Spirituality

The earliest mention of meditation involves the Hindu tradition in the neighborhood of 1500 BC. Though some historians believe that meditation was practiced as far back as 1500 years earlier, or around 3000 BC. Or earlier.

The origins of meditation were spiritual in nature where meditation experiences were attributed spiritual significance. It’s only been fairly recently that meditation has become used to help with things like stress, anxiety, and depression.

Within the scope of Buddhism, the original mindfulness practices were used to embody the Buddhist philosophies of impermanence, that life is suffering, and that there is no self. The main goal was to stop suffering through meditation by fully stopping the thinking mind so to experience what exists beyond life and death. This was my path and how I was able to achieve enlightenment.

A huge part of why I became a Buddhist monk was to find personal answers to the great question of life and death. Having PTSD played a huge part in this. It was only later that I realized that Gotama Sidartha, also known as the Buddha, abandoned his family and began his spiritual quest to find answers he could live with, as a result of suffering from PTSD. Perhaps that’s why I felt a kinship with Buddhim and the idea that you shouldn’t believe what anyone else says, but instead find out for yourself. Having PTSD, that last part was huge to me because I wasn’t able to trust others, so finding out for myself seemed the only way forward. 

My enlightenment experience included seeing how the cycle of rebirth works and afforded me the option of being reborn or not. Unlike the Buddha, I wasn’t content with accepting enlightenment at face value for long. My PTSD pushed me to learn how I had the experiences I did so I could check their validity, and there was something that just seemed too convenient about my enlightenment experience. I began to have doubts as I tested to see if further enlightenment experiences gave the same results. As it turned out, as my doubts grew, the enlightenment experienced changed accordingly. My experiences mirrored my expectations. Looking more closely as I meditated I was able to see that my awareness, the only thing that remains when you fully stop the thinking mind, had direct access to my memories without being filtered by the thinking mind, thus the content of my enlightenment experiences were being created by my own memories of what is supposed to happen. This cleared up a lot, like how the enlightenment experience, and near death experiences where the mind stops functioning temporarily, of peoples from different religions mirror their beliefs.

For a long time it’s been thought that our consciousness (awareness) was separate from the thinking mind, but newer theories are that it is also part of the functioning brain, which is in-line with my personal meditative observations. The only way to know for sure at the current time requires being brain dead, which we can’t come back from. So whether it’s Buddhist, Christian, Islam, Hindu, etc…they are all equally provable and non provable through awakening/enlightening experiences that mirror our beliefs.