Love your breath. Then you will so keen, so eager to focus on your breath. You will feel: “Oh, I’m so happy, because my breath is my best friend. I love my breath dearly, and this is the opportunity to be alone with my best friend, my favourite companion.”
Who doesn’t want to be alone with their best friend? Rather than being dismayed at the prospect of sitting still with our boring breath and mechanical counting, we are faced instead with the thrilling opportunity to engage in our favourite pastime with our beloved friend.
Our breath is the most essential reality in our lives: stop breathing, and we’re dead, so it’s very, very important. Yet how often do we give our breath any attention? Almost never. We take it for granted, the same way we take for granted that the sun shines, or the light comes on when we flick the switch. So many things in life which we take for granted, but they are amazing: and there’s nothing more amazing in our life than our breath. Our breath is a miracle. And it’s happening the whole time, right here. I’m looking here and there, chatting, reading, working, worrying, focussed on everything and nothing, while this incredible miracle is happening within me, at every moment.
Our breath is always giving to us – energy, oxygen, life-force, inspiration – it’s always feeding us and nourishing us, so let’s spend some time giving something back. Our breath is our oldest, most intimate, closest, most loyal friend. It’s the only friend who has never ever let us down in our life.
Everyone appreciates getting some attention and appreciation, and our breath is no different. So, let’s show our breath some love, let’s show our breath some concern, some attention, some focus.
Our most simple meditation exercise is breathing and counting.
When we meditate, we sit straight, to widen our chest so we can breathe more deeply, and to be more alert, more focussed, more in control. Choose a number that you will be able to count up to, slowly and silently as you breathe in. Then hold your breath for two counts in the same rhythm, then count to the same number as you breathe out. That is the entire exercise: do not think of anything else and do not allow any distraction to disturb your focus.
Some people find the very idea of just breathing and counting, dull and boring. If we feel something is dull and boring, we will not be inspired to practice at all. Or if we do practice, we will do so reluctantly and half-heartedly, and derive practically no benefit. So let us try another approach.
Love is the most powerful magnetic force, drawing all our being towards the object of our love. Think of anything that you love to do. If you love an activity, you are eagerly thinking about that activity and ready to dive into it, and once you are engaged in it, you don’t want to stop. Someone who loves to garden, just wants to spend all their time gardening, because they love it. People who love football, want to play football, and then when they’re finished, they can’t wait to talk about it, and then to watch the replays, then dream about it, and the next morning, it’s all football again.
Love is a superpower, the secret of success and progress in any field. We all have love within us, it is our very essence. So let us employ this superpower in our breathing and counting exercise.
We all thought Uncle Jack a bit peculiar. He would spend most of his days in the dense scrub behind the house, getting up to nothing in particular. Or so we thought.
Everyone in our large family was constantly occupied with meaningful tasks: going off to study, to work or look for work, heading out to travel, dashing to meetings, to rehearsals, training or sport, to engagements or entertainments of one kind or another. Everyone was busy busy busy: we formed a constant stream of traffic in and out. Our front door was a portal leading to all the promise and possibilities of life, for those who would go and pursue them. Which was everyone … except Uncle Jack.
Uncle Jack hardly ever passed through the front door. Only when he really had to. Or to help someone in need. And no-one else ever went out the back. Because, why would you? There was only scrub. Uncle Jack was sweet enough, and kindly, always with a smile which seemed to speak for him – so we left him alone. No-one ever thought to inquire about what he got up to all day.
Then the phone call came. Someone said they absolutely had to speak with Uncle Jack, and it couldn’t wait. Being the only one home, I’d have to go and find him. Out in the stupid scrub. Somewhere out the back.
And there it was. My heart stopped.
Just a metre behind the hedge: softly shimmering unearthly beauty, whispering leaves an ethereal chorus, a magical shaded pool of fragrant tranquillity; perfection fulfilled. Through the timeless breathless stillness, with a knowing nod, smilingly Uncle Jack floated off to the phone. He was never seen thereafter.
Nowadays, they look at me the way we used to look at Uncle Jack.
In meditation, imagination is our indispensable friend, guide, ally, confidence and assurance.
Like gratitude, our power of imagination is a gift from the spiritual realm, which in turn, guides us back to our inner reality, from whence it has come. When imagination arises from our heart’s cry, and not our confused mind or restless vital, imagination first shows us our possibility, blossoming into our future inevitability.
To make the fastest progress in meditation, an active and creative imagination is an unfailing catalyst to our love, eagerness, devotion and discipline.
