We are continuing to take a close look at specific factors of our meditation practice. This week, we’ll revisit Easwaran’s recommendation on the pace of the passage, and how it can help us slow down and become more loving and aware of life.
Do you experiment with the pace of reciting the passage? What have you noticed?
Easwaran says below, “When you concentrate on the sound of each word, you will also be concentrating on the meaning of the passage. Sound and sense are one.”
Do you have any strategies to help yourself concentrate more fully on the sound of the passage, rather than the meaning of the words or how they might look to your minds’ eye?
We’d all benefit from hearing about how you’ve worked with pace in your practice of passage meditation. Watch this short video for tips on how to use the commenting feature to share your thoughts.
The excerpt below is from Passage Meditation, by Eknath Easwaran.
Pace
Once you have memorized a passage, you are ready to go through it word by word, as slowly as you can. Why slowly? I think it is Meher Baba, a modern mystic of India, who explained:
A mind that is fast is sick.
A mind that is slow is sound.
A mind that is still is divine.
Think of a car tearing along at ninety miles per hour. The driver may feel exuberant, powerful, but a number of things can suddenly cause him to lose control. When he is moving at thirty miles per hour, his car handles easily; even if somebody else makes a dangerous maneuver, he can probably turn and avoid a collision. So too with the mind. When its desperate whirrings slow down, intentionality and good judgment appear, then love, and finally what the Bible calls “the peace that passes understanding.” Let the words, therefore, proceed slowly. You can cluster the small helper words with a word of substance, like this:
Lord . . . make . . . me . . . an instrument . . . of thy . . . peace.
The space between words is a matter for each person to work out individually. They should be comfortably spaced with a little elbowroom between. If the words come too close together, you will not be slowing down the mind:
Lord.make.me.
If the words stand too far apart, they will not be working together:
Lord make
Here “make” has put in its contribution, but “me” simply won’t get on with it. Before long some other word or image or idea rushes in to fill the vacuum, and the passage has been lost.
With some experimentation, you will find your own best pace. I remember that when I learned to drive many years ago, my instructor kept trying patiently to teach me to use the clutch. I was not a terribly apt pupil. After a number of chugging stops and dying engines, I asked him how I was ever going to master those pedals. He said, “You get a feeling for it.” That is the way with the words too: you will know intuitively when not enough space lies between them and when there is too much.
Concentrate on one word at a time, and let the words slip one after another into your consciousness like pearls falling into a clear pond. Let them all drop inwards one at a time. Of course, we learn this skill gradually. For some time we drop a word and it floats on the surface, bumped around by distractions, irrelevant imagery, fantasies, worries, regrets, and negative emotions. At least we see just how far we are from being able to give the mind a simple order that it will carry out.
Later on, after assiduous practice, the words will fall inward; you will see them going in and hitting the very bottom. This takes time, though. Don’t expect it to happen next week. Nothing really worth having comes quickly and easily; if it did, I doubt that we would ever grow.
As you attend to each word dropping singly, significantly, into your consciousness, you will realize that there is no discrepancy between sound and meaning. When you concentrate on the sound of each word, you will also be concentrating on the meaning of the passage. Sound and sense are one.
Trying to visualize the words – imagining them in your mind’s eye, or even typing them mentally as some people want to do – may help a little at the outset, but later on it will become an obstacle. We are working to shut down the senses temporarily, and visualization only binds us to the sensory level of consciousness.
Your body may even try to get into the act. I recall a lady who not only typed her passage mentally but danced her fingers quite unknowingly along an imaginary keyboard too. Another friend used to sway back and forth in meditation as if she were singing in a choir. So check yourself occasionally to see that you are not developing any superfluous body movements.