I hear so many complaining of anguished dreams and sleepless nights, frayed nerves and a torrent of disturbing thoughts, feeling like they are going crazy. The important thing to know about this is, it's not just you. It's all of us. The second thing we need to know is that this crisis of anxiety is caused from within us, not from the external world. It is not the world but the mind that is off-kilter. Therefore the crisis must be healed within us, before we can heal any world "out there."
The dissonance begins in the subtler realms of the astral and mental planes. When we are inwardly chaotic, it not only shows up in our dreams and night-sweats, but through our senses and perceptions of the world. Then we speak and act on those perceptions, and project our inner discord outwardly.
Since the cause lies within, the solution cannot lie outside. The solution is not "fixing" the economy, or our politics, or the social system. Those are effects, not causes, and the effects will not change until our consciousness shifts into a state that is more stable, centered, and harmonic. What influence, what transforming power, can bring about such an internal shift? It won't be a shift in the stars and planets, or a descent of some ascended Master into the world. It will come in a "still small voice of calm," the whisper of a blessing that is more interior to our heart that our own thoughts.
Meditation is the art of opening to this interior shift. It is not escape from the world, or "by-passing," or narcissistic fantasy. Meditation is the application of wisdom at the level of the cause rather than the effect. Yet this salvific blessing cannot come from self-effort. It cannot come from our own mind, since our mind is the problem. This mind cannot save itself, cannot even change itself. For the mind who acts on the mind is still the same tormented mind.
Peace comes only when we learn the art of surrendering the mind to Grace. Then we drop immediately from the head into the heart, where we can hear the unstruck sound of a power much deeper than thought (I say "deeper" rather than "higher"). In silence, the Grace of the Friend fills the field of mind, not with thoughts, but with vibrations of healing love. Let the will and the intellect harmonize to that inner tuning fork. The sound of divine Love is called the Mantra. It resonates in the field of the Heart. This vibration of Love does not come down from above; it wells up like a tear from the core of your chest, percolating through every neuron into all the cells of your flesh, irradiating the body and senses, greening the world.
If you are, like so many, experiencing the nightmares, sleepless torments, and jangled nerves of despair, don't waste time and energy on blame. Blame neither yourself, nor others, nor any external cause. The cause is within. By returning to the silent core of your own heart, and reposing on the breast of the Friend, you will feel the healing caress, yes, but not only you will feel it. That healing caress will pass effortlessly from your center into other hearts, touching all humanity.
Beneath our separate and separating thoughts, there is a quantum field where we all pulse like ripples in one sea of empathy. Here there is no need for thought or image, for in simple silence the breath surrenders. Here we are each the secret self of the other. And when we meet here, our hearts repose in one another. We share from a single bottomless cup, at rest in Rumi's meadow, where there are no rights and wrongs, only energy.
Painting by Breughel
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