Imagination fells forests of doubt; hurdles walls of fear; tames hurricanes of confusion; and charts oceans of the unknown. Imagination is the precursor of reality, parent of creation. Imagination shows us the sunrise before the dawn appears; offers the ripe fruit when the tree is but a seed. Everything that exists in the physical realm, started as imagination: the chair you are sitting on was first imagined, before it was designed and then constructed. Imagination shapes our meditation, and in turn our meditation shapes our life and our destiny.
Always imagine only the positive, the bright and progressive: just as imagination can be a powerful force for good, so too it can be a vengeful weapon of gloom and destruction.
Imagination enables transformation. Imagination gives form to prayer, shape to meditation and flavour to aspiration.
Imagine – thoughtless meditation. The thrill of imagining this fanciful impossibility, will before long, expedite this glowing reality.
Imagine – perfect bliss. This bliss, which shimmers already deep within, envelops you as it hearkens your imagination’s call.
Imagine – the transcendence of your ego. Over and again. Imagined with an unwavering inner cry, ego’s death warrant is sealed.
With utmost sincerity, imagine – pristine purity. In pristine purity, whatever you imagine, is foreseen reality.
Most of us are connected to a regional or national electrical grid, which stores electrical power from its various sources, and regulates and delivers this power to households, businesses and industry. To access the electrical grid, we need credit with a provider, and our house or apartment must be suitably wired and connected to overhead or underground power lines. Then, each electrical appliance must be plugged in to an appropriate power outlet or socket, and switched on.
Just as we have constructed a grid for electrical power, so all forms of physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual energy and power are each conveyed and accessed by their own form of grid. Like the electricity grid, these grids are within, all around and beyond us. The more subtle the energy, the more subtle is its grid, and the more finely we must tune ourselves to receive and utilise it.
Just as we must be connected with the electrical power grid to access electrical power, so to access the spiritual power grid of happiness, peace, love, devotion, enthusiasm, faith, joy and bliss, we must have an account, be connected, plugged in and switched on.
We are each a node of the spiritual power grid, either passive or active, dormant or awake. Our spiritual heart is a sub-station for receiving, storing and transmitting spiritual power, within and all around us. So, to activate our account with the spiritual power grid, and to switch on its limitless array of qualities, we must first access our spiritual heart.
How?
Meditate. Meditation in our spiritual heart plugs us directly into the universal and transcendental spiritual power grid, granting us access to the unfailing current of spiritual qualities and their capacities.
Meditate, to gradually uncover and grow into the universal power.
Your typical mind is a dense, impenetrable thorny thicket of thoughts.
Every thorny thicket was once upon a time a clear space. And can become so again. Just as time and neglect conspired to allow the bushes and brambles to proliferate and entrench themselves, so time and dedicated effort can slowly untangle and eradicate them and return the space to its former beauty.
There is no easy way to clear such a thicket. It is hard work. Just as the tricky thicket of our mind has become ever denser and thornier over a lifetime of constant distraction, stimulation and ‘education’, so to clear the mind, requires years of patient, determined, disciplined effort in meditation. To clear the mind, just start your meditation journey, continue and persist cheerfully with relentless purpose and unwavering faith, till the task is complete.
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Some mountains are almost never seen. Their summits are perpetually swathed in clouds, mist and fog.
So also, are the summits of our inner life, the peaks of spiritual experience, almost never glimpsed through the swirling cloud and fog of our mind’s thoughts, theories, conjecture, distractions, obsessions, fears, fantasies, illusions and delusions.
Yet once in a rare while, even the most elusive peaks peek through their veil, bearing bright sunlight through a break in the clouds. So also, in flashes we glimpse moments of pure bliss, sense perfect peace, feel universal love, and perceive the inner oneness of things.
The mountain is always there. And so are our inner heights. To see the mountain, we must wait for rare breaks in the weather: just imagine if we had the power to remove these clouds at our sweet will.
Such is the power of meditation: dispersing the mind’s clouds, our inner mountain heights are revealed.
Our mind is a mirror. A mirror shows not reality, but a reflection of reality.
Just as a misshapen mirror will offer us a grotesque or distorted image of ourselves, so a mind contorted by dogma, fear, pride or prejudice, will show us a bizarre caricature of the real. Whoever harbours strong beliefs and opinions, perceives and projects a confronting world, as though walking through a hall of weirdly distorting mirrors.
Only when a mirror is perfectly clear, with no cracks, chips, smudges or stains; and perfectly flat, with no surface convolutions, does it offer a faithful and reliable reflection of whatever stands before it. Even so, only a perfectly clear and still mind can offer a fair apprehension of what it perceives as the world.
