Learn To Meditate - Meditation Podcast Sunirmalya Symons

There is nothing so incongruous to humanity as war. All combatants are scarred deeply for ever and ever. No one ever truly wins in battle..

In the world of meditation, TM (Transcendental Meditation) is Coca Cola and Mindfulness is Pepsi. These two ubiquitous brands are everywhere meditation is taught. They both use famous personalities to sell their product and to surreptitiously emphasise that theirs is the ‘real thing’.

Many times spiritual seekers put themselves inadvertently in conflict with themselves. The ego is an example of this. Many feel that the ego must be conquered or supressed or even completely disregarded or ignored. As though, for some reason, the ego was a mistake and we have to do all we can to ignore or overlook or disown it. The ego is not a mistake, it is not a hindrance, it is not a curse, the ego is our life’s curriculum of ‘doing’ for the expansion of our ‘being’.
The ego is actually probably the most important aspect of us in this life and it is an absolutely awesome design. It tells the story of how we think about ourselves and our universe. Everything is mirrored in our ego.

As spiritual seekers we are often quite hard on ourselves. In these next two classes we are going to talk about being kinder, specifically the body and the mind whilst in class 50 we will be discussing the ego. To be clear though, even though we will be talking about the body, mind and ego, these are actually just labels for different aspects of the soul. In reality everything is soul, these are just distinctive aspects of the soul we are already familiar with.

The iconic tag of Nike from the 90's was 'Just do it'. This advertising line did a few things, it told the public that the Nike corporation was interested in its customers being more driven, more ambitious to achieve not only their sporting goals but their life goals by doing more.

Is suffering really necessary? If this is heaven as many say it is, how then can we be free of suffering? In Sunirmalya's opinion, the masters of the past might be famous because they suffered so much and offered freedom from suffering after death, but he contends that if heaven is here now, then we have to deal with suffering and our attachment to it.