In addition to the senses you had as an animal, you now have that most marvellous instrument of awareness – the mind.
It is as though your world has just exploded in scope, variety and possibilities. The power of the mind to perceive, to analyse, organise, classify, quantify and control is dazzling and unparalleled. Along with the mind, your sense of ego is now infinitely more developed and refined. Your interactions with the world are now far more complex and comprehensive. Your instincts are now guided and overruled by your mental awareness and growing moral compass, your sense of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust.
As an individual human being you play numerous roles in your family, at school, in society and even on the world stage. You study and learn the sciences, mathematics, history. You gather information, form and hold opinions, views, biases and prejudices. You travel the world, absorbing its cultures, customs, languages, sights, sounds and experiences. You play sports and games, enjoy hobbies and passions. You pursue multiple jobs and careers, from servant and labourer to landowner, employer and tycoon. You accumulate possessions and wealth, you acquire status and power.
You give and receive.
You immerse yourself in the arts, poetry, music, painting, architecture. You cultivate a rich aesthetic sense. You are involved in all manner of relationships and interactions, yielding a vast catalogue of experiences. You soar in untrammelled bliss, and plumb despair’s depths. You taste the joy of success and bitterness of failure, the devastation of loss and tragedy. Your renown spreads far and wide. You experience pride and humiliation. In addition to your explorations of your physical and social world, you dabble in the metaphysical, in religion, spiritual teachings and practices.
Eventually you become a huge tree, with magnificent strong branches and countless fluttering leaves, offering shade and protection to all and sundry, great and small. You bear flowers and fruits. You are admired by the world. You live a long, full and fulfilling life as a tree.
Then, slowly but surely, there arises once more from deep within you, a gnawing sense of something greater, stronger, vaster. Your sense of incompleteness grows and grows into an insistent cry, an intense longing for something beyond…
This inner yearning blocks out all else, becoming so intense you almost cannot bear it any more.
Then “whoosh!”, you are reborn as an animal!
You are a gush of freedom and dominion. Your senses are flooded with sights, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations. You roam all around, investigating the world to establish your unique identity. Compared to your tree existence, this life is infinitely richer, more varied and fulfilling. You have a powerful, dynamic body and voice. You communicate with others of your species. You recognise which other animals are your sources of food and livelihood, and which would make of you their own dinner. You nurture and protect your own, at any cost. The world of sense and instinct is your dominion. You tread between breathless fear and exuberant glee.
You live a long, rich life as an animal, replete with adventure and achievement. Nothing more could you hope to accomplish. Yet again their arises, from deep within, faint at first and gradually growing, an inner need for something higher, grander, mightier, fuller. This desperate compulsion grows in a crescendo, to completely dominate your consciousness. It becomes maddening, of intolerable intensity…
… until Lo and Behold, you take birth as a human being.
To answer this question, let us embark on an imaginary journey. Immerse yourself, allowing no outside thought or distraction to enter.
Sit somewhere where you can be quiet and alone. Assume your meditation pose, breathe calmly and close your eyes.
Once you are settled into your breathing and have cleared your mind, imagine that you are a stone. This is not easy. A stone has no conscious awareness in the way that we do. It has no sense of time, place or order, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires, no will. It simply exists. You want for nothing. Cold, heat, light, dark, rain, storms and convulsions of earth are all the same to you. You are still, mute, inert, without sensation or motivation – and so you remain through the passing of days and nights, the turning of the seasons, the rolling years, centuries and millennia…
Now there arises from somewhere in your unseen depths a vague, wordless stirring, a push towards awareness. This bewildering force builds an irresistible momentum of increasing intensity, leading you, thrusting you towards the unknown.
Now suddenly you emerge from your stone-state. You are a plant. Your immediate sense is of liberation. You sense movement, growth, light, potential. You are free from the dire confines of the stone consciousness. Your roots reach down into the earth for nourishment, sustenance and stability. Meanwhile you reach upwards towards your radiant life-giver, the sun, source of light, energy, warmth and power. How you long only to merge with that all-nourishing, all-thrilling wondrous orb!
As a plant, you sense light and shade, cold and warmth, hidden magnetic and etheric forces unknown to human perception. You have a place in the world, and a role to play. Day by day you grow.
