I went to meditation today. The practice on Sundays centers on visualizing negative energy being drawn into the person meditating and radiating out love and compassion. Tonglen - giving and receiving. As I meditated, the negative and the positive seemed almost the same to me. It's hard to phrase how I felt during the practice. I felt the euphoria and the goodness that lightheaded feeling that comes as everything goes calm. Yet, I know that there is more to meditation than feeling good. Emotion is subjective. I can feel bad, good, pain, joy, but in the end it is not the goal. The goal is to get closer to the stillness beyond those things. Because both the positive and the negative are both maras in themselves, it seems to me that giving and receiving itself is a mara. It is all one and the same. In the quiet, their are different expressions or forms that the maras take...from there they anchor a person in place. According to the meditation, maras are illusions.
I want to get closer to the stillness. I've prayed in charismatic Catholic youth groups and felt the emotional build up that comes with it. In adoration, there is a stillness that mirrors the Buddhist meditation; however, there is also this idea of petitioning. From what I have seen so far, Buddhist meditation is about compassion and acceptance. To accept myself and the events around me in all their darkness and light and try be still within them.
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