text /// Chris Rusak

10-26-08

Salt, pepper, allspice.

If there has been one essential change in my life that has caused a great shift in my own personal existence, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, it is undoubtedly meditation. If heightened awareness is a cliché in meditation vernacular it has earned its place. My assessment is that, like marijuana, meditation is like salt for human sustenance… except in the case of meditation it is like the whole spice box.

I have been perusing books on Transcendental Meditation (TM) in an effort to gain an understanding of the technique, but my attempts are all met with failure. While I have found references on the internet discussing the method and process of TM, the literature I have read on the topic all clearly state one thing: TM can only be taught one-on-one by someone already practicing and trained in the procedure.

Admittedly, this has been a stone thrown into my creative pool, skimming across the surface, creating zen-garden-like concentric ripples of temptation and skepticism. The allure of a different (and deeper) flavor to my meditation practice, a practice that has been going on now for 18 years!, is strong. The highly respected and lauded creative forces who practice TM (see: David Lynch #1) speak nothing of regret at the cost. But, it is the cost and the possibility-of-change that cause my skepticism. Even now, I find my current meditation process a little choppy as I sit there and begin to focus on something else better… how trippy. To be sitting in state only to approach envy and doubt at the one thing credited with massive improvement external to the process.

By all accounts, if it takes me a few more years to have the means and willingness to plunk down the $2000 course fee, I will still be in possession of the practice I have discovered and built by my Self… something men and women have accomplished on their own for millennia, and something I am enormously proud of in my Self. Certainly, though, it has become a goal and a reward, an opportunity that I can partake of when I lead my Self to success in the desires and actions I have chosen to pursue in this existence.