Most people become interested in meditation because they are stressed out or unhappy. They want relief, escape, or instant relief so they can feel better. This is understandable. When we are uncomfortable we seek relief.
All I would like to make the reader aware of in this article is the fact that relief is not always a good thing.
I'm sure you have heard of certain people who lack the ability to feel pain. Such a person could literally have their hand on a hot stove and not realize it. The person feels no pain, while their hand is being burned.
Likewise, any practice that covers up the real cause by eliminating symptoms can cause us to continue to be harmed without realizing it. In physical terms, this is called symptom removal. In emotional terms, it is called reassurance. In spiritual terms it is called deception.
It is like this: suppose a lady is unhappy because she resents her parents. Her unhappiness leads to feeling bad. To relieve her symptoms she goes out with friends and parties, drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana. She temporarily feels better, but the under lying cause of her
unhappiness is still there.
The underlying cause is the resentment (hatred) toward her parents. She might try taking psychiatric drugs or she might try reading nice spiritual books or singing nice music. She might try yoga to find peace of mind. But the marijuana, the drugs, the partying, the spiritual music, the yoga are all attempts to get symptom relief.
To the extent that any of them succeed, they only keep the real cause buried. Again, in this situation the cause is resentment. Resentment, being a form of hatred, causes separation from love. Separated from her own ground of good wherein is love, she feels empty and has no love for herself either, except for the compensations of comfort and symptom relief. So she eats to feel the emptiness, or finds other substitute forms of false love.
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Now suppose that instead she woke up one day and realized that she was hating her parents. Seeing her own wrong, her discomfort would increase. But suppose she also saw that she had been judging her parents. She realized that her hatred of them was wrong, especially because her parents too were lost. They were doing the best they could; and they too had been hurt when they were kids. No one loved them.
Deeply realizing all of this leads to a change of heart. No longer judging and blaming them, she drops the resentment. She feels bad for her own sneaky hate, experiences remorse, and she becomes a friend of conscience.
Now, a friend of conscience and a friend of God, no longer resenting her parents: a great weight is lifted from her mind. Joy returns. She is free to go on with her life and leave the past behind. Suddenly she has no more need for drugs, marijuana, yoga, music or anything else to distract her. She is a friend of conscience, at peace with God and at peace with herself. She is no longer full of hate.
