7 Insights On How To Meditate And Live A Better Life

Hello and welcome.

As I reflect over all the work,

Or play if you want to call it,

Play more than work,

Here on Inside Timer.

Anyway,

My name is Doug Scrummons,

Thanks for joining me today.

As I reflect over my work after all the things I've said and shared with you guys,

I always feel like I can't complete a track.

I try to keep the tracks down between 10 and 20 minutes,

Maybe 30 minutes at the longest,

But I always try to keep them short so that I don't lose your interest.

You don't get lost in my echo.

Because it's so easy to get lost in what we call God's echo.

And that's something you don't want to do.

So I thought I'd make a recording about some of the inside secrets to meditation that you may not have heard from others,

Or inside secrets that will help you excel faster through this growing phase.

I know I've said that you can do things to accelerate the path towards enlightenment,

Towards nirvana,

Towards being born again,

Being twice born.

All these things kind of mean the same thing.

They all have one thing in common,

And that is that they return you to innocence.

Returning you to something that you left behind.

And you went on this adventure called life,

Explored,

Met people,

Did things,

Maybe things you're not proud of,

Maybe things that you're very proud of,

That you excelled at,

Or whatever.

But a point comes in every woman's or every man's journey to come home.

And that's the work of a Buddha.

That's the work of a Jesus,

Or a Lao Tzu,

Or a Chang Tzu,

Or maybe even a Mohammed.

So these things I want to share with you,

These secrets,

Are things that helped me progress up through the,

If you want to call them the ranks,

Or just through raising energy up through your different chakras,

And growing,

And allowing yourself to come to the point,

Like I said,

You can't do anything to make enlightenment happen.

There's no cause and effect to enlightenment.

It just happens.

But I have to also say that you can work on yourself.

Like you said,

You can't sit and watch the grass grow.

Eventually you just can't do it.

You can try,

But it's hard to see growth over a long period of time.

So hold on a sec.

I stumbled upon a secret when I first started meditating.

And I noticed,

Or at least I thought,

That if I created a gap,

A gap of no thought,

Or a gap between thoughts,

I would say,

Then maybe,

I know it's kind of a funny thing to think about,

But maybe that gives you a chance to reenter into this life.

If time travel was ever possible,

You'd have to create a gap to allow yourself to jump back in.

So,

With that funny thought,

I look back at it and I think,

Yeah,

It's kind of silly to think about,

But it worked.

It did the trick for me,

The trick that nobody really tells you about,

Is how to create these gaps.

At first it just seems like holding your breath.

It seems like you're having this short moment.

But then the moments get longer and longer.

And eventually you can go hours,

Days,

Years,

Without ever having to think again.

You can function from a new center.

The new center is your consciousness.

And there's a difference between the mind and consciousness.

The two can be separated.

If you've never separated them before,

Then you don't know that they can be separated.

But once you do this separation of the two,

Then you realize it is a reality and many people live that way.

Buddhist monks live that way.

Zen monks,

Sufis,

All kinds of Hindus also practice this pattern of no thought and letting consciousness lead and guide you.

Then I discovered this fellow,

This mystic named Osho.

And Osho changed everything else.

He is the most on-spot,

Super expansive consciousness that I ever came across as far as human beings go.

But Osho's input was that basically you become a watcher on a hill.

That you sit and you watch your thoughts.

You sit back and just watch them.

And then you create that separation again.

And you don't feed the thoughts.

You don't keep saying,

Okay I have a dog and the dogs remind me of cats and the cats get run over in the streets and oh yeah I love motorcycles.

And that's the way the mind works.

It goes on and on and on.

And you keep feeding it.

But if you sit and watch it,

Eventually it's like a super highway that calms down.

At first it's chaotic.

You know,

Cars everywhere.

You're flying down the freeway.

And there's no way you can ever think about calming it down.

But as time passes,

Then you'll see that a point comes where it all does calm down.

In fact Buddha had a little saying with one of his monks,

One of his bhikkhu followers.

And basically the monk said to Buddha that he could never calm his mind.

His mind can never calm down.

It's always a traffic jam.

So Buddha said to him,

Step into the river just once.

He's looking into the river and it's nice and clear and clean.

And he puts his foot in the river and he stirs up all the dirt in the bottom of the river and it all becomes dirty and mucky around him.

And Buddha said,

Okay now just sit and watch.

Sit and watch the river.

Sit and watch the river until everything calms down.

And that's what happens after a couple hours,

All the dirt settles back down and the river becomes clean again.

And then Buddha said,

Well this is the way your mind works too.

If you sit and don't add anything to it,

If you just sit and enjoy,

Be in the present moment and just watch,

Be the watcher,

Then everything settles down.

So that's the second insight.

So following Osho's work,

And I have several hundred of his books,

I just fell in love with what the guy has to say and what he shares and his essence about his being that he shares and gives so much.

The guy for like 40 something,

50 something years did nothing but give and give and give and give.

And yeah he is a questionable character but I like questionable characters.

I'm the rebel in the family.

I'm the guy that went outside the fences to find out what was going on in this world.

So anyway,

The next insight I want to give you is that of learning the trick.

So just like riding a skateboard or surfboard,

You learn to do tricks.

At first you got to think about it real hard and concentrate and focus really hard.

And eventually if you keep working on it,

You pull the trick off.

So once you pull the trick off,

Then it gets easier and easier every single time until almost you don't even have to think about it.

You just whap pow and you do the trick.

Well the same is in meditation.

