Meditation.

Meditation.

In practical life, thought is used just as a crutch, a means to an end, and meditation is necessary to remind the calculating mind to rest.

Yet where thought is an end in and of its self, meditation is a hassle. True meditation, in its pure form, occurs to the man of depth only once the thoughts he has ALLOWED TO RUN THEIR COURSE (as in Taoism) have settled. If he knows that he is meditating, he is not meditating. The Nothingness that he has been THROWN into has been subsumed in SOMETHING. Meditation has become not an end in and of its self, the natural converse of thought for its own sake, now seen (though not by the meditator yet, thank fully) as no longer the transcendent OPPOSITE of thought but rather its imminent corollary.

Western dabblers who forget that the Western mind is historically of sharper intellect (Jung writes of this with profound respect notwithstanding to Easterners in his critique of The Secret of the Golden Flower, explaining that the Taoists had non-intellectual and may be even surpassing forms of Intelligence, but he described the Eastern intellect as comparably “childish” to Western intellect*) would do well not to use meditation as a means to an end. As Gibran wrote, he who favours one guest over an other loses the favour of both. So it is with the twin guests of thought and non-thought.

*To accuse him of hegemony is ridiculous. It is like what feminists do when they condemn “passive” depictions of women. Passivity is only rejected by virtue of the same patriarchy that they claim to oppose, and so it is that to describe one’s intellect as childish is an affront only made mortal by a culture that, as Jung demonstrates, has all ways EXCELLED and thus REVELED in the Intellect.  The argument is only circular because the conditions are circular; both parties are responsible for it. Jung proves that our over-valuation of the intellect came from our excellence in using it; the opponent proves, by one’s affront, that the excellence led to its over-valuation. The argument is semantic and self-referential by nature.

Dm.A.A.