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.
*************
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.
*************
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!
*************
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.
*************
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.
*************
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.
Finally, God has granted you an interview. You have been looking forward to this moment for as long as the sky has been blue. You have imagined what you might say and ask for, the way God will speak to you, how everything will look and feel and what it will mean for your future life. Now the hour is given, the moment approaches. You are full of reverence, anticipation, and eagerness that you will fulfill whatever plans God might reveal for your life.
You are invited to hang your coat on a rack outside the door, and ushered into a most beautiful, luminous room. God arrives and you are overwhelmed with the sweetest feeling of closest intimacy: absolute oneness. You do not actually see God: God surrounds and envelops you. All is silent thrill.
In sweet words and velvet tones, God praises all your good qualities and capacities, appreciates all your good deeds and intentions, and is about to tell what you have been pining to hear: the plan for your future life. At this exact moment, your mobile phone rings loudly and jarringly. It is in the pocket of your coat outside the door, where you cannot reach it! God smiles, waits for the ringing to finish, and resumes. And then the phone rings again, and again. Each time God starts to speak, your phone rings with a different, louder and more annoying ring tone. In a wistful sigh, God vanishes.
The mobile phone is our mind. If we do not switch off our mind completely before entering our meditation room, it may remain quiet for a while, but is bound to disturb us and wreck our meditation at precisely the moment we most need it to remain still and silent.
The answers to all your life’s most pressing questions, are being spoken to you, one after the other, in clear language by a beautiful angel. You are transfixed, looking right at the angel. The angel is looking directly at you while speaking. You are eagerly listening, but you cannot grasp a word. Why?
The angel is standing in the far corner of the room, whispering. Right next to your shoulder, a group of friends who you have invited for a party, are singing and shouting at the top of their voices, while dancing to loud music which is shaking your whole house.
The angel is your heart, constantly whispering every secret you ever need to know. To hear our angel-heart, we must first quieten the boisterous emotions of our dancing vital and the rowdy thoughts, opinions and dictates of our shouting mind, most of whom we have personally invited and made welcome.
Only when they are evicted, or fully subdued and silent, can we hear clearly and unmistakably, the nectar-messages of our whispering angel-heart.
*************
As you reach for your jacket and boots, your dog knows this means it is time to go out for a walk, and immediately becomes a frenzy of excitement at the prospect, spinning, twisting, jumping and scurrying in all directions.
You cannot walk your dog without a leash, so before you open the door, you must first attach the leash to your dog’s collar, which means you must grasp your dog and hold her still for long enough to attach the leash. She simply cannot allow herself to be held still for even a split second, and eventually you have to abandon your plan for a walk. Needless to say, your dog is the most disappointed of all.
The sun is ceaselessly shining, radiating, beaming forth all its light, power, energy, heat, inspiration and illumination, freely and unreservedly for all. And yet, very often, we not only do not receive the light of the sun, perversely we even imagine the sun is not there at all. We look outside and see clouds, rain, gloom and sometimes complete darkness. We do not see the sun directly and so we surmise it is not there.
The sun is like our spiritual heart, which is all the time shining and offering infinite, ceaseless peace, light, love, wisdom and delight. The clouds, rain and darkness of the night are the thoughts and distractions of our mind, and the restless emotions of our vital, which we take as our reality, allowing them to obscure our vision of the clear light of the sun, our heart.
To bask in the permanent sunshine of our spiritual heart, we have only to clear away the clouds of our mind and gloom of our vital. When the mind and vital are empty and transparent, they no longer block, but transmit the heart’s light, love and joy clearly and faithfully.
*************
You cannot get off a moving train. If you wish to alight from a train, you first need to wait till the train comes to a standstill. The moving train is our mind. For as long as it is in motion, we are a captive on that train. Meditation does not and cannot happen on the moving mind train. To meditate, we must exit from our mind, and to achieve this, we must first still the mind completely. Wherever and whenever the mind train eases to a complete stop, we need only to alight, to find ourselves at the meditation-station.
Imagine that the ultimate secret of life is written along the spoke of a wheel. Just read what is written, and all your questions will be answered. The message is a few words, yet almost no-one can read it. Why? – because the wheel is spinning, at high speed. Most people cannot even make out that there is writing on the spoke, let alone read what is written there: everything is a blur.
This spinning wheel is our mind. To even perceive that there is a message, we must first considerably slow the spinning of the wheel; then to read the message, the wheel must halt. This secret message of life and our soul’s purpose is clearly inscribed in the depths of our hearts: to see it there, and then to read it, we first must slow, then cease the spinning of the mind.
*************
Certain surgical procedures are so intricate, and the site of the operation so inaccessible, the surgeon must use finely calibrated instruments, and view the procedure using a precisely angled mirror. Now imagine that the mirror in use becomes fogged over. The entire procedure is suspended, and the patient’s life perhaps in jeopardy, because the surgeon cannot see anything. The condensation must be cleared, so the mirror can once more play its crucial role, and the surgery proceed.
The only faithful mirror is a completely clear mirror. Similarly, the only useful and faithful mind in meditation, is a completely clear mind. Thoughts, opinions and judgements, which our mind considers empowering, fog our mind and cripple its most essential function, which is to faithfully transmit the light of the heart and soul. To receive and hold the light of meditation, the mirror of the mind must absolutely remain clear and fog-free.
