This is not some crummy ‘meditate so you’ll be nicer to people post. This isn’t ‘meditate so you’ll be calmer post. This is ‘meditate so you can escape verbal confinement and roam free in the universe. Meditation as revolutionary politics, as anarchy, as Will and Life and Freedom. You know that your mind is a cage: that other people wrote the language you think in, that your conceptual frameworks were moulded first by your parents, then by your schools, then by Aleister Crowley, Bill Burroughs and Swami Shivananada. Everything in words is garbage, ever more confining and sophisticated traps to keep you in the realm of experience to which words can meaningfully refer.

Thus starts a very good article over at Key23

I think that Bastart has some very good points. What we see is a illusion, defined by our cultural context. I used to try and explain it like this:

Reality is defined by two things. First off is our belief structure. What we believe defines our personal reality. Many people do not understand this. They feel that if they see it certain way, that everyone should agree with them. They do not understand that most of their beliefs are constructed by their own meme structure. The first step to freedom is to realize that others have different paradigms - and therefore different realities. They live in different worlds then we do.

Most people think in terms of symbols and labels for the objects and relationships between the actual objects of reality. They take the “idea” to be the thing and work mentally with these concepts about the things of reality alone, usually paying little attention to how closely these concepts or ideas accurately relate to actual observable things.

Reality, Belief and The Mind by Gene Zimmer

The second definer of reality is culture. Everyone else’s beliefs will impact your belief. It’s like inertia. It’s hard to change speed and direction when you are weighted down by everyone else’s beliefs. Only by breaking the paradigm that your culture has installed into your mind, can you really see the universe for what it is. The second step to freedom is to free your mind from the background noise that exists all of the time. To quiet it, and allow your perceptions to work alone, so that you can see what is really happening, rather then what your meme complex says that is happening.

This is the enlightenment that the Buddha spoke of. It’s not super powers, or some spiritual transmogrification. Rather, it is a new way of seeing the universe. A way of seeing with out the baggage of thousands of years of memes and cruft that was passed down to you by your parents, your teachers, your pastors.

To survive in this world, to find lasting happiness and peace, you must throw away the constructs that run rampant in the back of your mind - quiet them and allow reality to bubble to the front. Stop using symbols in your mind to define reality, but allow reality to define it’s self.