One of the most damaging characteristics of the highly-conscientious is being harsh with themselves. Even some highly spiritual persons I have known, when you see them open up at times of great stress, start pummeling themselves.

The hardest person I have ever found to forgive is myself. And I don’t profess to be a highly evolved, deeply spiritual person like some whose kind faces are in my mind at the moment of this writing. At times I have felt like begging them to set themselves free from their internal horror chambers.

Once when a counselor told me I had been treated with coldness and unfairness in a break-up of a personal relationship, I found it much easier to forgive the one who hurt me than to forgive myself. Psychologically speaking, I beat myself with barbed wire for allowing myself to be such a patsy.

Well, being a patsy is sometimes the same as being open and loving. We can never know for sure and certain who is good for us or who is as authentic as they seem. We forget that even the best psychiatrists and saints get divorces and have deep disappointments and emotional crashes.

Years ago I came across a goofy group who put out a video tape of rantings resembling the old evangelists of sawdust trail days.. One of their rant texts was, "In a slackless world, cut thyself some slack." Even a goofy group can come up with a profound truth. The people who need it most will have the hardest time taking it to heart.

The Plodding Caterpillar

There would be no butterfly times without the plodding caterpillar. Before we can fly, we must crawl and be kinda ugly for a spell.

One of my all-time favorite stories is the one about the caterpillar who saw a butterfly overhead and remarked, "You’ll never get me up in one of those things.!"

If we had the power to look inside ourselves, we would see a lot of butterflies and a comparable number of caterpillars. We have many facets and different ones are ever in different states of transition. Parts of us are soaring and parts are crawling. When we realize there can be no butterflies without caterpillars, suddenly caterpillars become beautiful. That which is a necessary stage in our development cannot be viewed as anything but beautiful.

So crawl with pride!.

Meditation and the Brain

The Dalai Lama said, "I think some part of the brain’s capability may be fully utilized only through deep meditation." It is my experience that he is right.

I can’t precisely describe the part he is talking about but it’s a place of great stillness and freedom from action. It’s a stillness we don’t even know we have until we tap it. And it’s a part beyond all thoughts of reward - a point at which we enter into meditation for the sheer joy of it.

It may seem that seeking sheer joy is reward motivation. But the first time we find it in meditation, it is not from seeking it. It happens when we go from getting still and quiet for some known purpose, like lowering blood pressure, to a place of forgetting everything except the act of meditating. It can be Non-purposeful absorption in one thing, or in nothing. Sometimes it results from a complete erasure of all thought from the mind.

Such an erasure is not likely to be a conscious act. It’s more like a release from frantic or anxious thoughts. Like cutting a string that binds an eagle to a tree, and letting it soar across the canyon on the wind with no movement of the wings.

It all sounds so other-worldly on paper but in experience it is as solid as anything in this life. It just seems esoteric because we are so accustomed to living in a continuous state of monkey mind, swinging from one tense thought to another.

The part of the brain utilized only through meditation is that part just below the encrustation of monkey mind.