An Understanding Of Meditation

    

Can you turn a Mystery into a technique? Can you turn Grace into a self-help regime, a 12 step program, or cool the fire of God into smoldering tablets?

According to the accounts in Exodus chapter 3 and Deuteronomy 4, Moses entered the cloud of unknowing and there, beyond the senses, saw God as uncreated fire. He heard the voice of the almighty but saw no form. Then God revealed the divine name: "I AM." This is real meditation. But when Moses came out of the cloud, the Word of God somehow solidified into stone, containing Ten Commandments. 

It is better to enter the Fire and simply leave your innermost Self there, where you don't need any tablets. Then the mind, the senses, and the body can emerge into the world again to perform their work. But the heart remains forever drowned in the ocean of divine radiance.

When the intellectual mind gets hold of spirituality, it wants to turn it into theology, law, and a doctoral program. Better to be a beginner than a PhD. That is why Jesus said, "You must be like a child to enter the kingdom." Yet we keep packaging spirituality as science, and selling it as a technique. Meditation may begin as a technique, but if it is real meditation it takes you deeper than the linear thinking or intellectual mind where any technique could be practiced. 

We only discover meditation in the present moment, although it is a very ancient moment. That is why it is passed on to us from a venerable lineage, though it must be enlivened as Presence. Meditation is the way of the Word, the same Word that created the universe when God said, "Let there be light." But the art of meditation is creation in reverse. We follow the Word back inward to its source in the Unmanifest, the Ineffable. Then we are reborn from the womb of light.

This is the way of the mantra, the way of the Name. It is the essence of the Vedic tradition, as well as the most ancient spiritual practice mentioned in the Bible: "Calling on the name of the Lord" (Genesis 4:26). When we sink from the mind into the heart, the mantra merges with the Logos, the vibration that creates the world. We enter "the beginning," but we do not have to go back in time, just deep into the heart of now. "In the beginning was, and is, the Word" (John 1:1 - the aorist verb tense means that the action is still going on). Likewise, a Vedic text declares: "Adau Bhagavan shabda rasahi: In the beginning, the Lord created the universe out of a stream of sound."

In essential meditation, there is no doing, simply a sea of grace, the ocean of the effortless. We sink from the mind into the heart, following the mantra beyond thinking, to the subtlest level of feeling, where it ceases to be a "technique" and becomes a flow of pure devotion, the secret river of the divine Name.

Let the mantra merge with the vibration of the formless, where matter arises from the vacuum. The early church called this creation "ex nihilo: out of nothing." Physicists call this no-thing "the quantum vacuum." But of course it is not nothing: it is a teeming cauldron of potential energy, virtual photons of light, virtual electrons of matter. At this finest threshold of creation, the sound of the mantra dissolves into the original glow of divine silence.

Some say that this practice of transcendental deep meditation "by-passes" our embodiment. But they don't really understand it at all. This dive through the Word in reverse, that carries us into the silence at creation's source, is not transcending the body, but transcending the mind. We do not go beyond the body, but through the body, to the inception of the finest subnuclear particles that dance out of the quantum vacuum as waves. Thus meditation does not deny embodiment at all, but effortlessly heals and re-creates the body, gently dissolving the trauma stored in the deepest layers of our physiology.

Now taste and feel the fire of creation humming through every cell of your flesh. Witness the radiant golden sun in your chest. Bathe in the whisper that births each particle of fire from the womb of holy darkness.

Image: Moses at the burning bush, by Rick Jacobi