Viewing Meditation as Entertaining by Marcus Antebi
In order to actually develop a meditation practice you might have to trick yourself sometimes. We can become so distracted and so unwilling to practice meditation for a variety of reasons that we have to make it into a game. We have to make sure that we have a prize for meditating, such as relaxation and/or a clear understanding of truth.
But what if none of those things that are said about meditation are true? What if meditation is a complete fraud? What if the idea of meditation was and is a scheme and totally phony? What if the people that really studied and knew about it knew that meditation did nothing?
What if most of those people were either too scared to talk about the scandal of meditation being fraudulent or disinterested in being activists and revealing that something is wrong somewhere? Or what if people had a secret and silent motivation to keep this going?
In actuality meditation could just be intellectual masturbation. It may not do anything at all. In fact, pursuing it may make a person delusional and filled with all kinds of wacky fantasies.
Suppose that were true. In fact, if you’re going to be a meditator and really open up your consciousness, you have to be able for a moment to suppose that every possibility in the universe is true. Then, you have to think about it for a moment and then choose the possibility that you believe. There’s a possibility that meditation is complete and total nonsense. But the likelihood of that, if you look closely at the practice, is nearly impossible. Meditation is a mental practice. It’s like a really advanced version of a crossword puzzle or a word search game.
Such games teach us to look, to focus, to solve problems, and to stack entities of knowledge on top of each other. Their purpose is to build up reflexes, give us entertainment, teach us words, and do many other things. In fact, just doing crossword puzzles and word search games are a great first step to learning how to meditate. This is so because meditation is very much about the ability to concentrate and focus on a single task. And the highest task to focus on in meditation is that of being in the present moment.