Month: December 2017

James Hillman remarks in one of his books how there are three kinds of knowledge: scientific knowledge where facts are weighed in the balance; philosophic knowledge where one evaluates the pros and cons; and, finally, contemplative knowledge, which is sometimes called intuition, or gnosis, knowledge of spiritual things.

It is this latter that the practice of meditation can lead one to access. And of late it has led me to reflect on the friends who have crossed my path, many of whom have been signposts pointing me in the direction I should go. I think also of those major loves which have profoundly changed me both in the past and now in this present moment. My meeting with such individuals appears more and more to me not as accidental but pre-planned, that X and I were meant to meet and come into a relationship.

In many of our emotional or sexual encounters we are like passing ships, but there are those few relationships which become a long voyage of discovery. And so one asks: where does this attraction between two people come from? Is there a destiny at work here? Who can tell why some find the perfect partner and others don’t? How do we manage to be in the same place at the same time. And if we had missed the moment would we have remained strangers?

Increasingly, at an intuitive level, I have come to sense that we all live several lives, and that certain relationships of love or deep friendship, have been meant from many lives ago.

Silence is not easy to find in the Western world. In many households the television is switched on all day, though no one may be listening or watching. People walk down the street locked into their mobiles and iPods and do not hear the sound of birds or children playing.

And yet silence remains a precious gift which goes way beyond any words we might speak. As Claudio says in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, ‘Silence is the perfect’st herald of joy; I were little happy if I could say how much.’

It is the gift of poets to express such precious silence in words. I remember Robert Frost saying that if he wrote a poem about heart-ache or heart-break, and a reader said, ‘That is exactly how I feel, though I couldn’t have put it into words’ then, he felt, he had achieved his task.

In our practice of meditation, seated in silence we learn, in the words of the Welsh poet, R.S.Thomas, that ‘the meaning is in the waiting’. Slowly, over weeks and months, the sands within us shift and change, and we find ourselves growing in deeper awareness, while neuroses and problems have a way of dissolving of their own accord. We have but to persevere.