The Myth of Meditation Positions and the Silence of What You Already Are

We often find ourselves searching for the donkey while we are already sitting on its back. It is a strange comedy, isn't it? We look for awareness, we look for peace, and we look for some grand awakening as if it were a lost treasure hidden in a distant jungle. But who is the one looking? And where could you possibly go to find what is already the very ground of your existence? The separate self loves the idea of a journey. It loves the "supermarket of meditation" where it can pick and choose from a vast array of techniques, hoping that the next one will finally be the key that unlocks the door. But the door was never locked, and more importantly, there is no one inside to unlock it. In the world of spiritual seeking, we hear much about meditation positions and the "right" way to sit, as if the absolute cared whether your spine was straight or your legs were crossed. We must be frank with each other: this stillness are not ladders to the infinite. The absolute is already absolute; it doesn't need you to sit in a specific way to be itself. If the infinite is truly infinite, it must include you exactly as you are right now—distracted, tired, or even bored—otherwise, it wouldn't be infinite. It would be the "almost-infinite minus you," which is a logical absurdity. When we speak of meditation, we aren't talking about a way to become something better. The body-mind may indeed feel more harmonious through certain practices. We might find that sitting in specific meditation positions helps to calm the ripples on the surface of the lake, making the water transparent. This is fine. It is a functional improvement at a horizontal level, much like learning to play the piano or refining a technical skill. If you want to feel better in your daily life, meditation is a wonderful tool. But let’s not confuse feeling better with liberation. Liberation is not the "me" getting free; it is freedom *from* the "me." It is the realization that the character in the dream was never the one having the dream. Think of the witness. Many practices guide us to develop the position of the observer—the one who sits on the riverbank and watches the thoughts, emotions, and sensations flow by. This is an incredibly useful shift. It allows us to stop diving into every passing current and getting swept away by the stories of the separate self. We begin to see that the body-mind is just a collection of sensations and thoughts appearing in a field of conscious presence. But even here, a subtle trap remains. We might start to identify as "the witness," creating a new center, a new "I" that is watching everything else. This is like standing on the threshold of freedom but keeping our backs turned to it because we are still obsessed with the objects being observed. True freedom isn't the witness watching the world; it is the collapse of the wall between the observer and the observed. There is just observing. No one doing it, and nothing separate being seen.