Over the next month, let’s embrace our unsettling times as a difficult – but real – opportunity. As passage meditators, whatever we face, we have the capacity to give, to love, and to serve. Easwaran assures us, “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 can become a flawless work of art.”
This week, we offer you a short reading and video for inspiration, and these experiments to try.
Notice how you are using the eight-point program to help with the challenges of these times. As the week proceeds, try approaching challenges as increased opportunities to weave the eight points through your days.
Which meditation passages are particularly speaking to you during this challenging time? Are there special lines or stanzas that light up your day or come to your rescue? Pour your concentration into these passages during meditation.
Would you like to share your observations?
Here, Easwaran describes how our meditation passages have been helping us to slowly reveal our own inner capacities.
The secret of this transformation is breathtakingly simple: we become what we meditate on. There is a story in ancient India about a sculptor who was so gifted that his statues almost seemed to come to life out of the stone. Once, lost in admiration over his stone elephants, one of his students asked, “How do you do this? These elephants are more real than real elephants are; you can almost hear them trumpeting.” And the sculptor replied, “There’s no secret to it. I just go and get a big block of stone, set it up in my studio, and study it very carefully. Then I take my hammers and chisels and slowly, over a number of years, I chip away everything that is not elephant.
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 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.
In the following 3-minute video, Easwaran reminds us of the true goal of our striving for transformation: “You have a loving relationship with everybody, and you express it every day in your life.”