Meditating, Eating and Sleeping

This is in response to a question I received about the point of view that it is contradictory to engage in activities intended to lead to enlightenment, because enlightenment is an effortless state which can not be attained through effort; that seeking by its nature reinforces the very sense of separation that enlightenment would eliminate.

Meditation and spiritual practice should be approached more like they way we approach sleeping, rather than like eating. Eating and sleeping are two essential life activities that are quite qualitatively different. In order to eat, there are many things that we have to undertake and actively engage in to accomplish this task. We have to consciously and intentionally obtain, cook and eat the food. There is a clear goal and procedures for accomplishing that goal involving active participation. Sleeping is of a very different nature. We can say that we go to sleep, but it is more like we set up conditions favorable to sleep and eliminate conditions disruptive to sleep. We then allow sleep to happen of its own accord. So our effort in going to sleep ultimately is more passive and receptive. The preliminaries involve activities conducive to receiving sleep, to allowing that state to happen. I think the real basis for the argument that spiritual practices are useless concerns approaching spiritual practice with a mindset similar to the way we approach eating and comparable external activities. This would be limiting, and unfortunately, many people may approach it in this way, as another consumer product that needs to fit in with their schedules, that they partake of at their convenience. Spiritual practices need to be approached more in the manner in which we approach going to sleep: we set up conditions conducive to allowing them to happen, eliminating conditions that might be distracting. Then it is much more a process of allowing it to happen. It is not so much that we are meditating as it is that we are being meditated; we allow meditation that is already there in the background to come front and center. We don’t do sleep, we allow sleep to happen. What we can do is work on eliminating obstacles to meditation, but we can’t actually do meditation itself.