So I’m about three hours in to De Mello’s Enlightenment and I think I may have found something useful.
I’ve always wanted to try out meditation. I met a middle aged couple who meditated every day when I was in my teens and I’ve given the idea off and on interest every since.
The greatest hindrance has been the ease with which I fall asleep and my ability to do it anywhere, in any position, including standing up.
EDIT – 30/07/2017: OK I now realise that the concept of ‘me and I’ is widely used in numerous self-awareness systems! Just a pre-warning because in the text below it came as a revelation to me … but you have to learn it first from somewhere!
Meditation I thought was supposed to be about emptying your mind or of focusing on one object to clear your head of distractions. Perhaps to watch your breathing and concentrate on nothing but the movement of air coming in and going out.
These are all ideal recipes for me to fall asleep. Sleep, I was told by one person, are the demons trying to stop you meditating. Perhaps. If so there are some pretty effective demons knocking around in me!
I also tend to back off from those who promote mantras or similar. Or those who think you need to have certain things around you. Or those who believe rituals are needed. I want to achieve meditation without ‘aids’.
But what if the focus of your meditation was yourself?
De Mello’s Enlightenment is not about mediation (well at least the first three hours isn’t). Much of it repeats his Rediscovering Life work but there is certainly no harm listening to that again … and again, and again. We hear what we want to hear and miss what we want to miss. Repetition helps overcome that.
De Mello is also easy going listening interjected with stories and jokes. For me the audio was much better than the film. I could listen to it while I was cooking, driving, washing up.
Now in Enlightenment De Mello moves on to the concept of ‘Me and I’ which goes something like this:
Who am I? I am not a business man. That is what I do today but it is not I because I was not always a business man and I will not always be a business man. I am not frustrated. I feel frustrated from time to time but it is not I. I was and I will be, these are passing states but they are not the definitive I.
De Mello likens it to the sky and the clouds. The sky is I, the business man and the frustration are clouds that come and go. The clouds are me.
I is almost nothing. A human, a consciousness that can observe but nothing more. I has no personal baggage with which to make judgements. I is separate from me.
“Now the I is observing me” is the line from the recording that is now wedged in my mind and has fascinated me these last few days.
I has been observing me with my finger up my nose in the supermarket queue. I has been observing me cycling. I has been observing me sitting on the sofa. I has been observing me being frustrated. I has been observing me being excited.
It is absolutely fascinating for me to just look at myself as if in a film. I makes no judgement but passes what it observes back to me and me has been able to see myself in all sorts of new and different ways.
This is not a totally new idea for me. I have often felt like I was seeing myself in some kind of film we call life.
I once told someone about this. “I just feel like a character in a film” I said. “Life isn’t a film” he replied and I thought he as going to berate me for my crazy mentality or not taking personal responsibility or some such thing. “Its a comedy” he finished.
That was even truer to how I actually saw events around me unfold. Its made me see many situations that look frustrating as actually funny. When something goes pear shaped its like those Hollywood comedies where the main character has to endure all sorts of disasters before things come right … and they always do come right.
In the cinema we laugh at the latest disaster to befall our hero or groan with sympathy and offer our mental hope but we know things will work out. It is John Cleese in Clockwise or any number of other similar storylines.
In the film that is my life it has helped me laugh at the set backs as they happen and the ones that have been. This is only scene 4,567 after all. Things will come right in the end I tell myself.
To step outside and observe also has a second benefit. You instantly become more aware of your surroundings. You can see the bookcase from where you are, but what does it look like from over there? By visualising it this way you have to rebuild it and so you become aware of what it is, how it is made, what it is made from and what it contains.
Do this in a supermarket situation and you suddenly start to really see the people around you and a physical environment which you have walked through a thousand times but never observed.
To actually sit and concentrate on looking at myself, on observing the physical me and the mental me. This could be my doorway into meditation even if it isn’t meditation itself.
I think it is time to set up a meeting with someone I know and see as a ‘professional meditator’…
Quick footnote: I see Eckhart Tolle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gi4gBFc67s) and Alan Watts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpeLFJsxnlg) are modern practitioner who have picked up this concept: . Personally I prefer De Mello’s introduction of ‘Me and I’ but these alternatives might help you.