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.