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Water is essential to life. Indeed, it may be said that water is the essence of life. Water cleanses, cools, sustains, revives, refreshes, nourishes and energises us. Yet impure water can drain our energy, make us sick and even kill us.
Our mind is like water, which we are constantly drinking and bathing in. A pure mind, absent of thoughts, desires and distractions, is a life-energising drink for our fastest progress, deepest self-discovery, furthest expansion and surest illumination.
Yet a mind carrying the impurities of false, limiting, binding, destructive thoughts and ideas, is as enervating, debilitating, stifling, crippling, cloying and ultimately fatal to our inner health and happiness, as impure water is to our physical wellbeing.
We know the value of pure water to our outer health, and take great care to avoid impure water, well aware of its potential destructive power. Even more so, for our spiritual health and happiness, must we be super-cautious and vigilant to protect and safeguard the purity of our mind.
Cataracts develop slowly, and gradually cloud the lens of the eye, blurring our vision and making the world appear less and less clear.
Opinions, prejudices and beliefs are cataracts of the mind.
Just as cataracts scatter and block light as it passes through the lens of the eye, so our opinions, prejudices and even innocuous beliefs, obscure and distort reality, preventing our mind from perceiving the clear light of truth.
As we age, cataracts take hold and expand; the lenses of our eyes become thicker, harder and less flexible, just as our opinions and prejudices tend to become more rigid and obdurate with time. So, the clarity of our vision and our mental acuity often decline in parallel with each other.
It used to be thought that cataracts were an irreversible condition, our declining eyesight irredeemable, but a surgical procedure can now remove cataracts completely, restoring our vision to near-perfection, seemingly miraculously. The problem was never our vision, but the cataracts obscuring our vision.
So also, the most fixed of opinions and prejudices can be removed by the surgery of meditation, and the mind’s clarity and perspicacity restored to its natural perfection.
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We are surrounded by and immersed in an infinite array of vibrations, frequencies, waves, signals and rays, including multitudinous thoughts, concepts and emotions.
To enjoy music on the radio, our receiver must be perfectly matched to the frequency of our desired channel. Unless the receiver is precisely tuned, we get only static and jumbled sounds. Our mind is this radio receiver, subject to constant bombardment by hordes of perceptions, thoughts and impulses.
To focus our mind requires that we be concentrated precisely on one frequency; and insulate ourselves from all others. Only in a perfectly tuned mind, is meditation attainable.
There is nothing more beautiful, simple, elegant, pure, powerful and perfect than a still, motionless flame. To focus on a still candle flame is one of the best, most effective and rewarding concentration exercises, for it can bring forward all these essential qualities from our own heart and usher us almost effortlessly into the light and serenity of meditation.
Yet even the slightest movement of air, not to mention a breeze or draft, can throw the flame into a state of agitation. The moment the flame’s poise is disturbed, it loses much, if not all its clarity, beauty, purity and charm. And it becomes almost useless as a tool for concentration or meditation. A strong gust or gale can even obliterate the flame.
Our mind is this flame. Thoughts, emotions and distractions are the drafts, wafts, gusts and breezes that perpetually disturb our mind’s equanimity. Even small, seemingly innocuous thoughts diminish our mental clarity; wafts of opinion tilt our mind out of shape, contorting its elegance; gusts of prejudice distort and disfigure our mind’s beauty; drafts of misbelief cripple our mind’s agility; while full-blown gales of doubt, fear or hatred shatter our mind’s strength, snuff out its light and render it useless for any good purpose.
All our mind’s unique brilliance, beauty, subtlety, ingenuity and latent power is revealed, accessible and available only when our mind, like the flame, is in perfect poise.
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Like our mind, very pure rock salt allows light to shine through, and from this light, a block of plain but pure rock salt derives tremendous beauty and appeal. Most rock salt, however, is a mixture of various elements. This impure rock salt does not transmit light, and is hence neither beautiful nor appealing. So also, an impure mind.
When the surface of a pool of clear water is calm and still, we can see in perfect detail, everything on the bottom of the pool. It is as though the surface does not exist. Yet, when the water on the surface is ruffled or disturbed, we see only the waves and ripples of the surface.
Just as the water’s surface agitation either distorts or completely obscures our vision of its depths, so when our mind is active or our emotions are disturbed, we identify with this superficial chaos and are unable to perceive beyond these distractions to our own deeper reality.
To meditate in our own depths, to perceive our own inmost reality, just like the pool, our surface consciousness must be made calm, our mind silenced and emotions stilled. Totally and perfectly. Then our mind and emotions cannot obscure our heart and soul; then and only then can we enter into genuine, satisfying and fruitful meditation.