Two little boys were extremely fond of a particular red lolly.
Every day they would visit the corner store and purchase their supply, served in a white paper packet. They were agreed: nothing could equal these red lollies. They loved everything about them: their unsurpassable taste, texture, colour and shape. When they didn’t have their red lollies, the friends would think, talk and even dream about them. Visiting the corner store was a ritual; opening the packet a ceremony; popping the first red lolly into one’s mouth a sacrament. Their lives revolved around their beloved red lollies.
Then one day, the shop owner had no red lollies: she had heard the company might no longer be making them.
The boys were struck dumb. Their world teetered on a precipice.
Not to mind, said the shop owner, for she had new green lollies, which were far better than the old red ones. Just for today, she would offer them green ones for free.
The first boy shouted at the shop owner, hurled his green lollies on the ground and ran outside, crying inconsolably. Never in this life, he vowed, would he touch those accursed green lollies! He started hatching a plan to sue the manufacturer to force them to bring back his red lollies.
Numb, the second boy took his green lollies and walked home alone. Locking himself in his room, he grieved in silence.
Late that night, curious, he tried one green lolly.
That moment his life changed; he forgot all about silly red lollies. The green was indeed far superior in every way: taste, crunch, texture, aroma – an unparalleled sensation beyond description which just kept getting better.
Be always open to newness and change, the only way to grow, improve, discover and become.
“Meditate, do not delay – lest you later regret it.”
– The Buddha
Meditation is self-discovery, the purpose and meaning of life.
Tour Guide: everything is within. Meditation takes us by the hand and leads us from our floundering fixation on the outer, step by step into the fathomless depths and wondrous vastness of our limitless inner realms.
Teacher: the soul’s light dawns within a silent mind. Meditation – in the ever-expanding light of deepening silence – reveals the means and tools needed to learn and discover the secrets of the inner worlds.
Lover: love itself is what we love most, and love we must. Through meditation we not only discover love, we become love. The love within expands to encompass all, the apotheosis and perfection of love.
Playmate: life is a game. Meditation brings to the fore our childlike heart to eagerly embrace every experience-moment as a challenging, captivating, thrilling and fulfilling game.
Doctor: prevention is the best cure. Meditation supplies the antidote to every ill and ailment of our being – replacing stress with peace, tension with poise, darkness with light, confusion with clarity, hesitation with courage, anger with love, sorrow with joy and fear with faith.
Banker: far more valuable than money, to be happy in life we need the inner wealth of peace, love, light and joy. Meditation reveals these qualities, keeps them safe and accumulates them with generous interest.
Insurer: the best insurance against the pitfalls of attachment is to transcend attachment itself. Meditation elevates our identity from the material to the spiritual. Our satisfaction within is our comprehensive insurance against all outer mistakes, misfortunes and misadventures.
Friend: meditation is life’s only utterly reliable, dependable, cheerful, beautiful, playful, tireless, selfless, illumining, fulfilling, loving, caring, compassionate, affectionate, inspiring and aspiring all-weather friend.
Up to now, our evolution has been unconscious, determined by some unseen force of nature. As long as our journey is unconscious it is bound to be fraught and haphazard, with many false starts, wrong turns and missed opportunities. The ferntree or the mollusc doesn’t know that it is evolving: it may be aware of some instinctive desire or motivating force but it cannot know the source of that force or its goal. As long as evolution is unconscious within us, we are its helpless instruments and unwitting servants.
Now that we know we are evolving, we have the opportunity – indeed the responsibility – to become conscious and active partners in our evolution. Once we become conscious of where we are heading, then we can apply all of our energy, effort and aspiration toward expediting our evolution, toward attaining that future glorious goal or state of being as soon as possible.
How to become conscious of where we are heading?
Meditate!
The seed is always to be found within. Just as human tendencies can be seen and felt in the gaze and actions of a chimpanzee – for within it the human consciousness is already being prepared and slowly grows – so a hint of that future being into which we are evolving must also be found within our present consciousness. Meditation reveals hints, whispers and glimpses of that future self. Meditation leads to our conscious participation in our spiritual evolution.