Our mind is a boat, adrift on a sea of confusion. When a wave comes, the boat is swept ashore; when the tide turns, the boat is carried out to sea; a strong current pushes the boat along the coast; and when the wind blows, the boat is blown according to the wind’s whim. Like this, our mind is at the mercy of the currents of thoughts, waves of emotion, tides of desire and winds of whimsy. As long as we identify as our mind, and as long as our mind identifies with its present thoughts and preoccupations, our very perception of ourselves is all at sea; we have no control over our own consciousness, even our own sense of who we are and what we stand for.
We cannot control the wind, the waves and the tides, nor the flow of thoughts, distractions and desires. But we must take control of our own mind so that we are no longer the plaything of these external forces.
We cannot pilot a boat that is a toy of the wind and waves. Nor can we take command of our own lives until we can hold our mind still, even for a few moments. To hold the boat in one place, we drop an anchor. The weight of the anchor gives the boat stability, resisting the invitation of the wind, pull of the tides and force of the waves.
Concentration is our anchor, providing a focal point to keep our mind fixed in one place for long enough for us to take control, to quieten our thoughts and emotions, so that we can then point our mind in the direction we wish to travel, into our spiritual heart. Only then, can we enter into meditation.
Meditation cannot flourish without proper concentration. The role of concentration is indispensable. A meditator is a gardener. The gardener’s task is two-fold: to cultivate beautiful, fragrant flowers and plants in an aesthetically pleasing composition; and to keep the garden free of weeds. To enter into the spiritual heart and enjoy the limitless peace, love, beauty and joy of our heart-garden is surely the goal of meditation; yet we cannot perceive the good qualities of the garden if the mind’s thought- and worry-weeds are allowed to proliferate. Weeds strangle, smother and climb all over the more delicate and beautiful plants, just as our mental doubts and fears obliterate our heart’s peace, sympathy and sweetness.
Effective concentration is to meditation, as weeding is to the garden, eliminating mental activity which disrupts the flow of our meditation and blights the beauty of our heart-garden. A perfect garden has not a single weed: a perfect meditation entertains not a single thought. But thoughts, like weeds, do not disappear of their own accord: they require constant work and vigilance to remove and to proactively prevent their further encroachment.
Gardeners will tell you that weeding is their most important and time-consuming task. Everything else comes from just loving the garden. Without an effective weeding program, the garden is doomed. Never underestimate the importance and power of concentration. If your concentration is diligent, sincere and intense, your meditation will take care of itself and flourish as a beautiful, powerful, adorable, fragrant garden.
*************
You cannot eat with paper chopsticks. They do not have the strength to grip anything, let alone carry it to your mouth. To do their job, chopsticks must be firm. Only a concentrated mind can grip and control its own thoughts, enabling us to enter into meditation.
In C. S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, an unprepossessing wardrobe hides an entrance to Narnia, another entire world.
This notion of a hidden portal, bridge or secret passageway to another, usually better, brighter or vaster realm, located within our physical world and yet existing entirely parallel to or beyond it, forms a thread from ancient legends, through folklore, poetry and literature to modern fiction and games. Often the portal is inaccessible, either physically or metaphorically; guarded by dragons, warriors, ferocious animals or precipitous cliffs; or accessible only by performing feats of heroism, sacrifice or dazzling endeavour, solving a mind-bending riddle, cracking a fiendish code or intoning an esoteric mantra.
One hero might stumble upon their portal by chance, while another seeks it ardently, devoting their life to finding and passing through it.
The portal to the Beyond is such a popular and universal device because it strikes a chord within and rings true in our imagination. We sense there is indeed another world – better, kinder, purer, vaster, brighter – somewhere within and parallel to our everyday existence. We sense also there must be a way, an entrance, to access this hidden realm. Many of us sense also, that it is our purpose, our mission, even our destiny to seek out this portal and pass through it, even while living here, not abandoning our present world.
This hidden dimension is of course, the spiritual realm. Our meditation practise is both our portal and our Beyond; at once revealing the wardrobe and embodying the vaster realm within.
Our meditation and spiritual journey, reveals and makes accessible to us the infinite within the finite; the eternal within the moment; the immortal within each breath; the spiritual within, all around, embracing, permeating, infusing, inspiring, enlivening and illumining the material.
Go deep, deep under the sea, to where all is silent, invisible and unreachable from the surface world. Rising from the sea floor a mountainous landscape looms, silent, mythical. Hidden half-way up the side of a steep canyon, the mouth of a cave. Deep inside the cave is an illuminated glass dome, housing a wondrous tropical garden of lush plants, delicate fragrance and flittering silent butterflies.
The caretaker and inhabitant of this magical garden is a breathtakingly beautiful child, in whose glowing sweet smile you are enveloped within a single glance. The moment you set eyes on this child, all thoughts and worries evaporate, plans and desires dissipate, your self-consciousness dissolves as you melt under waves of pure love. You do not need to explain or say anything, for all is understood, all is known, all is accepted, all is loved, all is one. You can only smile, wonder and adore. There is light inside and emanating from the child’s eyes, soft, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-forgiving and all-illumining.
Language is superfluous. There is nothing to say and nothing to be said. Your communication is only through smiling, subtle gestures and especially, the light of the eyes. Like the child, you feel yourself weightless, liberated from yourself, relieved of life’s burdens and responsibilities, of all pretence and performance. The child is simplicity, purity, beauty, innocence and charm incarnate.
Implicitly, you are aware this child knows you better than you know yourself, seeing through and beyond everything you try to be, or think you are. Astonished in mute wonder, the being you see reflected in the child’s eyes is more beautiful and perfect than you could ever have imagined yourself to be.
In wordless wonder of breathless humility your true self, your selfless self, recognises, embraces and merges into itself, yourself.