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An archer must still their arm, if they are to have any hope of hitting their target. All the training and preparation in the world, will amount to nought if at the critical moment, the bow arm dips or sways.
The steady arm is the still, concentrated mind in meditation. Though unnoticed and unappreciated, it provides the rock on which everything stands. The meditation experience unfolds amid the profound peace, sublime beauty and breathtaking bliss of our spiritual heart, yet none of this can be enjoyed if the mind is not first steadied and silenced.
To expect to meditate without first stilling and silencing the mind, is for an archer to hit a bull’s eye while performing cartwheels. You might succeed once in a million attempts, but the other 999,999 times, you will not.
Imagine you have a blind friend. Sightless, your friend’s sense of smell is intensely sensitive and appreciative of fine fragrances. As a favour, your friend asks you to please visit the flower shop and select the best-smelling flowers.
You set out for the florist immediately. You plan to close your eyes, because the beauty of the flowers might be a distraction. The ones you seek may not be so colourful or pretty – they just must be fragrant.
You are at the florist, before an array of sweet-smelling flowers. But you cannot select even one.
Why? Right outside the open door, a garbage truck has parked, flooding the surrounds with a pungent stench of rotting fish. Your heart sinks, your mission dashed.
The sweet aroma of flowers is our meditation-heart, which we so look forward to loving and adoring. The stench of rotting fish is the unhealthy, negative and vindictive clamour of our mind, which slams shut the doorway to our heart. The garbage truck of the mind must be driven off a cliff, sooner than at once!
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When parents call their children to dinner, the children must stop playing in their rooms and come to the dining room. Meditation takes place in our spiritual heart: when we are summoned to our heart-room to meditate, we must first stop playing with our thoughts and fancies, exit the mind-room and close the door. We cannot be in both rooms at once; we cannot be both playing and eating our meal. We can always resume our games later; our mind room is always eager to welcome us at any time. But the time to meditate must be respected as the time to meditate, and the place to meditate is our silent heart-room, and nowhere else.
Imagine that you are in a theatre watching a play, which is the story of your life, weaving around the narrative of happenings and events, revealing the unfolding of your purpose and mission. The acting and directing is superb; everyone in the play apparently knows you better than you know yourself. You watch with rapt attention. The play reaches the present day; it is about to reveal what will happen next and how your soul’s purpose is to be fulfilled.
At this moment, several large people in the row in front of you stand up and start a loud discussion and criticism of the play, totally blocking your view. Despite knowing nothing about you, they are expressing strong opinions about how the play portrays you. You plead with them to sit down and they turn on you, telling you to shut up and mind your own business.
These argy-bargy people are your own mind and ego, which do not want you seeking enlightenment and fulfilment from outside their own realm of hopelessly limited understanding. Your mind and ego will do all in their power to distract and obstruct you from entering into the silence of meditation and basking in the light of your soul. To watch the play to the end and learn its message, you must either eject these obstreperous interjectors, or move to an upper private gallery where they cannot bother you.
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Your closest friend, who is a renowned chef, has cooked a meal just for you. You are both so excited to meet again after many years. The moment the meal is ready, you enter the kitchen, trip over yourself and knock the freshly prepared dishes flying. Thus, our mind’s bombast ruins our heart’s lovingly and painstakingly prepared meditation-meal.
Imagine you are an architect, who has struggled with some details of a particular design project for many months. The right shapes, contours and alignment of elements are proving elusive. Suddenly, it comes to you: the perfect, elegant solution. You feel compelled to draw your design this moment, or else you fear the inspiration may fly away and not return.
As it happens, you are riding in the back seat of a car, so you will have to draw your design the old-fashioned way – on paper, with pen and pencil. Fortunately, you have with you a flat drawing board, paper, pens, ruler, setsquare and compass. You are set to start, but you cannot draw a single line.
Why? You are driving on a winding, bumpy road, and the careening car is causing your drawing board to slide erratically on your bouncing knee. You request the driver to slow down but it makes no difference: the slightest movement of the board ruins your attempt.
For the still workspace you need, the car must be brought to a complete stop.
The car is our roaming mind, which habitually interrupts and distracts us whenever we try to receive, hold or express inspiration. So much creative potential is lost like water down the drain because our mind, which should be our ally in our creative efforts, stymies our endeavour due to its restlessness and incapacity to hold itself still for even a moment. Stop the car of your mind. Completely. Then, in focused stillness, record your inspiration.
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Meditation is an eternal moment, beyond time and space. Time and space are products of our mind, spun from perceptions and concepts. Only when our mind is still and silent, can we step beyond time and space, into meditation.
