The highest moments in our lives, the pinnacle experiences, are but glimpses of our deeper selves, our true nature.
When we are swept off our feet with happiness; when we gasp at the sheer beauty of a sunset; when our heart melts in the smile of an innocent child; when we are lost in wonder at the towering majesty of mighty mountains or the twinkling mystery of far galaxies; when we thrill to pure poetic perfection; glow with the flame of inspiration or soar on the wings of song; when we are seized with the revelation of a new truth; when we exult in silent speechless bliss of rapt meditation – these moments are signposts to the Beyond, the eternal reality within.
These moments are clarion calls from the infinite, the spiritual realm. They are reminders to our long-dormant self-awareness that we are not merely a physical, emotional, mental finite self but we are something much vaster, grander, deeper, higher and finer: we are the eternal consciousness, the infinite universe, the immortal soul.
The spiritual life is the quest of self-discovery. Self-discovery is the ultimate of everything we love.
We love adventure – why? – our inner journey beckons from within. Each outer adventure we enjoy is a faint echo, a summons to embark on this ultimate adventure.
We love to play games – why? – life itself is a game. Self-discovery is the conscious realisation of and participation in the ultimate, cosmic Game.
We love to learn – why? – all learning is a precursor of self-discovery, the summation and consummation of all knowledge.
We love to be in love – why? – to be in love offers a hint and promise of the ultimate romance, our union with the Source of all being.
Clear your mind and recall any most inspiring incident, experience or feeling from your past… Fully immerse yourself in and treasure this memory for a while.
You will notice that what you have recalled, is just a single moment.
Not a span of time: though your golden moment may have come as the culmination of a series of moments, yet it will always be one moment that crowns them all, one moment that brings the fullness of an inner thrill, a flash of revelation, a glow of realisation, or a losing of oneself in a vastness grander, lighter, purer, brighter.
When our life flashes before our eyes at a time of great peril, what we actually perceive is a cascading cavalcade of moments, each one the distillation of our state of consciousness at that time.
While journey and process are both invaluable and essential, the goal and pinnacle of any meditation is likewise a single moment: an epiphany, an inner awakening, an elevation to a grace-filled state of pure being.
We do not so much attain such a state, as surrender ourselves into it.
Ordinary life is a haphazard configuration of moments mostly mundane. The spiritual life is a concerted, consecrated progression of ever-ascending, ever-transcending, all-illumining moments in quest of The Ultimate Moment.
Time is a mechanism that shields us – or allows us to hide – from the ultimate, eternal moment.
The Truth of our being is not to be found in time. It is ensconced in a single moment, the Eternal Now. Time is woven by the mind from the fabric of thoughts. Thinking, we weave ourselves into so many cocoons of oblivion. To go beyond time and perceive the Eternal Now, we must venture beyond thought’s grasp, beyond the realm of the mind.
When you walk past the building site of a new large building in the city, and peer through the window of the siding walls protecting the site, for months on end all you will see is a hole in the ground.
The hole gets deeper and larger. Every time you walk past, still there is only this huge hole in the ground. There is always activity in the hole, massive machinery moving dirt around. It seems the building itself will never manifest.
Then one day the building is there, shooting skywards and in no time it is complete.
The time taken to excavate the hole always seems inordinately long compared to the time taken to erect the building.
Yet this is the first principle of all construction: establish a solid foundation. The “hole in the ground”, the foundation, is the most important part of every construction, for upon it rests the entire edifice.
So it is with our meditation practice.
The concentration exercises we do in order to gain control of our minds – the breathing and counting, focusing on a candle or flower, mantras, creative visualisations – these are the “hole in the ground”, the unattractive but absolutely indispensible foundation upon which will stand all our future spiritual experience and accomplishments.
While this phase of our spiritual practice may sometimes seem dull and repetitive, yet it is of supreme importance for our spiritual life to blossom to its full potential.
Every day we practise our concentration and meditation, we lay another brick in the foundation of our future spiritual palace. Every day we do not practise, one brick is removed from that foundation and the whole structure becomes weaker.
When patience, determination and unshakeable resolve are constant companions of our spiritual quest, our perfection is destined.
Mantra is a most effective form of meditation practise because it simultaneously involves many levels of our being. The body is involved in creating the sound; we feel the vibration, resonance and cadence of the mantra in our very limbs. The mind is focussed on the meaning of the mantra and on the challenge of keeping errant thoughts and distractions at bay. The heart opens, blossoms, sings and shines through the mantra as its various inner qualities are summoned and blossom.
