Thank you all for getting us off to a wonderful start on this month’s topic of deepening our meditation. Your insights are very helpful and motivating. Keep them coming!
We wanted to remind you about our weekly virtual meditation sessions each Saturday morning. You might consider participating as a concrete way to deepen your meditation. We invite you to join us if you can next Saturday morning at 6:30 a.m. San Francisco time. This is the same time of day that you would meditate in the morning if you were in Tomales, at the retreat house.
Every Saturday we start our virtual meditation promptly at 6:30 a.m. We begin with a volunteer reading a passage from God Makes the Rivers To Flow aloud. Then we meditate silently together for 30 minutes from 6:35 a.m. to 7:05 a.m. . We’ll ring a bell to signal the end of meditation, and ask for another volunteer to read aloud Easwaran's "Thought for the Day". We'll end by asking for any mantram requests.
We use Zoom software which allows us to videoconference with each other. Please download it before Saturday so that you can join us.
To inspire us, we’re sharing an article from Easwaran where he describes what we are doing during meditation and what is happening within us. After reading the article, please share your reflections in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you, and by offering your ideas you’ll inspire others to do so, too! You might share:
a line or two that really stood out to you – one you’d like to remember
an overall message from Easwaran that resonates with you in some way
thoughts, feelings, or questions that come up for you as you read Easwaran’s words.
This is an excerpt from Easwaran’s Like a Thousand Suns: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, volume 2. Easwaran is describing the master sculptor who was famous for his elephant statues.
When I see a person sitting quietly with eyes closed, giving all his attention to the Prayer of St. Francis, I like to think of this great sculptor, studying his big block of stone with such intense concentration that he really can see the elephant coming to life within: the trunk, and the big ears, and those keen, absurdly small eyes. We see only a block of stone, but for the sculptor, the elephant is already right there inside, struggling to be released. This is very much what we do in meditation, only instead of an elephant, it is the Atman who is imprisoned within us. In meditation, each of us is in a life sculpture class in which we are both the sculptor and the rock. Almost four billion big, shapeless rocks – no wonder we are sometimes uncomfortable with ourselves or think the world is ugly. But a mystic like St. Francis might say, “Of course, the rock is shapeless; no one would deny that. But look within, with intense concentration, and you can see the halo and the harp."
In meditation we give the mind a shining model and study it very carefully every morning and every evening until it is printed on our hearts. Then, throughout the rest of the day, we go along chipping away at everything that is not Self. It takes many years, but in the end, the great mystics of all religions tell us, every bit of anger, fear, and greed can be removed from our consciousness, so that our whole life becomes a flawless work of art. This is the third stage of meditation, called samadhi. Samadhi really is not a stage at all, but a stupendous realization in which all the barriers of separateness fall. Then there are no walls between the conscious and unconscious, no walls between you and others; your consciousness is completely integrated, from the attic to the cellar. When this happens, Patanjali says in one of the grandest understatements in mystical literature, you see yourself as you really are: the Atman, the Self, who dwells in the hearts of us all.
Most of us cannot even glimpse how miraculous this transformation is until we try to achieve it ourselves. Then we shall see why the mystics tell us there is no greater challenge on earth than the challenge of Self-realization. The Compassionate Buddha puts it beautifully in one simple word: patisotagami, “going against the current” – the current of all our conditioning, in how we act, how we speak, and even how we think.
In my village in Kerala state, South India, when the sky was a solid wash of water and the river was swollen from the monsoon rains, we boys liked to jump into the river and swim to the other side, not with the current – anyone could do that – but against it. It wasn’t just that the current was fierce; the river would be full of branches and all sorts of other debris, so that even if you had good, strong arms and a lot of stamina, there was the danger of being drowned. That was the challenge of it. It might take an hour to get across, and there were very few who could reach the other side exactly opposite the point from which they left. Most of us would end up a few hundred yards downstream. But there were one or two – we used to admire them tremendously – who were such strong swimmers that they could make it straight across. It required strong muscles, powerful lungs, a lot of endurance, and – most of all – an indomitable will.
That is just the kind of spirit you need in meditation. When a flood of anger is sweeping over you with monsoon swiftness, that’s no time to let yourself be carried away. As Jesus might say, “Anyone can do that.” Swim against it; that’s what it means to live. You will find your arms almost breaking, your endurance stretched to the limit, but you’ll find there is such satisfaction in the achievement that nothing easier will seem worthy of your effort “again. That is why the spiritual life appeals so deeply to the young and adventurous. It is only when you take on this challenge and begin to understand the extent of it, the daring and the courage and the resolute, dauntless spirit it requires, that you can look at St. Teresa of Ávila or Sri Ramakrishna and see that this is someone who has climbed the Himalayas of the spirit, who has stood on Mount Everest and seen the entire cosmos aflame with the glory of God.
Can you see from this what Sri Krishna means when he says in this verse, “Depend on Me completely"? No one in the world is so self-reliant as those who have realized God, just because they have put all their faith in the Lord within. When the mystics talk about God, when they refer to the Lord or the Divine Mother, they are not talking about somebody outside us, floating in space somewhere between Uranus and Neptune; they are talking about the Self, the Atman, who is nearer to us than the body is, dearer to us than our life. In samadhi, when all the barriers between us and the Self fall, there are no more doubts about the meaning of life, no more vacillations, no more sense of inadequacy or insecurity. We become part of an infinite force of love that can never perish, and all the resources of the Lord within flow into our lives to be harnessed for the welfare of the whole.
