Some of the many misconceptions about meditation

by David Accomazzo

It was a simple assignment, or so I thought. Write an article about meditation, not too long. Sounded easy enough at first. Man was I wrong.

Meditation, says Roland Cohen, a meditation instructor at Boulder’s Shambhala Meditation Center with more than three decades of experience, is “the simplest act you can do.” But like many aspects of meditation, that statement is filled with inherent contradictions, paradoxes within paradoxes. Which is fine, Cohen says, quoting one of his favorite meditation gurus: “If it isn’t a paradox, it isn’t true.”
One basic belief at the meditation center is that every human being is naturally compassionate, kind, warm and “awake.” But our egos get in the way of our true selves and cloud our perception of the world.

“Ego is a process of maintaining our reference points to ourselves. So we have this sense of ourselves of being continuously solid. But if you look at it really up close, that feeling of being continuously solid is made up of all these individual little reference points of who we think we are,” Cohen says.
Think of watching a movie — the illusion of motion implied by the rapid projection of individual frames, a phenomenon called persistence of vision. Our ego, Cohen, says, acts on the same principle.

“We see the whole world, everything else, in terms of what does it mean to me, the self. What do I feel about that? And the way that manifests is continuously that we like it, we don’t like it or we don’t care about it,” Cohen says. “And so we never see it the way it is; we always see it through this filter of, ‘What does that mean to me.’ We never see it on its own terms, seeing that as it is.”

So we meditate to fight our ego, right?

Wrong, Cohen says. Meditation’s goal is not destroy ego but to make us aware of it.

“You can’t get rid of ego, because if you try to get rid of ego, that’s aggression toward yourself,” Cohen says. “You’re creating ego, which is trying to destroy ego. It doesn’t work. You just have a new ego. And it’s a problem because then you’re just beating yourself up.”

The ego causes us to project ourselves onto the world and stops us from living in the present moment. If we’re not in the present, then we’re either remembering the past or predicting the future. Meditation tries to focus the mind on the present and see through the “gaps” of ego to appreciate the world as it really is. This state of being in the present is called “wakefulness.”

Clearly, meditation is something you shouldn’t try to figure out on your own. Cohen says it is imperative to work with an instructor (meditation instruction is free at the Shambhala Center), lest you create an alter ego watching to make sure your regular ego meditates properly.

“The mind is very subtle. The whole process of confusion is both gross and subtle. You need to have some sort of mirror to that so that you can actually understand what it is we’re talking about and what it is we’re working with. Otherwise, if you’re trying to be you own meditation instructor, you’re always maintaining some part of yourself to the other part to see how you’re doing, maintaining your concept about what you think letting go is. And that’s not letting go. It’s holding on to what you think you’re supposed to be doing,” Cohen says.

Boulder Shambhala Meditation Center offers ongoing introductory classes and instruction in meditation. Go to www.boulder.shambhala.org for more information.

Respond: info@boulderganc.com

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