Mantra can be the entire meditation, or can be used to open or close a session. In a group meditation, the chanting of a mantra commonly signifies that the session is commencing or concluding.
There are many ways to chant a mantra.
A mantra can be chanted in silence, softly under the breath, or powerfully out aloud; in a slow or swift rhythm; alone or in company with others. How we chant a mantra will depend on our circumstances and the force or quality we are invoking.
The time to chant a mantra silently might be when others are asleep or needing to be undisturbed or when we are in a public place. We might chant a mantra softly while gathering our focus into a calm control. A mantra is to be chanted loudly when power, resolution and conviction are demanded, or when we are chanting together in a group.
When we need something immediately, we chant a mantra rapidly and with urgency: for example if we are falling asleep and must summon instant energy, or if we find our concentration wavering at a critical moment. Conversely, when we need a quality from deep within – peace, poise, vastness or tranquillity – then a slow cadence is required. Fast is for urgency; slow is for depth.
After chanting all the words on your list in turn, each for a minute or two, conclude with the mantra “AUM” for a while.
Feel that the sound is emanating spontaneously from the depths of your spiritual heart.
While chanting AUM, once you close your mouth around “M”, allow the “M” to sound for about 3 times as long as the “AU” sound at the start. As “M” reverberates, there is a sense of the mantra itself entering into the infinite.
AUM is the original syllable of Sanskrit. It is supposed to be the seed sound of the universe, the sound and vibration from which all of creation sprang. AUM is considered the Mother of all mantras. In the Vedas and Upanishads, the most ancient scriptures of humanity, each mantra and invocation commences with AUM.
AUM is the mantra associated with the chakra of the spiritual heart: the centre within us of peace, love, harmony and oneness. As such, AUM is a harmonising mantra: by chanting AUM, we feel all the parts of our being – our thoughts, emotions, our physical body – coming into alignment, into harmony with each other, as well as a sense of oneness spreading from our own heart to pervade our surroundings and into the cosmos.
There is good reason why AUM has been chanted in many traditions for thousands of years. The reason is simple: it works! AUM embodies all the spiritual qualities on your list, while not conjuring any specific thoughts, associations or emotions. AUM is like the master-key with access to all the qualities we need.
AUM can be chanted at any time, anywhere. It is calming, focusing, energising and elevating. If chanted sincerely and from the heart, AUM is always effective and fruitful.
A mantra is the repetition of a phrase, word or syllable. The mantra is the focus of our meditation and the meditation itself. The mantra, its meaning, sound and resonance are at once an anchor for the mind and an invocation of a spiritual force, power or quality.
Let’s start with a simple mantra exercise: make a list of spiritual qualities you need in your life, for example: Peace, Love, Light, Joy, Compassion, Forgiveness, Wisdom, Patience, Determination. Include mono-syllabic and multi-syllabic words.
Take up your meditation station: sitting relaxed with your spine straight. Focus on your breathing for a few minutes, to calm the mind and bring your attention to a still point. Mantras can be practised either with the eyes open or closed.
Chant each word from your list aloud for a few minutes in turn. Each repetition of the word will fit exactly to one exhalation. Vary the length of the word and the breath according to your feeling, being sure not to strain or exert yourself beyond your capacity. Everything should be controlled and steady.
While chanting, focus all your being in the word, its production, its meaning and its resonance. Allow no other thoughts or distractions.
Feel that you are chanting not with your voice but from your heart centre, and feel the vibration of the word resonating from your heart throughout all your body, mind and the room around you. You are fully absorbed, immersed in the creation, vibration and sensation of each repetition.
According to your feeling, vary the pitch, volume and cadence for each word. For example, you may find “Peace” works better when chanted softly, slowly and at a lower pitch, whereas “Joy” might sound better at a louder volume and a higher tone.
Human beings have a deep, mystic relationship with words.
Words connect us with meaning, sound, vibration, and with Being itself. They are a means to communicate, to illustrate, to educate, to elevate and to liberate. Words link silence with sound, bridge Heaven and earth, marry the human with the Divine.
A mantra is the repetition of a word, phrase or sentence that serves at once as an anchor for the mind, and a means of transcendence beyond the mind.
Mantra is mystery made manifest, portal to the spiritual.
Mantra can be a tool to help us enter into meditation; it can be the object of our meditation; and it can be meditation itself.
A mantra is an invocation. We use mantra to invoke specific qualities as well as to enter a deeper, higher consciousness.
When mantra is used as a tool to help us enter into meditation, the mantra acts as a focal point to which the mind remains fixed, and to which it returns whenever it becomes distracted.
