How Do We Find The Ground? Three Meditation Paths

We may already be standing on the ground of being but that won’t help us until we look down.

Photo by Rajitha Fernando from Pexels

In traditions I have been trained I have been taught three ways:

1. The threefold training of Buddhism. This is first to restrain your behaviour so it gives you as little cause for suffering and remorse as possible; second to cultivate the ability to focus and still the mind in meditation; third to use the tranquil, strong mind resulting to investigate the states of body and mind. This investigation should reveal their unreliable, stressful and uncontrollable nature, leading to such a deep letting go that one experiences the unconditioned, deathless level of awareness normally obscured by the constructions of the mind.
2. The Nondual (Advaita) path of self-inquiry. Here one directs one’s attention inward to the source of the feeling of selfhood and all the thoughts that cluster around it, quietly watching the “I am” arise or gently inquiring, “To who or what do thoughts arise?” This quiet attention to the source of the mind eventually short-circuits it and the underlying deathless awareness normally obscured by the constructions of the mind is revealed. Two teachers who emphasized this way were Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj. This is the first step in a longer process of understanding perhaps best described these days by Rupert Spira.
3. The third way is to literally and thoroughly do nothing. This is, obviously, very difficult in practice. It is the way of “shikantaza” (just sitting) or zazen (sitting Zen) and is also taught by Advaita teachers, maybe most memorably by Papaji (although he also taught self-inquiry). The recipe here is that since it’s the constructions of the mind that obscure the presence of the Deathless to normal awareness if one can stop constructing- stop making any intentional effort at all, one can have an experience of the Deathless. This may sound lazy or easy but in fact it requires a very lucid and precise level of mindfulness. Various skillful ways of approaching this “nonmeditation” are taught in the Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions of Tibetan Buddhism as well.