Francis Lucille: Guided Meditation in the Tradition of Advaita

These meditations are kind of an experiment  we are conducting. They are not, of course,   a way to live your life 24-7. I suggest,  for instance, to keep your eyes closed. You cannot do that while driving.  So, sit as comfortably as possible,   and if possible, close your eyes. It's  not mandatory, but it may be useful. And simply welcome all your thoughts, all your  bodily sensations, all of your sense perceptions,   which are mostly sounds and tactile  perceptions, without trying to do anything   about them. That's the luxury of conducting  an experiment. We don't have any agenda. We don't have to do anything.  Everything that needed to be   taken care of has been taken care of,  or will be taken care of in 45 minutes.   So, we can be absolutely passive,  or passive as much as we can. And this extreme passivity doesn't  imply that we don't think. It   is not the same as an absence of thoughts,  because thoughts, images in the mind,   come up naturally, spontaneously. If we try  to interrupt the flow of thoughts, that will   be an activity which is precisely the opposite  of the passivity we seek in this experiment. We minimalize, if you will,  the expenditure of energy,   so to speak. The body is not moving.  There is no physical activity. So, the residual activity is brain activity, if  you will, mind stuff, thought-like stuff. And   to minimize it, all we do is just let it flow,  not stop it. Let it flow, but not act upon it. It is very interesting and, for the  first time, surprising to see that these   thoughts and perceptions arise in an absolutely  spontaneous fashion. They arise in us in a way   which is not different from the sound of traffic  outside, or the birds calling. We can be there,   and the next thought, the next image  which is going to come up, surprises us. In a sense, as a separate entity, we don't own  them. We don't choose them. They just visit us. The thoughts are the visitors of our mind.   So, see what happens as we are conducting this  experiment, when we try to verify my assertion,   my statement, that the next thought surprises us.   We don't know what the next  thought is going to be,   any more than you know what  my next words are going to be,   and any more than I know what my next words  are going to be, or at least my next thought. Everything is coming out of this  presence from moment to moment,   and in this meditation, it  is as if we were standing   by the source, seeing, contemplating,   observing. Whatever originates from the  source, from moment to moment, always new,   always unexpected. Up until we realize that we are  the source, we are not really standing next to it. That too is a concept, an image  in our mind. We are the source,   out of which all of these thoughts and  perceptions keep arising, surprising us.   Observe also the tendency to go  into the past or into the future,   instead of staying by the source, so to speak. Any incursion into the past or into the future  can be postponed up until after this experiment.   There is no emergency to go into the past  or into the future. Everything is fine. We have to understand that the past and the future  are not real. Our reality is now or never. So,   because the past and future are not real, no  real satisfaction can be found traveling there. When that is understood, no matter  how preposterous it may seem to be   in the at first sight, the propensity to  travel into the past and into the future,   trying to find happiness there, has  been dealt a lethal blow. As a result,   it becomes easier and easier to come back  to the now and to stay there effortlessly,   standing by the source, out of which everything  arises from moment to moment. A mistake would   be to try to see the source, to try to feel  the source, to try to experience the source. We have to understand it's  impossible, because we are the source.   Just as the human eye, EYE, we never  see itself directly. It can see its   reflection in a mirror in real time,  or its image in a video later on,   but it can never see itself directly  or, so to speak, eye to eye, EYE to EYE. It is the same here. We never  can see eye, letter I, to eye,   because we are it. We have always been  it, we will always be the invisible eye. Everything we see is simply our  creation from moment to moment.   Everything we see is an emanation, a  projection of the invisible source.   If you are frustrated upon hearing this, that  you can never see the source, think twice. Whatever we can see, we will  lose sight of it sooner or later,   but what we are will always be what we are.   Remember the experiment we are conducting. Simple  contemplation of whatever emanates from the   source, from moment to moment, without following  up on it, allowing it in, allowing it out. Unimpeded flow of things. The passing things  are simply reminders of our permanent being.   