diffused throughout the rest of the body, so the brain is rested and released from strain and the body releases its stress and strain through movement. Similarly, while doing the various types of pranayama the whole body is irrigated with energy. The nerves are soothed, the brain is calmed, the hardness and rigidity of the lungs are loosened. The nerves are made to remain healthy. There is a certain vibration, which you can make rhythmic and subtler in your asana and pranayama practice without force or stress. You are one with yourself and that is in and of itself a meditative state.

Lev 23:44 Worship involves both celebration and confession. But in Israel’s national holidays, the balance seems heavily tipped in favor of celebration—five joyous occasions to two solemn ones. The God of the Bible encourages joy! God does not intend for religion to be only meditation and introspection. He also wants us to celebrate. Serious reflection and immediate confession of sin are essential. But this should be balanced by celebrating who God is and what he has done for his people. What special occasions on your calendar would you describe as times for joy? Which would be times for confession? How are you doing with the five-to-two balance?

Fortune falls heavily on those for whom she’s unexpected. The one always on the lookout easily endures.” —

But all disciplines today are primarily cooperative enterprises in which progress depends heavily on global communication, conferences, and individuals enjoying institutional support, all of which cost money. For these reasons fewer today share Socrates’s belief that a group of intellectuals sitting around discussing ideas will suffice to yield a deep understanding of nature, human nature, or society. Knowledge today is expensive. Consequently, truth, at least the sort pursued and established by science and specialized scholarship, is no longer a value one would expect to be realized through a retreat from the world. Today, if truth is to be associated with frugality, simplicity, or austerity, it will typically be a different sort of truth, the kind that is sought by one who pursues enlightenment through religious devotions or meditation.

I loved Taoism, with its image of a vast, inchoate, benevolent Way flowing through all things. Zen appealed to me with its spareness, Chinese Buddhism because of its emphasis on erasing delusion, as opposed to adding knowledge. All these traditions focus heavily on meditation, a practice that was also recommended (in a Christianized form) by some Mormon leaders. And so I added meditation to the reading, praying, and homemaking that filled my religious-camel calendar.

I think that all that time I’d spent accepting the fact that I was already dead made me sort of a walking zombie among the living back home. Every person I looked at I would see as horribly disfigured, shot, maimed, bleeding, and needing my help. In some ways it was worse than being in Iraq, because the feelings were not appropriate to the situation and because I no longer had my buddies around to support me emotionally. I spent a good deal of time heavily dependent on alcohol and drugs, including drugs such as Clonazepam prescribed by well-meaning psychiatrists at the VA, drugs that were extremely addictive and led to a lot of risky behavior. However, I still had a dream of learning how to meditate and entering the spiritual path, a dream that began in college when I was exposed to teachings of Buddhism and yoga, and I realized these were more stable paths to well-being and elevated mood than the short-term effects of drugs. I decided that I wanted to learn meditation from an authentic Asian master, so I went to Japan to train at a traditional Zen monastery, called Sogen-ji, in the city of Okayama. Many people think that being at a Zen monastery must be a peaceful, blissful experience. Yet though I did have many beautiful experiences, the training was somewhat brutal. We meditated for long hours in freezing-cold rooms open to the snowy air of the Japanese winter and were not allowed to wear hats, scarves, socks, or gloves. A senior monk would constantly patrol the meditation hall with a stick, called the keisaku, or “compassion stick,” which was struck over the shoulders of anyone caught slouching or closing their eyes. Zen training would definitely violate the Geneva Conventions. And these were not guided meditations of the sort one finds in the West; I was simply told to sit and watch my breath, and those were the only meditation instructions I ever received. I remember on the third day at the monastery, I really thought my mind was about to snap due to the pain in my legs and the voice in my head that grew incredibly loud and distracting as I tried to meditate. I went to the senior monk and said, “Please, tell me what to do with my mind so I don’t go insane,” and he simply looked at me, said, “No talking,” and shuffled off. Left to my own devices, I was somehow able to find the will to carry on, and after days, weeks, and months of meditation, I indeed had an experience of such profound happiness and expanded awareness that it gave me the faith that meditation was, as a path to enlightenment, everything I had hoped for, everything I had been promised by the books and scriptures.

This was one instance in which the medical profession totally rejected something that they were not ready to accept because, in part, there was no framework for understanding the new concept. It was only later, when the causative agents were clearly identified through the work of Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, and Joseph Lister, that it became accepted that germs cause disease. Koch discovered that a microscopic agent was the cause of tuberculosis and showed this with total certainty, leading to a revolution in medicine. All of a sudden, science and technology seemed to hold tremendous power, once it was understood that so many diseases were caused by infectious agents, and powerful new technologies could be developed to treat them with great specificity. This naturally gave rise to a “find it and fix it” culture. Over the last one hundred years, medical science has given rise to many wonderful things. However, it is now very heavily focused on disease. We spend almost no time on health. We make an assumption that for every disease, there is a defect that we need to find and fix. We don’t deal with people throughout their lives, but only when they’re sick. In the United States, we have become accustomed to assuming that one’s health is managed by one’s doctor, and that individuals have little responsibility or control over their health. Where does this leave us? On the one hand, life expectancy in 1900 was forty years. Today it’s eighty years. We have doubled life expectancy in a hundred years. That’s almost miraculous. On the other hand, in 1900 the most likely cause of death for a young man between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five would have been infection. Today, it’s murder, suicide, drug abuse, or violent accidents. We have made tremendous progress, but some of the consequences of our progress are absolutely terrifying. In addition, we have a tremendous accumulation of chronic diseases, many of which are fostered by people’s own behavior. One of the problems with Western medicine is that it tends to make a reductionist assumption that for every disease, there is a single causative factor that we need to find and fix. We now are learning that there are often multiple factors, rather than a single reductionist cause of disease. People are born with a baseline risk, and then environmental factors impinge on that risk over time. There is a tremendous difference in susceptibility to different diseases, yet we often have a lot of control over environmental factors that contribute to disease progression.

Religions are like a ladder. If you cling to them, you cannot progress further. Religious organizations have their hidden agenda. They heavily rely on the past. They want to drag you towards the past. But you have to stand on your own. You have to work for your own liberation. Liberation is a state of mind and that is achievable right in this moment. It all depends on your choice. The moment you take the decision, you are free from the past; you are free from the thoughts.

Suddenly that body appears: in my smoke while someone's heavily describing Greece, that famous monotonous line feels white against the tensile gloom of life and I seem intimate with what I merely touch.

Nijinsky was badgered by the Outsider’s greatest enemy, human triviality. There was a ballet season in New York, with Nijinsky’s own company and a new Nijinsky ballet, and endless difficulties and annoyances to be overcome. Nijinfcky had no business ability; his temperament was almost completely introverted, contemplative (various observers have spoken of him as having the face of a Tibetan Llama, of ‘a Buddha in meditation’, of an Egyptian statue); these endless, unimportant demands by the outside world were an immense strain. In this state of strain, the war began to weigh heavily on him; he was haunted by visions of dead soldiers.