There are a few who in the practice of meditation climb so high that they can see from the top of the mountain. They are the mystics, to be found in all religions. The rest of us trudge along the foothills, knowing we may never glimpse the summit. And the journey is rarely easy. All who have walked the route to Compostela know how rough the terrain can be, and how on arrival at a hostel one sometimes finds the toilet rolls have run out or one is kept awake by the loud snores of fellow travellers! A pilgrimage makes demands. But we plod on!
Tag: meditation
Waiting
In past centuries those wanting to enter a monastery would be made to stand outside for three days and nights. Only if they persevered would they then be admitted as postulants. And so it is with all who meditate. We sit outside a door waiting for it to open. Occasionally it does. We hear music from beyond and yet we know it is not our time to enter. It is our task to wait patiently at the threshold. That is all we have to do.
By the open door
The entering of grace
By the open door
Of a house made ready.
This haiku is from The Ungainsayable Presence. The book, now out of print, was published anonymously. I knew the author. He had a demanding public life; but very few people know that he was a mystic, who began each day with four hours of silent meditation and reading.
All we have to do in meditation is sit patiently at the threshold.
The tree of life
There are many maxims relating to trees that are worth reflecting on:
What is well rooted survives.
As the twig bends so the tree will grow.
Severed branches grow again.
The whole tree is hidden in the acorn.
Every tree is known by its fruit.
A rotten tree bears rotten fruit.
Trees are full of secrets.
A tree’s rootedness points to our rootlessness.
It was seated in meditation under the of a pipal fig tree that the Buddha attained enlightenment. And there is Jesus’ story about the tiny mustard seed which when planted grows into a great tree, so that birds perch in its branches. Perhaps it was this image which prompted some words to come to me once in a meditation, and which I asked the calligrapher John Rowlands-Pritchard to make into a card – now on display at the Bleddfa Centre:
A Tree Being Motionless Birds Come To It.
At the threshold again
Meditation is a door opening onto unknown possibilities. We have but to sit still and wait, there at the threshold. There is nothing we can do, no challenge we can make such as ‘Who’s there?’ We simply sit in stillness and quietness, breathing in the very sense of now-ness, knowing that beyond is a vastness of Love and Knowledge awaiting us. It is a gift and will be given to us when we are ready. The nowness is all.
In the garden
In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic The Secret Garden, little Mary, the orphan, asks her guardian if she may have a piece of earth. ‘A piece of earth?’ he queries; and she answers, ‘To plant things in, to make them grow.’ To which he replies, ‘Child, when you see a piece of earth, take it and make it come alive!’ And that is exactly what Mary, aided by Dickon and Colin, does. When they find the secret garden, they weed it and plant it. Then what do they do? They sit cross-legged and meditate!
As Rumi, the Sufi mystic, wrote:
It is when we nurture the seeds of meditation in our own inner garden that we begin to come alive at a deeper level than that of mere happiness. Happiness is elusive, it comes and goes. What grows and becomes evergreen in our innermost garden is contentment.
Seated at the threshold
For someone starting to meditate it can be helpful to have a mantra (a particular sacred word or phrase) to repeat rhythmically, or else to count the breaths up to eight and then start again. But there will come a time when all that is needed is to sit quietly at the threshold of silence, gently breathing in and out, not attempting to cross the threshold or imagine what lies beyond, but simply waiting. Into that silence, from time to time, may come certain insights which arise from a deep source of wisdom within us. Such insights, when they come, are the fruits of meditation.
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s Horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.
These old rhymes which children used to chant contain much wisdom and practicality. If we’re aloof and prone to judging other people from a position of apparent superiority the time will come when we will get our come-uppance and have a big fall!
This is something that we also learn frequently in meditation. We endeavour to be concentrated and still, but every now and then we come a cropper. Our concentration falters, our minds go off at a tangent, our back aches … But all this can be very good for us. It reminds us that we are all beginners, that it is a long journey, and that we shall fall many times. It helps to keep our feet firmly planted on the ground.
A blank page
Over the years I have bought many books, large and small, with hard covers and blank pages. These I use partly as commonplace books, writing in longhand passages from things I am reading, but also to record when an insight, a thought, rises to the surface. I now have a large collection of these books, full of rich quotations and insights.
It is the same when we meditate. We make ourselves a tabula rasa, an empty canvas, onto which, either during the meditation or in the space afterwards, we find certain insights or images imprinting themselves on the blank page of our consciousness. But first we have to learn how to be a blank page!
Throwing stones
Jesus famously remarked, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ We sometimes say of someone, ‘I wish never to see them again,’ with reference to something in their behaviour that has offended us. All too often it is simply a projection of the ‘shadow’ in ourselves. None of us, not even the saints, is without some form of inner darkness – be it shortness of temper, impatience, laziness, bossiness or whatever. So always we need to look inside ourselves before we rush to criticise others. It is here that the practice of meditation can enable us to be more centred and less liable to stone-throwing.