The Simplest Meditation

Yes, for 'enlightenment' , presumably a transcendent state, sounds reasonable to say, cannot be worked at by me from the level or grosser state i am in. Yet there is something i need to bring to the table, an inner posture , adopted very sensitively, of active receptivity.. As the author himself says, insights then reveal themselves. I have seen that even for basic life, livelihood and relationship issues this inner posture helps. One example : The other day as sleep eluded me the mental/emotional complex got occupied with the problems on hand . Then the rational part of the mind intervened and said that this is the time to rest and pointed me to instead engage the awake organism towards some meditative practices. That was beneficial but there still was chattering of the mind. Then i decided to focus the mind on reading about a certain esoteric concept about some fundamental aspect of human and cosmic design. About 20 minutes of that in the middle of the night finally made the body more tuned to sleep which came eventually ... So tossing and turning about ( a reactive state) was seen to be unhelpful and adopting an active State, yet more oriented to receptivity, to observing, turned out to be helpful. It seems to me being mindful, consciously resisting instinctive reactionary tendencies, and being open to insights, helps to tune the organism to respond to life appropriately - be it to discover 'enlightenment' or to engage harmoniously with the person who usually gets my goat.

Inner meditation seems to me like watching smoke. Sleep is a better technique. There is no transcendent state in reality, save the transcendent idealism of Kant, and he disliked being called an idealist. But pure reason seems to be what he was pointing to as being transcentdent. Reality is the object of experience. Unless, of course, your suppressed premise is that there is really a supernatural world more real than the natural world, as in Platonic Ideal Forms.

That got me to pause and ponder on the aspect of "suppressed premise" and the reality , or otherwise of states not normally evident (i withdraw the term "transcendent") and two points are relevant to make in that context .... 1. It may be true that Buddha ( or Christ, or any similar figure) experienced or knew some reality and Kant did not (or was not interested about exploring that, or was convinced about its 'unreality'). 2. Even within my fairly limited experience i can truthfully state that ( and have heard this to be true for others as well) that the state of my being evokes or reveals some truth which fades away when my being goes back to its more usual state. For example, when i was in a certain state for a few hours when it seemed my death was imminent, the negative attitude towards someone I knew was clearly felt as an absurd and petty one and it fell away. However , though weakened significantly, it has come back when the my ordinary state of existence has returned. Therefore , i consider, as an explorer, one can stay open to possibilities. However, yes, this whole endeavour does look like "smoke and mirrors" as one is both the scientist/explorer and the laboratory/field of discovery. . It