MEDITATION FOR KINGS
Excerpted from Jon Kabat Zinn's Wherever you go there you are : "Meditation develops full human beings. I am told that in Pali, the original language of the Buddha, there is no one word corresponding to our word meditation, even though meditation may have been said to evolve to an extraodinary degree in ancient Indian culture. One word that is frequently used is Bhavana. Bhavana translates as development through mental training. To me, this strikes the mark. Meditation really is about human development. It's a natural extension of cutting teeth, growing an adult sized body, working and making things happen in the world, raising a family, going into debt of one kind or another, even if only to yourself through bargains that may imprison the soul, and realizing that you too will grow old and die. At some time or another you are practically forced to sit down and contemplate your life and question who you are and where the meaning lies in the journey of life, your life. The old fairy tales we are told are ancient maps offering their own guidance for the development of full human beings.The wisdom of these tales comes down to our day from a time before writing, having been told in twilight and darkness around fires for thousands of years. While they are entertaining and engaging stories in their own right, they are so in large part because they are emlematical of the dramas we encounter as we seek wholeness, happiness and peace. The Kings and Queens, princes and princesses, dwarfs and witches, are not merely personages out there, we know them intuitively as aspects of our own psyches, strands of our own being, groping toward fulfillment. We house the ogre, and the witch, and they have to be faced and honored or they will consume us, eat us up. Fairy tales are ancient guidance, containing a wisdom distilled through a millenia of telling for our instinctual survival, growth and integration, in the face of inner and outer demons and dragons, dark woods, and wastelands. These stories remind us that it is worth seeking the altar where our own fragmented and isolated "being" strands can find each other and marry, bringing new levels of harmony and understanding to our lives to the point where we might actually live happily ever after which really means in the timeless here and now. These stories are wise ancient surprisingly sohpisticated blueprints necessary for our full development as human beings. One recurrent theme in the fairy stories is that of a young child, usually a prince or princess who loses his or her golden ball. Whether we ourselves are male or female, old or young, we each contain both prince and princess among countless other figures. And there was a time we each radiated with the golden innocence, infinite promise, carried by youth, and we still carry that golden radiance, or can recover it if we take care not to let our development arrest.
The form of Buddhism that took form and rooted and flowered in Tibet in the 8th Century until now, developed perhaps the most refined artistic expression of these terrifying aspects of the human psyche. Many Tibetan statues and paintings are of grotesque demonic beings, all respected members of the pantheon of inner deities. Keep in mind that these deities are not gods in the usual sense, rather they represent different mind states, each with its own kind of divine energy which has to be faced, honored and worked with if we are to grow and develop our true potential as full human beings whether men or women. These wrathful creatures are not seen as bad, even though their appearance is frightening or repulsive, necklaces of skulls, and grotesque grimaces. Their terrible outward appearance is actually a disguise, adopted by deities embodying wisdom and compassion to help us attain greater understanding and kindness towards ourselves and towards others who it is understood are not fundamentally different from ourselves. In Buddhism, the vehicle for this work of development is meditation. Even in the fairy tales, to get in touch with the wild man under the pond, requires bucketing out the pond, something Bly points out takes repetative inner work over a long time. There's nothing easy about bucketing out a pond, or working at a hot forge, or sweltering vineyards, day after day, year after year, but repetative inner work of this kind, coming to know the forces of one's own psyche, is its own initiation. It's a tempering process. Usually heat is involved. It takes discipline to tolerate the heat, to persevere, but what comes of keeping at it, is mastery and non-naivate, attainment of an inward order, unattainable without the discipline of heat......sent into darkness and despair......even the temporary defeats we are suffering........This is what Jungians call soulwork, the development of depth of character, through knowing something of the torcherous laberinthian depths and expanses of our own minds. The heat tempers, rearranging the very atoms of our psychic being and most likely of our bodies as well