Tori Amos's
A Sorta Fairytale is such a powerful song for me. All five of my senses return to the fateful winter between 2003 and 2004. The sharp smell of the descending Columbus winter, the warm feeling in my heart from sparkling red signs of Christmas everywhere and from the feeling of shopping bags in my hands, heavy with cute clothes. My friend Jen by my side, fiercely protective of my honor, having the time of our lives. So many things came together on those evenings, and I can't think of any way to have times quite like those ever again. My heart glows just remembering. Sure, much was going badly wrong in those otherwise dark, dark days. But the combination of dark struggles and beauty beyond description is exactly what makes the stuff of myths, right? When I went to Columbus with Jen on those nights, I was living in a unique mesh of the present and a very idealized future. Times like those feel almost like an age of myths now, looking back upon them.
Musings like these are powerful, and they're usually brought on by a single thought. In a flurry of greed and materialism, I was browsing ebay earlier tonight and was happy to see plenty of the now-discontinued Clinique Simply up for auction. It triggered an emotional response - it was one of my badly-wanted fragrances in the fateful winter I mentioned just above. Everything...the bottle, the color of the perfume, all the complex notes in the fragrance, seemed to sum up that time in my life in an interesting way. That emotional response sort of fermented in my mind until just now as I was pulling music from my backup folder on Anna's computer into iTunes...and then suddenly and for no reason I started listening to that song. And then come the flood of memories, made all the clearer by heavy, intense meditation every day for the past month or two. It was vivid, but clearer than the fading images was the feeling in my chest. It was tangible...palpable. The warmth, the comfort, the joy of discovering an idealized new world, all right there, all very noticeable as sensations in my body.
The process of one little thing leading to a cascade of other events in your life that lead to the manifestation of much bigger things....Deepak Chopra calls it "Synchrodestiny". Everything that's happening now...to you, to me, to everyone reading these words and everyone else in existence....all of it has its roots deep in the past and will have echoes and far-reaching effects long into the future.
I started to understand all of this on a really deep, fundamental level when I started really intensive meditation. I never realized how colorful, deep, and strange "reality" really is. It's so humbling but there's a kind of really amazing joy in it...
I guess I should stop and ask...why meditate?
The goal of meditation is to silence your mind completely. There's two parts to us...there's the "real" us that lives under all the social conditioning and the roar of constant thoughts...and there's the ego...the thing that says "I want, I need, me me me." The ego is the part of us that gets offended, flies into rages, gets angry at people and holds grudges, feels egotistical or proud or ambitious, the part that cuts people off in traffic out of spite or gets vindictive or petulant. Sadly, it's the part of us that we mistake for the "real" us...and even more sadly, I think it's entirely artificial. That part of us develops sometime in childhood as the beginning of a profound slide into separation from every other person and being in existence. By the time we're teenagers, we've thrown up this artificial barrier and we're pouring 99% of all of our energy and attention into defending its sensitive and arbitrary barriers. We defend points of view. We buy newer and better cars, cell phones, and strain to get better jobs and lawnmowers than our neighbors. We defend dignity. We defend political or racial affiliations. We defend mythology and religion. And we assert those points by taking the offensive and pushing those points of view onto others...by force sometimes. Enter war and terrorism.
That part of you is what clamors for your attention every single moment with nagging passing thoughts flitting through your awareness. And if you run like that all day, every day, you age quickly. You get old really fast as stress consumes your body. You fall victim to myriad different illnesses, then you wonder if your life meant anything before you die.
Now that sounds really melodramatic, and maybe it is a little bit. But it's true.
Meditation is supposed to get you around that. It's a chance for your mind to rest a little bit, but also to silence that chatter of thoughts. It's like the difference between a phone conversation where you can hear hundreds of other conversations at once, drowning out you and your friend...and having a clear, one-on-one conversation with that person with no interruption. The more you meditate, the quieter and sharper your mind gets. Scientific studies on meditation point to increased cognitive ability *and* productivity...huge increases...in those who meditate vs. those who don't. I can tell you personally that life is a lot easier to live when you meditate, and that's sort of only the beginning of all the benefits.
Me personally? I wondered why nothing I ever intended happened...until meditation. Now what I intend, happens. All the time. It's crazy.
And images like the one I mentioned above become so much clearer and more profound. I'm dazzled by how beautiful life is.
