What the Ocean Whispered to the Wave

A small group of us were sitting with Maharshi in 1972, marveling at how graceful meditation is. We asked him, "Who created the teaching that meditation requires effort, concentration, control?"

Maharshi laughed and made up a little parable right on the spot: "The wave asked the sea: could I be like you? The sea replied: it's easy, just settle down!"

So much harm has been done in every religion by the teaching of concentration, control, and effort to over-come the body with the mind. This obsession with spiritual effort stems from a sense that there is something wrong with me, an essential sinfulness, a journey I must take, a distance between me and my source.

But a wave does not need to go anywhere to merge with the sea. No distance ever exists between the wave and the water. At its peak the wave may appear to be an individual, but at its base, every wave is already the whole ocean. Therefore, no energy is required for a wave to return to its resting state. Just a shift of awareness to what already IS. In fact, as the wave returns to its source, energy increases. The practice of meditation is not an effort to rise upward: it is a settling to rest in the simplest state. 

Therefore the greatest teachers tell us that meditation is not concentration, but de-concentration. When the wave settles into the sea, it does not contract to a point, but gracefully expands into boundlessness. 

Returning to the sea, a wave makes a gentle sound, sizzling cool, fresh over sand. As mind settles back into Source, there is a faint whisper: the sound of the finite dissolving into the infinite. The sound of dissolving is the secret of Mantra.

The Rig Veda declares: Adau bhagavan shabdha rasahih. "In the beginning, God manifested as sound." Likewise in Biblical tradition, God manifests through sound, through the Logos: "In the beginning was the Word." Modern quantum physics confirms the ancient vision. In the vacuum at the source of energy there is an internal vibration of "virtual electrons” and “ virtual photons." Physicists call this internal self-resonance "fluctuations of the vacuum."

The mantra, in its subtlest form, is this very resonance at the heart of creation. It is not an ordinary word. The mantra is part of that primordial sound through which the vacuum generates particles of matter, that primordial Word through whom the Creator speaks creation. 

Real meditation is not an attempt to rise above the physical body. Meditation is listening to what the body actually is: infinite spiritual energy ceaselessly recreated out of the uncreated void. Each photon and electron of our flesh is permeated with God’s creative Word. The mantra given to us by the guru at initiation is a vehicle for the mind to settle down into the cosmic Logos that eternally pulsates in divine silence. We witness our waves effortlessly merge with the sea, by the grace of the sea, as the mantra-wave dissolves into divine Silence.

As grace draws the mantra's sound toward deeper and deeper stillness, individual mind merges with divine mind, and the body is infused with the energy at the source of creation. As the ocean whispers in the wave, so the Almighty whispers in every particle of this body.

Seen through the Eye of the heart in transcendental deep meditation, there is no distinction whatsoever between God and Man, Heaven and Earth, Consciousness and Matter. We taste the divine in every atom of creation. In the words of Jesus, "If your Eye is single, your whole body will be full of light."  (Luke 11:34)

When we were young, someone taught us that God is far above and difficult to attain.  Someone taught us that “I” must leave this lowly flesh and journey upward until, at the last day, after immeasurable striving, “I” will reach heaven, a heaven where earthly matter is erased. Who told us the lie that we can only be with God when we die? That the goal is to become an angel, or an immaterial ghost? Who separated heaven from earth, spirit from body, the “higher” from the “lower” realms? Whoever those teachers were, their time is over now. Hierarchy is over. Striving is over. Now we wake up to a simpler truth: God is not the end but the beginning.

What my yearning for God is made of, is God. At every moment, I am a wave in the ocean of love, and God dances in every ripple of my being. The Beloved hums divine music through the instrument of my body, which is a vina with seven strings, and each string is made of seven strings, and each of these is made of seven vibrant threads of sound, ad infinitum, as my own body’s yearning carries me back into Silence.

God is my sacred Zero. Any number of steps I climb only take me further from who I Am. The true Guru never says, "Strive upward! Take a long journey, and you will one day reach the kingdom. Until then, worship Me!" A true Guru says exactly what the Christian scriptures say: " My yoke is easy, my burden is light.... The kingdom of God is within you... Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Sink into God before you rise up. Kneel upon God before you take a single step. God is with you wherever you go, whether rising or falling. This is why we bow. Touch God beneath you, God at the beginning, God the very ground of our being. This is why we bow.

Jai Guru Dev.