Andrew Cohen

The meditation instructions that I give are simple. I ask people to relax as much as they can, to be as at ease and as free from tension as possible, and at the same time, to pay as much attention as they can to everything. We don’t need to concentrate on our breath or on any particular point on our body. We allow our attention to become very vast, very wide and very deep, and we remain as alert as we possibly can.

It’s good to reflect on the fact that deep and profound relaxation and freedom from existential tension is the foundation for liberation. It’s the foundation for the discovery of true freedom. Deep and profound relaxation is not simply a pleasant state to be attained.

It’s the foundation of a condition that enables us to stop running away from the truth, to stop running away from where we always are, but are rarely aware of. At the same time we want to be very alert, very aware and very sensitive. Being alert, aware, awake, sensitive, undistracted and fully present is the expression of an enlightened condition.

When we sit in meditation, it is important to to be very still, because not moving and being still is a metaphor for liberation. One who has realized the goal of liberation is one who never moves, never strays. Even though they appear to walk, to talk, to respond just like everybody else, inwardly they never move. They’re always at the center. This is why it’s important to learn how to be completely still, because being completely still can help us to understand these things. The deeper the concentration, the deeper the relaxation, and the more profound the attention, the easier it is to let oneself go, to fly. In this meditation, it doesn’t matter if thoughts come and go. It doesn’t matter if feelings, memories, doubt or happiness come and go. None of it matters. The only thing that matters is that we don’t move, that we’re completely at ease, and that we’re fully awake.

When I speak about not moving in meditation, many people think that I mean not moving physically, not moving one’s body. When some people hear "not moving," they feel that their mind shouldn’t move or that their attention shouldn’t wander. But the not moving I’m speaking about is deeper than that. It has to do with not moving away or straying from our true nature.

When we, for some mysterious reason, fall into a condition where we find that we suddenly want nothing at all, and we need nothing at all, we begin to discover what our true nature is about. At times like that, we begin to settle down. By settling down I mean we begin to fall deeply within ourselves. It’s like falling into the mouth of a volcano, sinking down and down and down—way, way down, sinking so deeply that we forget about the falling.

This is what occurs when we discover or stumble upon a condition where we find that we want nothing and need nothing. When this happens, when everything falls away, there is a very deep contentment because there is a recognition that nothing is lacking. Nothing is lacking, but what is there is difficult to define. We might define it in terms of a lack of unfulfillment, but what actually is there is difficult to describe. We could say fullness, but that’s a dangerous thing to do because the minute we begin to give a quality or a qualitative description to emptiness, the mind starts to paint pictures. One of the pictures that the mind paints is God. When we go deeply within, we want to try to see clearly, to know clearly, to understand, to feel, but we want to be careful about imposing pictures or fixed ideas upon our own experience, because when we do, we lose touch with a depth that can’t be measured.

One way to understand the goal of liberation is to discover and experience this depth which cannot be measured, to find out what it’s like not to want anything and to not need anything. As we begin to find happiness without a cause, peace without a cause, joy without a cause, the most challenging thing is to not move away from it. When I speak about not moving, this is that I’m referring to.

Moving away takes various shapes and forms. One shape is that something is wrong. This one catches almost everybody. It’s the primordial problem. The minute we believe something is wrong, we seek a way to fix it. As a result, we get up from our seat, and we look for a way to fix it. As we look, we wander and wander, and we get farther away from where we were. If individuals who start to look for a way to fix their problem are ever lucky enough to find liberation, they will find that there never was anything wrong. If they could have resisted the temptation to believe that something was wrong, they could have been free their whole lives. If they could have resisted that temptation, they would never have left where they’d been all along. In profound awakening, one realizes that one has been there all along, but simply has forgotten and become unaware of it, because one has become distracted by this conviction that something is wrong. So the work that has to be done is giving up the belief that something is wrong, that something has to be fixed.

That we need to give up the belief that something is wrong doesn’t automatically mean everything is great. As long as we are deeply convinced that something is wrong, there is no doubt that our life will be a mess, an expression of fear and confusion in a world that is frightened and confused. Throughout my travels in the modern spiritual world, I have met many people who are doing everything they can to tell themselves that everything is okay even though they don’t believe it. If we don’t really believe it, and at the same time we try to tell ourselves that everything is okay, we’re deceiving ourselves and everyone else.

This is not a superficial matter that I’m speaking about. It’s something quite challenging, because as we look within ourselves with greater and greater depth, we will become more aware of this impulse to move away. This impulse to move away, to turn away, to run away, to become, to create, is for most simply a compulsive and habitual way of being. It’s a state in which we’re constantly running away from where we already are, towards where we think we want to be. When we look more deeply, we may find out that what we think we’re running towards is not what we want.

The lives that most people lead are quite superficial, lacking in depth. When a human life lacks depth, the individual is preoccupied, concerned and endlessly busy with matters which do not have great significance. If we want to get in touch with where we’ve always been, and want to learn how to resist the temptation to move away from where we’ve always been, we have to cease to live in a way that is superficial. There is no other way that it can work. The challenge for the individual who truly wants to be free, is not only to deeply experience the truth, which is that one has never been away from home, but more importantly, to look into what it means in a very practical sense to resist all of the countless temptations to move away, to become.

What I’m speaking about has nothing to do with anything passive. I’m speaking about something that’s dynamic and conscious. I’m speaking about giving oneself fully and deliberately to a much deeper relationship with life and with truth. Unless we succeed in liberating ourselves personally from this compulsive need to run away, to become, to have and to be, it will be next to impossible to realize and manifest the kind of depth that I’m speaking about for more than a few moments. A life that expresses liberation is one where the individual has not only realized this depth, this stillness, this fullness, this emptiness once or twice, but they are permanently abiding there, whether they are busy or not, whether they are active or not. Unless we’re willing to turn within in a way that is absolute, in a way that transcends the mere practice of meditation, the likelihood of this kind of transformation actually occurring is very small. In order to not move away, we need to look deeply within ourselves with great consistency, and cease to live in a way that is merely superficial. That is the hardest part.

Many people have told me that they find something and then lose it. They wait and they seek, and then find and lose it again. Most of the time, seekers are trying to rediscover or re-attain something that they tasted but lost touch with. The reason that we lose touch with that which is most important, precious and sacred, is not that it’s far from us or distant, it’s because it’s not the most important thing for us. Often people take things for granted that are very near to them. Wives take their husbands for granted, husbands take their wives for granted, parents take their children for granted, children take their parents for granted. That which is most dear and so close to us is easy to forget the significance of. This also has to do with our own heart. It’s the easiest thing to move away from, even though in certain states of consciousness it appears to be the most important thing there is. Sometimes something is so close that we tend to not give it the kind of importance that it deserves. We live in a world in which most people give the greatest importance to things that are impermanent and ultimately insignificant, and very few people give the greatest importance to that which is imperishable and has the greatest significance.

This is about a willingness to re-educate ourselves. If we recognize ourselves to be unfree or not as free as we know is possible, it is because of choices that we make all the time, without being aware of it. If that’s the case, we have to make the effort to find out which choices take us away from where we think we want to be. We have to remember that the goal is never moving from where we always have been, never straying from there, and never losing touch with what’s most important—always allowing that to come first before anything else. When we get to that point, our work is over: there is nothing left to do. Then we will become truly independent individuals.