We are urged to pursue and to realise our dreams.
Yet how do we even know what our dreams are? How can we know what we ought to pursue?
There are so many ideas, ideals, possibilities, pathways and goals before and around us: how to discriminate between an alluring yet empty desire and what will really fulfil us; between what society expects or our family or peers are pressuring us to follow, and what will bring us deep, abiding happiness?
We are each unique. Just as a cow eats grass and a lion eats meat, and to feed a cow meat or grass to a lion will cause serious indigestion, so one person’s greatest fulfilment will be another’s endless suffering. Only we can find our calling, our own dream, and we can only find it within.
In meditation we strip away the superficial and reveal the real. As the prospector swirls his pan in the creek, all lightweight objects and common dirt is progressively washed away, leaving only the sought-after heaviest particles of pure gold; so as we clear the mind of its trivialities and preoccupation with appearances, we are left ultimately with that which is most solid, precious and essential, our inner gold.
Our true dreams are those we are destined to grow into and become. As the future adult is already there in the embryo, so is our future fulfilment embedded within us. The more and the deeper we meditate, the brighter become our dreams and goals, the greater our conviction and eagerness to pursue them, and the clearer the way and means to their achievement.
Meditation is an incubator in which all our possibility-seeds germinate; fertile soil in which our potentiality-trees grow tall; and the sunshine in which our fulfilment-flowers gloriously blossom.