Exploring Ultimacy

This blog was submitted by Peter Cloudsley:

The regular Tuesday Meditation+Evolution evenings at EnlightenNext are already a fixture in my week as they have helped my meditation to go deeper. For example, last night I had a dream that I was attempting a major project and at a critical moment, a new sense of self confidence came over me telling me it was all perfectly possible.

This came after Tuesday evening when we explored ‘Ultimacy’ – in the context of meditation this means the experience of infinity. Patrick Bryson, who leads the events and guides us, always encourages us to talk about our experience of meditation after the weekly sessions. At first I found it very difficult, even unanswerable, but now I see the point of this inquiry and ask myself this question frequently as this helps me to stay alert and to go much deeper. Also, I am learning what non-duality means – in that we can see meditation as both a means and a goal, and I am beginning to relate these insights to the whole of my life.

Last Tuesday, I shared that I had always felt a yearning in life to ‘be up to something’ beyond day-to-day activities and even work that I loved doing. Here I was seeing that a guide was coming from a deeper part of me accessed by the experience of ultimacy. Someone else said she felt this when she used to work as an environmental activist, but disagreements in her group had caused her to lose interest. Perhaps her comrades did not appreciate the need for ultimacy to unite them.

The discussion moved on to the relevance of meditation as a ground for cultural change and someone said that if culture was always evolving, why had there been retrogressive periods of fascism and right wing ideology? There are indeed dead ends in evolution too and we can learn from them when we are clear about the need to move beyond the divisive conflicts born out of the egoic self, i.e., a primary assumption of separation from life.

Someone else said there were limitations when one simply tried to do the ‘right’ thing. This person had tried it and found it could lead to conflict with others. By the end of the evening there was a tangible sense that we had moved forward as a group. We were discovering a sense that culture could move forwards consensually in spite of all our differences, if we come from the same spiritual ground.

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Next Tuesday (22 Nov) we’ll be exploring the art and science of stillness