So the trick in meditation is to never look for the same experience twice.

You can never repeat it and not only can you not repeat it,

You have to forget about it.

You have to put it out of your mind and don't focus on the trick because that will distract you from the goal if there is a goal.

And to me the goal is to keep raising energy,

To experience more,

To grow,

To love,

To be loving,

To be compassionate,

To be just an all around cool dude.

So if you get to the point in meditation where the third insight that I'm giving you applies,

You'll find that bliss happens when you meditate for like 15,

20,

30 minutes and you have like 15 minutes of complete silence where you're,

Basically you dissolve into existence.

And that's the fourth insight,

That you dissolve into existence.

You basically disappear as an essence.

Your body is still there,

But your consciousness blends in with the whole consciousness of existence,

The kind of,

You could call it the collective consciousness of existence.

And you kind of disappear.

And when you come back from that experience,

You're full of bliss.

You become like me,

Like a bliss junkie.

So full of bliss all the time that it's beautiful.

It just makes you feel like you're in the right mindset for the whole day or for the evening when you're settling down and meditating in the evenings.

It's just a beautiful thing to fall into sleep into.

It's beautiful.

It just makes your life so more abundant.

And you appreciate life so much more when this happens to you.

But the trick is that you can't look for the bliss.

That's like the skateboard trick I was telling you about.

You can't look for the bliss.

You just basically have to let it happen.

And as you're going into your meditation after experiencing that bliss,

You may have thoughts like,

Oh,

I want to experience it again.

I want to experience it again.

But you learn to just put that out of your mind.

Let those thoughts dissolve.

Just like all other thoughts,

You let those thoughts dissolve and let them go.

And that's the trick.

And you will allow yourself to dissolve into existence again.

And you can do this over and over and over and over once you learn the trick.

Without the trick,

You're just sitting there being pulled into the future because your greed or your desire for the bliss comes in and then it never happens.

So the trick is to dissolve and let yourself go.

Just dissolve into it.

Trust existence.

That's the fourth or fifth insight.

You have to learn that we are cradled by existence.

We are cradled by life and everything.

If you want to call it God,

I like the word existence better because it seems to encompass more.

When we think of God,

We think of something like a person who has a personality and it's not always favorable.

But I like to call it existence.

You're cradled by existence.

That includes everything.

If you trust existence,

If you're at this point in your life where you're meditating this deep and you've gotten this far into this recording,

Then your life is becoming more abundant and more beautiful.

The sixth insight is this.

You're going to experience times of darkness.

There's going to be anxiety in your life.

There's going to be stress in your life.

There's also going to be loneliness and isolation.

There's going to be negativity.

There's going to be hatred.

There's going to be all kinds of things going on around you.

What I have to say to that is that you basically learn to center yourself by doing these meditations,

By practicing meditation.

By centering yourself,

That kind of puts a little gap between you and your periphery to your outside,

What people are approaching and creating havoc with you.

You learn to function from your center.

You learn to not let the periphery control what goes on in your life.

A lot of people live at the periphery and the mind is usually out at the periphery.

They don't know about living from the center.

The next insight is to learn to live from the center,

To experience existence and give it a little distance so you're not reacting to situations,

You're responding to them.

There's a difference between that.

The response actually has more compassion in it and it has a little bit of love within it.

These things can all go on around you.

The thing about this is that you can't deal with anxiety or hatred with more hatred.

One fight doesn't cure another fight if you keep fighting.

What you have to do is you have to bring in light.

It's kind of like the opposite of the negativity.

You have to bring in positivity.

By bringing awareness,

And awareness in a sense is a form of light,

By bringing this new awareness into your problems,

Into your situations that are causing havoc,

Then you dissolve the darkness.

The darkness just disappears when you bring light in.

You don't fight darkness with more darkness.

It doesn't work that way.

If you want to fight darkness then you have to bring in light.

That's something I learned from Osho but you can see why I love the guy so much.

And the seventh,

The last insight for today is just this.

I can't say if there is a purpose for us being here,

For being on this planet,

But we can assign purpose to life.

It can be purposeful if we assign a purpose to it.

For the most part life is better off being purposeless.

Once you assign a purpose to life then you assign meaning to it,

Which brings in the mind,

Which brings in negativity and duality and all the other things.

If you say that life has no purpose then it takes you above the mind.

It brings you into what they call the Tao,

Into the totality of is-ness,

Which is very beautiful.

But what I want to say,

The seventh insight,

Is that in a way you become to appreciate life so much that that's all you want is more life.

When life becomes so beautiful that you can't imagine anything else or any other existence being any better,

Any heaven or any other place that you might think might be better.

When you appreciate this life so much and you fall in love with it so much you become so abundant with love and appreciation that you have to share it.

It just becomes a part of you that you have to share and give back to.

But really if you look at it in this way you never look for an end.

You never look for heaven in another life.

You just basically want this life to go on and on and on.

In a way it's like getting in a race car and driving out to the horizon.

As you drive into the horizon you never reach the horizon.

You just basically keep going and the horizon keeps disappearing.

For us as meditators,

For spiritual beings,

The horizon keeps evading us and we keep growing and we keep experiencing life and we just keep going on and on.

It just becomes so beautiful.

It gives us not just hope but basically a reason for waking up in the morning and a reason for being happy and a reason for being spiritual.

These things just come along with the other six insights that I gave you.

Anyway thank you for listening you guys and girls and namaste and aloha to all my servant friends.

Take care of yourselves and we'll talk to you at another time.

Take care.

Thank you.