Juan Ignacio Iglesias

Meditation Deconstructed

Original title:

La meditación deconstruida.

About the book:

Meditation Deconstructed

Meditation is in vogue. Meditation is being taught everywhere. Yet, all too often, thisis a type of meditation that has been metabolised by the banal mechanisms of Western culture, whereby “I meditate to obtain certain benefits”. There is, however, a true form of meditating in which one discovers that there is no “I” that meditates, simply meditation happens.

However, the knots that bind us to thought are intractable. How can we set about undoing them?  By observing them. Only by means of lucid, impersonal observation can we root out the deep habits of the mind and deconstruct them.

Meditation is the bridge to span the gap within and enables to arrive at this lucid vision or, rather, to find it again. And it does this by showing, in itself, by its own process, the conditionings and habits that beset us. Thus true meditation is a deconstruction, a deconstruction of the “I” which believes it is meditating. Indeed, it is self-deconstruction, in that meditation itself begins from illusory premises or suppositions.

Meditation Deconstructed seeks, then, to show us our knots as they show up In meditation itself, in order to reveal that which is illusory and, at the same time, make evident what we are: pure freedom.

About the author:

Juan Ignacio Iglesias has a degree in Philosophy. A teacher and writer, he is married, with two children. He is the author of several novels and other books on spirituality. At the present time he is an assiduous contributor to the magazine Cuadernos de Budismo.