Other forms of meditation apart from Anapanasiti are available, such as Creative Visualisations; which is my preferred method of meditation. Before we get into Creative Visualisations and how the name is somewhat misleading, it’s necessary to talk a little about the philosophy of meditation. Meditation can either be taken as a lifestyle or a skill and the approaches are quite different. Something which I have heard from the monastics at Wat Suan Mokh is that, initially you should experiment with different forms of meditation, and after some time choose one and stick to that. The metaphor that they use is that one deep well is more effective than many shallow wells. While I believe this to be true for those who choose meditation as a lifestyle, I am not convinced that it is necessarily true for people who use it as a skill to benefit their life.
As a lifestyle, meditation requires a significant level of dedication, either as a monastic or a lay person who has committed to a reasonably strict lifestyle. Alcohol and other forms of narcotics are either completely abandoned or used very sparingly; there is usually a commitment to some form of exercise routine and/or yoga, there may be certain dietary restrictions, and some form of commitment to society and family or micro-community. For many monastics and some lay people there may be a commitment to celibacy. For most humans, this is too high a level of commitment; certainly, my path has involved varying levels of commitment, and so my experience has been of meditation as a skill rather than a lifestyle.
Any skill can be learnt. There are exceptions, when there is some form of physical/mental retardation and/or psychological issue such as a specific mental health problem or developmental issue, such as Asperger’s syndrome. If that does not apply to you, then you can learn to meditate provided that you choose and become familiar with one or other of the many methods / modalities available to you and you commit a certain amount of time, at least twice a week but preferably every day, to the endeavour. It’s true that some rare individuals have a natural predisposition to meditation, but I’m not one of them and probably neither are you, so don’t let that bother you. Write a plan / commitment to yourself and some goals and then just crack on. Be consistent. Keeping some type of journal would be a good move. Evaluate your performance twice a month and course-correct as necessary. Start reading some books about the subject of meditation. It’s neither brain surgery nor rocket science.
The nature of mind is a curious thing, and there are different modes of thought. Furthermore, I contend that this, at least in part, relates to Howard Gardener’s theory of multiple intelligences and why different people have different natural aptitudes, which will be developed to a lesser or greater degree later in life. Narrative thinking and visual thinking are distinctly different, for example, but most of us do a mix of both. There are at least three different ways you can undertake ‘Creative Visualisations’ (from herein out they will be referred to as C-Viz), visual, narrative and feeling. This is an oversimplification because some people, musicians for example, will sometimes think and imagine in terms of sound and rhythm rather than visually, but let’s keep it simple. I’ll try and explain, but unless you actually experiment with it yourself, your understanding will always be limited. Let’s start with a little exercise.
Lie on your back or sit up in your chair and close your eyes. Picture an apple in your ‘mind’s eye’. Can you do it? Can you actually ‘see’ the apple in your mind’s eye? Can you see it from only one angle, or can you rotate it?
Is it red or green? Is part of it illuminated by the sun’s rays and other parts hidden in shade? Can you identify it as a specific type of apple? How easy was it to picture?
If I ask you to picture your mother, is it easier or harder? Do you now feel a strong emotion? Can you hear some type of voice in your head? Is it your own voice narrating a story? Or is it your mother’s voice?
Try it and observe what happens without judgement. Try it. Without. Judgement. Later when you are reflecting on the experience, judgement might be useful, but at the time just practise the technique.
With the visual aspect you are creating or recreating a picture or ‘mind-movie’ of a scenario in your mind’s eye. Perhaps one or two per cent of the population have a condition called aphantasia and are lacking a mind’s eye and cannot use this aspect of C-Viz, but for those who are not suffering from aphantasia, the mind’s eye will improve with practise, and if you don’t practise it your skill level will not improve.
Often you will be drawing on memory and then playing with it or embellishing it; be playful with it, like a child. This picture or movie does not need to be completely true or accurate, it needs to be useful for you; something that is a goal you aspire to in the future, for example. It is a skill which is primarily, although not exclusively, driven by intuition and emotion. Although for extremely skilled meditation practitioners there are highly complex visualisations, flames coming out of lotus flowers for example, for most of us the techniques can be quite simple and that is sufficient.
Do you have a narrative voice in your head? I do. In fact, I have multiple voices. To be clear they are all ‘my’ voice; I am not schizophrenic. Most of us are running different tape-loop voices which often begin in childhood as the voices of parents or teachers and are later internalised to become the voices of different personas, which is one reason why your ‘angry voice’ may well have a different tone or quality to your ‘happy voice’. For most of us these narrative tape-loop voices are running on autopilot, in which case we will tend to end up with the same results in life. Sometimes there may be competing voices in your head and it will be more like a dialogue or discussion in your mind rather than a monologue for the simple reason that you have more than one persona and there is no unchangeable ‘self’. At this point it may be useful to mention how this differs from madness / insanity.
Some people, often labelled as paranoid schizophrenics, ‘hear’ voices, as if some external entities were talking to them. As I understand it this is an entirely different phenomenon to hearing your own narrative voice in your head, which is a programmed loop of default ways of behaving. The voices the schizophrenic hears are not identified as ‘his’ or ‘her’ own voice, but as some external entity talking to him or her; exactly how these manifest I don’t know, since this has never happened to me. There is a rare condition known as anaduralia which means that a person has no internal monologue, but most people have some sort of internal monologue or dialogue running in their heads for most or all of their waking hours. For those suffering from anaduralia, they cannot utilise the narrative aspect of C-Viz.
The narrative loops that you have (probably) been playing today are likely running in an unconscious manner and in all likelihood, they have been programmed into you by external forces, particularly as a child. With the narrative aspect, if you don’t take the time to reprogramme it and preferably use it in an active way (as well as reprogramming the more passive-automatic voice) your life will continue to play out in a largely unconscious manner. To quote Carl Jung, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Consider the life that you actually want to live, really think about it deeply and then commit it to writing. Leave it for a few days or a week and then come back and add to it, update it as necessary and use it as the basis for the narrative aspect of your C-Viz. I did and my life is better now than it was before; this is a form of delusion which may actually be helpful for you. Committing it to writing is important, it makes it more real and shows a certain level of commitment. Or simply don’t bother and see how that works out for you.
Delusion. Part of the central paradox is that while there exists a Self, there is no eternal ‘self’, but many personas or parts that help conduct and guide a thought process within a human avatar body, that delusionally believes itself to be an ‘eternal self’. The physical avatar body changes over time, but the inner cast of actors largely remains the same over time unless there is some deliberate intervention to change it. In many cases, perhaps the majority of cases, delusion becomes reality.
