“Meditation”…what kind of image do you have? Don’t you have an image of zazen (zen sitting meditation)? I guess that the popular image is to sit in a cross-legged position with your eyes closed. It is true that the zazen is a type of meditation but that’s not all. So, in fact what is meditation in then?
Let’s look the word of “瞑想 (meditation)” closely. “瞑” is composed with “目 (eye)” and “冥(darkness)”. “想” represents a phase of heart as I previously explained. So “瞑想 (meditation)” is to look close into your heart by shining in the darkness.
We seem to know a lot about our own mind but we actually don’t. We think that we know well about ourselves but we actually don’t. I mentioned that zen and yoga contain the meaning of “meditation” in the last part, therefore what meditation should be is to pay attention not to the things outside but inside of yourself. There is a larger part of darkness in our mind (inside of ourselves) than what we think. So, meditation is to light up the darkness.
Therefore, just sitting in a cross-legged position with your eyes closed isn’t meditation, and the true meditation is to always observe the movement of your own mind in your daily life. You can do this as if you were a third party observing yourself in a calm manner.
But it’s not easy to do. Even though Tempu Nakamura who introduced yoga first to Japan said “the esoteric point of yoga is to look at yourself like others do”…
The esoteric knowledge is something very unique and secret. So it’s not easily transmitted to the outside. Zen monks have tried their best to transmit the esoteric knowledge though. If it’s an easy thing to do, everyone could be enlightened by now and be happy.
Well, there is a phrase from “ONE PIECE” a very popular animation series in Japan, which was “We should’ve fought against it ‘inside’ of ourselves first of all”. Yes, what is important is to look inside of ourselves…
However, this phrase wasn’t totally right. What's wrong with it? Because what I really wanted to say has nothing to do with fighting. Anyway I’ll explain about this matter some other time.
We should remember that what is important is to pay attention to your mind (inside of yourself). I suppose that bad things (=darkness) always exist inside of ourselves but we usually try not to see them. We really don’t want to see any of the bad things, do we?
A lot of companies try developing their business activities overseas because it’s getting too hard inside Japan, as economy in Japan has been quite bad. But we should take a close look at things inside Japan under this situation. As for yourself, you should review things about yourself rather than being concerning about something outside. Don’t you think so? ???
When you shine in the darkness in your mind and see the real light which comes from your inside, the others will see the light (heart), too. When it happens, you won’t need any words.
