...
I am not sure, but I think maybe my decades of work might be able to spare you some confusion. If you are someone to whom awakeness, alertness, reality makes a difference, you might be tempted to look into this "spiritual awakening" business. If you are completely frustrated by life in this world and determined to wrest some not fake equanimity from your days, you might wish to turn to some spiritual "master" or other. This impulse is not misguided.
But almost every publicly advertised outlet for it is definitely going to misguide you. I wish it were not thus, but it is.
By far the most popular stuff is known as New Age, and I have been subjecting myself to its proponents to the greatest extent I can stand for quite some time. I note that it is now taken as gospel that we live many, many lives, exchange our old skinbags, aka meat suits, almost like snakes shed skin or hermit crabs find new shells, over the course of the millennia. Further, each of us alive today has chosen to incarnate here right now because this is the most interesting moment in the most interesting place in the history of sentience in this cosmos. This is all horse shit of course... a gross misunderstanding of canonical terms.
Lately I note that New Age gurus advocate meditation to move you out of your left brain picklement into your right brain liberation. I do see some merit in the idea, but if it is incorrect in the beginning, it will be incorrect in the end, and so even if there seems to be some merit in it, it is most likely ill-advised.
I think it is better to picture it more like an onion or like a target than to get into this left/right debacle. The outer rings being the crap, the delusion, the ego, the conditioning, the big mistake, and the innermost one being the good part. Picture it like there is a core perfection in your mind that is imprisoned in there something like the bits of sand that cause oysters to make precious big hairy deals out of them. You may think you are insulating yourself from the big bad world out there, but it is really the big bad world out there insulating itself from you!
You have it exactly backwards.
In Zen, they have a REPRESENTATION for it, but it has been ruined by decades of poseurs appropriating it as a means of interior decoration. You want to signify your spiritual superiority, use that symbol.
So I go with the circle full of rings instead. Your mind is the pearl the world formed around a diamond that was born into it. You meditate to end up identifying with the diamond instead of the pearl.
.
