An Understanding Of Meditation

    

Can you turn a Mystery into a technique? Can you turn Grace into 12 steps, or 10 commandments? Can you cool the fire of God into smoldering tablets?

According to the accounts in Exodus and Deuteronomy, Moses entered a cloud of unknowing on the mountain, and there, beyond the senses, saw God as uncreated fire. He heard the voice of the almighty but saw no form. "The Lord spoke from the midst of the fire: you heard the sound of the words but saw no form (Deut. 4:12)." There 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, on which ten laws were etched. This is what happens where we step out of the Fire, back into the linear thinking of conceptual mind.

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

For the mind wants to turn spirituality into a science, a theology, 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." But linear thinking wants to package spirituality as a step by step program, and sell it as a technique. Yes, meditation may begin as a technique, but if it is real meditation it takes you deeper than any intellect where a "technique" could be practiced. 

Meditation only happens in the present moment, though it is a very ancient moment. That is why a venerable lineage passes meditation down to us, A living flame is never in the past, yet it is passed from wick to wick, ever burning, consuming, present. Meditation is the flame of the Word, the same Word that created the universe when God said, "Let there be light." 

The art of meditation is creation in reverse. We follow the Word back to its source in the Ineffable, the Unmanifest. We are reborn from the darkness, the womb of light.

This is the way of the Name. The Name is the Mantra.  "Mantra" comes from the Sanskrit for mind, "mannas," and the suffix "tron," as in electron. "Tra" means vehicle. An electron is a vehicle for electricity, so a mantra is a vehicle for the mind. It carries awareness back to its source, the unbounded cosmic awareness of God. 

This sadana 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 mind to intuition, where truth is grasped as a whole, without linear thinking. Then we sink from intuition to the subtlest level of feeling. Here, the mantra ceases to be a "technique" and becomes the silent 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 recognized this as creation "ex nihilo," out of nothing. Physicists call this no-thing "the quantum vacuum." But of course it is not nothing, but 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 is "spiritual by-passing," which shows that they don't understand it all. Real meditation does not "by-passes" embodiment. The mantra vibrates through subtler and subtler fields of the nervous system, the cellular, the molecular, and the subatomic, until this vehicle of sound carries us into the very Silence at creation's source. This is not a journey out of the body, but through the body. It is not the body that we transcend, but the superficial mind. 

Transcendental Meditation does not deny embodiment at all, but 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