asia
10 Maggio 2013

Meditation, at the origin of questioning/1

What is meditation? Re-view and re-ask from the origin of every experience.

Every civilization is characterized by the fundamental question which seeks an answer.
Daughter of the Ancient Greece, our society basically  wonders tì tò òn: what is what it is?.
Modern science has reduced the terms of this question to two sub-questions: "How does it work? What is it for?". 

Once we have answered these two questions, we are convinced we have understood the essence of what we investigate. Today we ask about ourselves in terms of brain, body, and social behaviour.
Any suffering, even the sore soul, is faced by asking the two above sub-questions.
It follows that, according to the technical-scientific paradigm, the existential suffering (Who am I? What is the meaning of existence?) is considered as a dysfunction and treated in the laboratory.
On the other hand, in Italy, metaphysics in its various forms ended with Giovanni Gentile’s murder; the post-war period led to delegate to science the answers to the questions above.
Today we live in the pseudo freedom of a "dead God" and in the light of the "court of reason" and of the scientific objectivism which claims to be all-inclusive. For many people this is not enough. 

How could we open this question again?
Resurrecting God?
No, it would not be accepted.
So?
We must start from ourselves again.
How?
Exactly from the place where this same question, as each question, arises. Not metaphorically, but in the practice, through meditation. 

Meditation is just that: re-view and re-ask at the origin of each experience. 
I have been practicing meditation for over thirty years. Through it I found the answers I was looking for about identity and meaning.
Meditation is a discipline of research and it fits well with the critical need that characterizes the Western mind. The meditator is provided with tools to build attitudes of observation in the inner silence. Another mind, that our ordinary life does not know, wakes up. Intuitions come with deep and persuasive resonance, opening themselves to a comparison with the tradition on the one hand, and with  contemporary culture on the other hand. Meditation offers a view, which is unknown to the Western mind: the look that comes from the origin of all thought.
This Way is still possible today. 

Franco Bertossa
ASIA president 


Translated from the Italian version by Marianna Turriciano. 

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