The other more direct way to perceive our goal is to search for someone who has already attained it, and seek direction from them. That is precisely the role on earth of the spiritual Masters. A spiritual Master embodies the goal, reveals it to us and within us, and lovingly guides us there by the shortest possible route.
In school we learn about evolution. We learn about how we humans have evolved from animals, most recently from apes and chimpanzees. We learn about Charles Darwin, his theory of the Evolution of the Species and of Natural Selection. When I was in school I readily accepted and subscribed to these theories as fact.
Yet at the end of the chapter on evolution I was left with a feeling of profound disappointment.
After studying all about where we had come from and what we had once been, I turned the page eager to discover more, only to find a blank space. That was apparently the end of the story. What a let down!
For me, there was only one relevant question, and that question was never even asked in school, let alone answered.
My question was not: “Where have we come from?” As far as I was concerned that was all very fascinating but didn’t really matter, for there was nothing I could do about that now.
My question was, and remains: “Where are we heading?” This seemed the only question worth knowing the answer to.
For if evolution is a thing – and apparently it is – then surely this process is a continuum. The school texts treated the matter as though it were a straight line of progression with an end point, that point being humanity in our present state.
Yet this cannot be. In the process of evolution, we can never be a finished product. Just as we have evolved from something, so must we be evolving into something else, presumably something better, higher, more powerful and illumined.
Here is where it gets exciting: we are now at the singular most crucial point in all of our evolution to date.
They had heard rumours of the elephant, which they were not able to verify since none of them had seen the elephant.
They agreed one of them should find the elephant and report back.
Their first member went and found the elephant, and encountered its leg. Returning, he recounted: “The elephant stands tall, round like a pillar. I can barely reach around it with my arms.”
Not satisfied with this description, the remaining blind men resolved to send another of their members the following day. The second blind man felt the side of the elephant’s belly. “The elephant floats above the ground, is rough to the touch and stretches further than my arms can reach,” was his report.
And so it continued. The third blind man approached the elephant’s tail: “The elephant is long and stringy like a rope.”
The fourth discovered its tusk: “The elephant is curved, smooth and hard to the touch.”
The fifth described the ear, as “Large, thin and flat, shaped like a fan.”
The sixth and final blind man met the trunk: “The elephant writhes like a snake and spouts like a fire hose. It drenched me with water.”
Each blind man had reported faithfully his experience of the elephant. Yet each account was utterly different and wildly contradictory.
Convinced that the others were all lying, the men furiously raged and beat each other to death with their blind man’s sticks.
In this story, the blind men represent the various religions, while the ultimate Truth is the unsuspecting elephant, minding its own business. Each religion has captured an aspect of Truth, yet the ultimate Truth can only be experienced, and never described.
Order reigns even in chaos; within order, chaos lurks.
All outer phenomena bear the signature of hidden forces. If you want to achieve, influence or become anything, go to its source.
We regard the landscape around us as a fixed anchor of our existence. Yet even solid rock is a veneer, a thin crust floating atop a slowly seething sea of molten magma.
An earthquake is an instrument of unseen forces. Slowly but surely, the inner earth has been moving, while the surface sought to maintain its established shape and form. When the forces of inner change and outer so-called permanence confront each other, the inner will always prevail.
As a tree grows from its roots, so the conditions and circumstances of our outer world must always flow from and express our inner consciousness.
Revolutions occur when the inner consciousness of a culture or society has evolved while its outer structures and circumstances have not: like an earthquake, a drastic realignment of outer conditions is necessary to bring the outer into harmony with the inner.
We live in times of rapidly evolving consciousness: we feel within a growing, glowing heart of peace, love, joy and oneness. Yet surrounded by pervading injustice, misunderstanding, division, disharmony and disconnection, many crave a radical transformation of these outer circumstances – a revolution.
Our society and culture are the flowers and fruits of the tree of human consciousness.
How to effect change? One teaspoon of honey sweetens a pot of tea; from one candle, many are lit. Let me be that spoon of honey, that flaming candle to transform our collective consciousness. To do so, I must dive into, discover, become and reveal the sweetness, light, love, wisdom and glory of my own – our own – inner depths.