If only a tool, then it would not matter much what word or phrase would be used. However once we apply not only our minds’ but also our hearts’ focus to a mantra, then its meaning and significance very much matter – for when the heart focuses intensely on a spiritual quality, that very quality comes to the fore from its source deep within the heart, just as a faithful dog responds to its name being called and comes running home.
The heart is like a large, deep bell. The mantra strikes this bell and in response, the quality invoked by the mantra resonates both within and all around. At this point, word has become reality: the mantra is at once meditation’s seed, flower and fruit.
If a boat is left by itself on the ocean, it will be in constant motion: moving this way with the tides, that way with the wind, another way with a current. The boat itself has no say in where it goes, helpless before the forces of sea, sky and moon.
Our mind is that boat. The wind is our thoughts, the tides our emotions and the currents, our desires and the overwhelming distractions of the world. Left by itself, our mind cannot stay still, being constantly pulled, pushed and lured this way and that – and mindlessly following.
The first prerequisite of meditation is to calm, and ultimately to still, the mind.
To fix a boat in one place, requires an anchor or mooring. Similarly, to fix our mind so that it is not swept away by distractions, thoughts and desires, requires a mind-anchor, a firm object of concentration.
This “anchor” can be a physical object to look at such as a candle flame or flower; it might be a sound such as music or a mantra; a mental process like counting; the inflow and outflow of our breath; or a scene created in our mind’s eye.
Most “meditation exercises” are simply exercises in concentration; the process of focusing and anchoring our mind on one thought, one object, one sound, one feeling to the exclusion of all else. Of course the mind will still wander, for that is its nature. Without an anchor, it will drift all over the sea: with an anchor, it will only be able to go so far before it is brought back to a point of stillness.
By virtue of daily practise, the mind gradually becomes used to remaining in the one place. In the mind’s stillness, meditation may commence.
Just as light and dark cannot coexist in the same space, so gratitude and negative feelings cannot co-inhabit our consciousness. To dispel darkness, turn the light on: to relinquish negative thoughts and feelings, invoke gratitude.
Our minds are usually circumscribed by fear, pride, insecurity and greed. Yet when gratitude opens our heart-door, our every thought and feeling surrenders to peace, love, sweetness and joy.
Gratitude is our unfailing friend, physician, mentor and saviour. It is the simplest and surest antidote to negativity and depression. To embrace gratitude is to banish gloom swiftly, safely and surely.
For gratitude to play its role most effectively, it must be practised, nurtured and cultivated, regularly and devotedly.
How to “practise” gratitude? Simple: just feel gratitude, as often and as much as possible, always accompanied by a smile. You can never overdose on gratitude.
Try this exercise: sit quietly alone, with eyes closed. Breathe calmly, consciously breathing peace into your whole system.
Imagine a flower, in bud form, in the depths of your heart. The innocence and purity of this flower-bud calls forth all your heart’s sympathy, concern and protection. Gaze smilingly in wonder at this flower with all your tender care. As it slowly opens to your love, you are entranced by the flower’s beauty, purity, sweetness, delicacy, subtlety, simplicity and fragrance. This is your gratitude-heart-flower, the embodiment of all your heart’s gratitude for everything good and divine. Breathing in, allow the flower’s fragrance to permeate your whole being the way incense fills a room.
Now let the flower grow to the extent that your whole body has become the flower itself. You are the flower, its beauty, fragrance and perfection.
The sweetness of gratitude is power invincible, devouring weakness, liberating limitation and burying imperfection.
Close your eyes and picture, in the depths of your heart, a most beautiful child, four or five years old – more beautiful, far more beautiful, more radiant than any child you have ever seen.
This child does not speak, but only smiles, smiles through its eyes and with its whole being. To see this child is to be enveloped in a wave of smile, to become a thrill of pure smile.
This child is breathing, blissful divinity – beauty incarnate, purity incarnate, simplicity, sweetness, charm and innocence incarnate, perfect beyond imagination. You simply cannot take your eyes off him or her. Your heart is all love, concern and affection; you are drawn only to protect, support and attend to this child. All you long for is for the child to be happy, pure and free. In the child’s smile is your complete joy and fulfilment.
This child is your soul.
After some time, somehow you become distracted and find yourself thinking of some mundane thing.
The child’s smile is gone.
The child is gone.
Shattered, you cry, you lament, you are all anguish and remorse …
Silently, slowly, from a clearing mist, your divine child reappears, its stern face peering straight into you.
Never again will you neglect your divine child.