Remember that this experiment we are conducting is  about absolute passivity, minimizing any kind of   effort, postponing anything that needs to be done,  that can be postponed for 30 more minutes or so. See that as a result most  activity of the mind gets dropped,   especially any thought that relates to the past  or the future of a human being we believe to be,   of a separate body-mind we believe to be.   Because experientially, separate body-mind  exists only as a concept, as a thought, and   as a result exists only in relation to the past or  to the future. In the now, there is only what is. There is no separation, there is no separate  entity, only what is. And in the beginning   it seems difficult to stick to what is, because  there are forces that seem to pull us out of it,   into the past, into the future. So it seems to  us that to stick to it, so to speak, requires a   certain amount of effort, an effort which then  would be in contradiction with the experiment   we are conducting, which is an experiment in  absolute passivity, absolute effortlessness. But in fact, the effort is this pull into the  past and into the future that triggers all these   thoughts of fear and desire, always pursuing  a goal, a goal that is allegedly going to   be beneficial to the limited, separate entity who  is pursuing it. And that's an effort. It begins   with a thought, with thinking, more thinking,  more thinking, more thinking, and then activities. Every time we go back to the now,  we go back to this meditation,   we destroy this activity. In its very inception,  we just abort it. As a result, the habit of going   into the past and into the future that feeds  this illusion of being separate gets weaker. The less we perpetuate it, the weaker it gets,   the longer we can abide effortlessly  in this presence, as this presence.   So it's okay in this experiment, in the beginning,  to apparently relentlessly go back to this   absolute passivity, go back to the now. Every  time we do that, we are in perfect meditation,   up until we fall back into the old habit,  and then we go back to perfect meditation. So in the now, we don't know what we are,   which doesn't matter because we are what we  are anyway. We don't need to know it really,   we are it. But it is not true that we don't know  it, because we know it with every perception. Our knowing it is a consciousness  aspect, the consciousness element   in all perceptions. By perceiving the very same  fact of perceiving whatever we are perceiving,   by the same token we know I am, we cannot  not know what we are. That's the secret. We only believe that it is possible for us to  not know. It is only possible conceptually as a   residue in the mind, but not experientially.  In a sense, if we create new words,   we could say that knowing, coined from being  in the now, right? Knowing equals knowing. So   in this meditation you can   at some point have the feeling that you are  losing it, so to speak. You are losing your   moral. And that's okay, you'll find it again,  don't worry, at the end of the meditation. But for this time being, allow  complete freedom to whatever arises.   Body sensations, feelings and  thoughts, fearlessly open the box.   Nothing which is inside the box can  hurt you, affect you or kill you. Let everything flow by itself, on its own. Don't  hold on to anything. Let it go, let it flow. After some practice, when by practice, I  mean simply after having conducted this   experiment several times, sometimes more  than several times, you should see that   you can remain effortlessly in the now.  So when we are effortlessly in the now,   there are much less thoughts. So we can  observe that we are effortlessly in the   now when our phenomenal experience is  mostly comprised of bodily sensations. In this configuration of this experiment,  the eyes are closed and the external sense   perceptions are reduced to a strict minimum.  Sometimes accompanying, not sometimes, most of   the time, accompanying these bodily sensations are  irrational images in the mind, a little similar to   what happens in our dreams, however, without the  story that appears in the dream. Because in this   case of this experiment, there is no entity  in the story, so there cannot be a story. What appears then in these bodily sensations are  bodily sensations that are related to the normal   functioning of the body, and also other sensations  that are related to the body transitioning towards   its natural condition, its natural state, which  is a state of transparency and borderlessness.   Now regarding this experiment in meditation,  what is interesting to observe is what happens   when we stop it, when we go back to normal  activities, normal life, without imposing   any longer the constraint to minimalize our  activities. This constraint was a trick,   if you will, to place our body-mind somehow  artificially in its meditative state, if you will. But the meditative state, which is a natural  state of the body-mind, doesn't stop abruptly   when we remove the constraint of being  absolutely passive. It survives for a while,   sometimes for a very long while, after the  experiment. So we can observe then a different   quality in our life, in our experience,  which is the perfume of meditation.