Vision

I have been told by the astrologically enthusiastic that my Aquarius predisposition accounts for my idealism. However, I believe having vision is more a matter of exercise and practice than predisposition from distant constellations. Vision comes with keeping your chin up and your eyes open.

I have found that maintaining my personal awareness in the moment makes it much easier to look ahead with confidence. There is the Great Vision: Peace and justice for everyone on a planet which is cherished and respected for the life it gives. Within that Great Vision is the immediate vision of the scope of my own life as I age and eventually die.

These visions of a future which is never promised sustain me in my daily practice, my practice in the moment. My practice of mindfulness, study and compassion in the moment sustains my hopeful vision of the future. This is the dance of consciousness within the boundaries of space and time. Meditation and reflection allow me to project myself outside the boundaries of space and time by strengthening my imagination and reducing my physical stress.

Life without vision beyond plain sight is self-limiting. The blind man with vision walks bravely through life. The sighted man without vision is materialistic and self-centered.

Vision

Maintaining a personal practice of truth, compassion and mindfulness is aided by a vision of life as it could be without suffering, greed and violence. Formulating this vision is helped by focusing on alleviating your own suffering, monitoring your own greed and purging violence from your own thoughts and actions.

My own life is my best laboratory. By showing myself that I can effect change in my own actions and perceptions in the moment, I can instill hope into my life for the eventual liberation of all life from suffering. This requires an ongoing commitment in moment after moment.

The mind slides to its animal or habitual nature all too easily. Being fully awake entails guiding the mnd along a path to wellness against the resistance of habit and history in each moment of awareness. This takes practice. This is practice.

Meditation

Much has been made of meditation in pop American culture in the last 40 years. There was the craze of Transcendental Meditation, sold to a young intellectual crowd in the 1970s by the Beatles and their guru, who became a multimillionaire on it. There was Insight Meditation, another intellectual movement, inspired by meditative Buddhism. There were various self-actualizing New Age meditation gurus whose self-help books were eagerly adopted by the addiction-recovery industry. Zen meditation has been a constant path for those who turn their backs on frenzied, urban materialism. And, Tibetan Buddhist meditation has been popularized by the Free-Tibet movement. Thomas Merton wrote about Catholic monastic meditative traditions.

My question: Meditation or medication?

I have had some of exposure to all the meditative disciplines mentioned. I accept the validity and efficacy of meditation as a worthy behavior, regardless of the methodology. However, I do take issue with the concept that meditation has any cumulative effect if used only as a treatment in reaction to a psychic headache or worldly stress.

As I understand the traditions that developed meditation as an effective tool to expand consciousness, relax the body and calm the static interference of obsessive thought, their prescription for the use of meditation, based on centuries of its application to millions of lives, is the daily use of meditation as an exercise to build psychological strength and focus.

Therefore, when a regularly stress-polluted mind infrequently yields to meditation like taking an aspirin, its headache may temporarily be mollified, but the root causes of the problem are untouched. As occurs with the person who runs to the gym in May to feel comfortable in a swinsuit in June, backache is a more likely result than fitness.

Meditation of any kind, when practiced routinely, is both restorative and cumulatively empowering. Its restorative effect, in my opinion, becomes secondary to its strengthening of sustainable vision and focus in daily life situations. Like muscular exercise, meditation as habit eventually leads to greater emotional and intellectual fitness.