Just as we feed our body every day in response to the body’s hunger, so we must feed our divine soul-child every day with our heart’s love and concern. To feed our soul, we only need to love, admire and adore it with all our heart. This requires a clear mind and sure focus: in other words, it requires meditation. Meditation invokes our soul by clearing space in our consciousness, allowing our soul in silent stillness to shine and smile through our heart, mind and life.
If you have attained ultimate perfection, you do not need to change. If you are completely happy, you do not need to change. If you are already fulfilling your potential and your life’s highest purpose, you do not need to change.
Yet who can say that he or she is already utterly perfect, happy and fulfilled?
No-one.
If we are not yet absolutely happy and fulfilled, and we aspire to be so, then something in us must change. Change is the indispensable agent of progress.
As humans we at once desperately need change, and yet we fear and resist that very change which is necessary for our greater happiness and fuller perfection.
These two contradictory forces – the yearning for, and fear of change – are natural and inherent tendencies in us all.
Fear of change arises from our established, finite consciousness, to which change poses a threat. Our present ego fears that change will see its supremacy threatened or worse, extinguished altogether.
The yearning for change comes from our spiritual heart, aspiring for the infinite light, bliss and freedom of our soul. Our heart senses and knows that to attain to the infinite, demands that we first transcend the boundaries and bondage of the finite, embodied in our thoughts and desires, notions, prejudices and fixed ideas.
This process involves a fundamental realignment of our perception of our selves: from our present notion that we are a finite, material being with some spiritual tendencies, to the realisation that we are first and foremost a spiritual being, a soul, inhabiting and experiencing but not defined by a finite world and life.
Expansion of our consciousness by recognising, challenging and ultimately transcending the mind’s limitations – which is the very purpose of meditation – is the only way to effect lasting change, within and without.
Close your eyes and imagine that you are sitting on a beach.
You are alone. It is a perfect day. The beach stretches as far as your eye can see in either direction. Feel the sun’s warmth on your skin, the faint sea breeze on your cheek, taste a little salt in the air. Gaze out to the horizon, where the mighty ocean meets the vast sky and folds into the infinite.
Make your breathing deep, controlled and steady, focusing all your attention on your breath, counting slowly with each inhalation and exhalation.
After some time you notice that the waves are gently rolling in and subsiding in perfect rhythm with your breathing. As you breathe in, the wave rolls in to shore: as you exhale, the water retreats to the bosom of the sea. Your breathing and the ocean’s breathing – embodied in the motion of the waves – have become one. The sea is breathing in and through you.
You notice that your breath is actually controlling the movements of the waves: as you breathe in and the wave rolls in to shore, if you hold your breath for a moment, the water pauses and waits for your outgoing breath before returning to the sea.
You and the ocean are one.
Look into your heart and see and feel that you have become the ocean’s depths. No matter what is happening on the surface – wind, waves, even a storm – your depths are vast, silent, profound peace, the source of immense power.
After some time absorbed in the peace of your inner depths, you notice that the sun has started to sink. It is time for you to depart. With a happy heart, collect your things, rise, bid a fond farewell to the sea and turn for home…
As the dinosaurs of yore, our ego now proudly roams and rules the world…
… and as the dinosaurs found their days were numbered, so the time of the ego’s reign is now well and truly up.
Consciousness is constantly evolving, within us and around us.
The ego has been a compelling and indispensable force in the evolution and progress of humanity, inspiring many of our most glorious achievements as well as our worst excesses, blunders and crimes. The ego’s thirst for greatness and dominion has in part fuelled our quest for knowledge, skills and understanding as well as for conquest, power and wealth. Our ego has given us scientific and technological advancement as well as war, famine, exploitation and destruction. Ego has carried us to peaks of glory and pits of misery.
Our ego limits and defines us within its own small boundaries. Yet our hearts and souls, our true selves, can never be confined by any boundary. As we go further and deeper in meditation, our consciousness expands into vast, timeless tracts where the ego is as useful as a pencil in the sky. The limiting ego presents as more and more of an obstruction, a barrier limiting and stymying our further progress and expansion. Like the chrysalis of a butterfly or the tail of a frog, the ego, having fulfilled its role, is now a decaying, suffocating burden in need of being discarded or transformed utterly.
The ego promised happiness, and instead fed us fear, separation, suffering and treachery.
Our real happiness-treasure is within our hearts, patiently awaiting our call. Stubbornly blocking the way is ego.
It is high time for ego to see the writing on the wall.
O ego, step aside gracefully, or go the way of the dinosaur.
