Thanks to all who joined in this year’s Celebration of Easwaran’s Life and Teachings, including last Sunday’s culmination! Taking part in that six-week program with you was such a joyful and inspiring experience. Let us each continue our united effort to infuse the spiritual renaissance with a little more life, a little more love. We have Easwaran’s support in this. Our daily meditation and our mantram are healing forces in the world.
And now we have another resource to help us deepen our efforts: a new issue of the Blue Mountain Journal has arrived, Meditation: From Distraction to Absorption. Here on the eSatsang let’s start by reading Easwaran’s article “Spiritual Growth That Is Swift and Sure,” on pages 5–18. Easwaran dives right into the subject of how we can deepen meditation, with a penetrating analysis of the connections with our habits of mind:
“I would go so far as to say that dwelling on oneself is the root cause of most personal problems. The more preoccupied we become with our private fears, resentments, memories, and cravings, the more power they have over our attention. When we sit down to meditate, we cannot get our mind off ourselves. With practice, however, we can learn to pay more and more attention to the needs of others–and this carries over directly into meditation. Less self-centered thinking means fewer distractions, a clearer mind, fewer outgoing thoughts to impede our gathering absorption as meditation deepens.”
Is there some tip from Easwaran in this reading that you tend to skim over because you have already heard it many times before? Try focusing on it this week.
Throughout this journal study, let’s give special effort to deepening our meditation. What is one benefit you hope to gain by deepening your own meditation?
For our spiritual bonus this week, let’s try out the audio section of the Easwaran Digital Library. The library has a great wealth of audio talks along with passage recordings helpfully curated. This week let’s visit the Passages for Changing Negative Patterns of Thinking. (You’ll first need to log in for this link to work; if it’s your first time, use the button Create new account from the login page). Try clicking the heading Dwelling on Oneself, Depression near the bottom of the page. Then in the player near the top of the page check Play all passages in this category and use the Play button to begin.