Question: What is the most extreme sport?
Answer: Meditation.
Is there a more expansive, unlimited, challenging, rewarding exercise than BEING? Meditation practice holds the keys to all levels of awareness, information, and experience. Who said it has to be sitting? there’s lying meditation, sleeping meditation, walking meditation, washing dishes meditation, yelling meditation, “dynamic” meditation (Osho), tantric meditation, meditation on the self, meditation on the no-self… I could go on and on.
The list doesn’t end.
Let’s get extreme with it. Why? Because it’s fun, that’s why. And because a lot of you think meditation is boring. And, to be perfectly honest, it can be. Sooo boring. The way washing dishes is boring, or any chore we don’t really want to be doing.
But what if we change the rules? Who made them anyway? Some dude in a cave thousands of years ago? Wrote down some stuff and called it the last word on the subject, and there we go — dogma.
Let’s change the rules. Life is extreme. Life is far from boring. Look around. All of a sudden April is here and the entire world is upside down. It looks nothing like it did back in February or even early March!
I offer this perspective on meditation. It is a posture, a stance, a mental stance. A place to experience FROM. Put yourself in that place, and all things that are experienced become greater, richer, more colorful, more sonorous, more flavorful, more real, more exciting, more interesting, more everything. Just More.
When you put ALL of yourself into something, that something can put all of itself back into you.
Life is a direct response to you. It is an immediate (or lucky for us, a somewhat delayed ? feedback loop. The more of you that is there to receive it, the more life offers you, and the more meaningful it becomes.
That’s why meditation is so applicable to now. And to every Now.
That is also why it is so unlimited and so powerful. Because life is like that. And in the peace and silence of the void, in deep meditation, there is a powerful stillness that pervades everything, connects everything, and gives life to the universe. What could be more extreme than that?
One moment I am sitting in my living room, eyes open.
The next moment I have no body, no identity, no attachments, no fear, eyes closed. I open them. I remember no body. I remember no identity. I remember no attachments. I remember no fear.
Nothing to hold on to, we become free of limitation. Fear of loss is fear of everything. Everything new, everything unknown.
Any extreme sport entails a certain amount of boundary pushing. Limit breaking. We have to go beyond what we know and are comfortable with, and push the limits of our abilities, to hone our skills, and improve our reflexes, our response time to the Universe.
The greatest fear, for most, is fear of death. So the greatest extreme sport is playing ball with death. Lets dive into THAT ocean. What happens when we die? We don’t really know, unless we remember last time! Or perhaps we think we know, because we read Dr. Weiss’ book “Many Lives Many Masters”, (highly recommended) or many of the other books that have been written about peoples’ accounts of life after death. But if you don’t remember it yourself, it’s pretty hard to just accept that in any more than an intellectual way. To really sink in, we have to go there. That’s right, we have to die.
We aren’t afraid of going to sleep at night. And yet, we have no guarantee that we are going to wake up in the morning. We trust that something will wake us up and we will get the opportunity to do this all over again when the sun rises. Why? Because that is the way it has been every other day.
Life is no different. Our life is like a day, and at the end, we go to sleep and we wake up and get a chance to do it all over again. Hopefully we learned a few things along the way. Going to sleep at night is very similar to the trust we must have for the process of life and death. Lets expand our definition of life and awake, and address the elephant in the room — you aren’t your body. Exercising your Being is the most extreme sport. Exercising your abilities to exist in other planes of existence. Expanding the definition of what is real and what is imaginary, we can start to play in a field which has multiple levels, and unlimited lives, all happening at once. And you can choose your level. One night you could be in a dream about college, trapped in an endless corridor, unable to find your dorm room, and look down and DAMN, where are my clothes? Another night you could be in a temple in the sky chanting with 1000 Buddhas! The more we pay attention to what is going on, the more skilled we become at navigating these multiple realms of existence, exploring inner and outer space, and the unlimited nature of our Beings.
As for death? There is no death. There is Being here, now, on this planet, and there is Being in an endless number of other places and times. It’s all Being. And the more often we can remember that, the more we can put ourselves in the meditation posture that suits us, that suits the moment, “clothes” the now, we become the master of our experience.