Lost in your flight, your song and the thrill of freedom, you are now drawn not by what is below, but rather what is above. Tilting your neck upward, a radiant sky beckons as you bend your being up into its heart of infinite blue. The higher you fly, the brighter and fuller the hue until even its blue is dissipated into pure light as the all-real.
The world is now but a tiny speck far, far below, a miniscule memory dissolving in the fullness-embrace of ecstatic liberation. You are no longer conscious of having wings or of the act of flying or of having any physical form whatsoever: so far beyond the physical realm of relativity, speed has become irrelevant as your consciousness immerses into infinitely expanding, all-encompassing light and delight.
You are peace absolute, satisfaction supreme.
There is no passage of time: only an ever-intensifying present moment of fullness-perfection-bliss.
Gradually you become aware of a faint echo of gloom in your universe of light, and realise that your role is not complete until all is utterly illumined and liberated.
Inspired and determined, you focus your consciousness, arrow-like, to locate and expunge this impediment to your perfection: you will reveal the effulgent light hidden within any lurking shadow.
Dauntless, your search draws you to the finite realm. You perceive your light and liberation already within the heart of the world but masked, hidden, encaged. To free the world – and secure your own ultimate perfection – happily you fly back to your windowsill and hop into your cage … for the world can only see and hear our soul-bird singing its perfection-song and dancing its liberation-dance when it is inside the mind-vital-body-world-cage: hence it is here, encaged, where we must attain integral, ultimate freedom…
In a rush of light and air, instinctively your wings engage to keep you aloft. Dazzled, your world spins in a hurtling rush of colours, shapes, scents and sounds.
You are in another realm. Around the garden you fly, drinking in the array of vivid colours and sweet fragrances. Giddy you rise beyond your own backyard to discover more gardens, vibrant and abuzz with the joy and industry of life. Higher over the city you circle, spanning the myriad activities of people, animals, vehicles, streets, parks and buildings. Children play and laugh, while adults – heads bowed – go through their routine motions.
You fly out over the countryside, ranging over farms, rivers, highways and byways. Everything of the drama below fascinates, amazes and captivates you. Further afield you fly, over forests, lakes, cascading waterfalls, mighty mountains. The vast ocean stretches beyond the horizon, a new wonder to behold. Leaving behind the land with its myriad distractions and activities, you are drawn to the expanse of the sea.
Spontaneously you play with various modes of flight: now you soar, now glide, now dart and swoop, you perform aerial acrobatics for fun. Then, apparently from nowhere you are startled by the most beautiful music – sweet, charming, haunting and alluring – above and all around you. After some time soaring, immersed, bathed in song, you come to realise that you are singing: you are the source of this enthralling music. You give yourself utterly to your melody, your whole being and every cell athrill with the song of freedom and freedom as song.
Until now you have been focussed mostly on what is below: firstly the world and all its activities, and later the ocean calling with its vastness, grandeur and power.
Sit in a quiet place, alone, where you will not be disturbed.
Close your eyes and focus on your breathing for a few minutes, carefully regulating your breath to relax your whole body while calming your thoughts and emotions.
When you have reached a poised stillness, imagine you are a bird in a cage. Your cage has black metal bars. The porch where your cage hangs is all the time gloomy, stuffy and musty. The furniture is old and dilapidated. In a dim far corner a sorry, weary pot plant ekes out its existence, smothered in dust. An occasional spider has to be satisfied with the odd blowfly or elderly cockroach.
Once in a while your owner leaves food in your cage, without so much as a ‘hello’. You sit on your perch, occasionally reorienting yourself to face this way or that. Your days, weeks and months extend in monotonous glum numbness.
And so it continues, until…
One day upon delivering food, your owner neglects to secure the latch on your cage door. From your perch, you gaze in numbed wonder as the door of your cage slowly, gradually swings open.
Although you longed for it, you never expected or planned for this moment to actually arrive. After a long while staring at the gaping cage door, eventually you gather your courage and hop off your perch. You pause at the open door, threshold of your known world. Your pulse racing, you leap onto the windowsill and hop to the far end. With pounding heart you lean against the window to gather yourself…
… all of a sudden the creaky window swings open, you lose your footing and topple tumbling into thin air.
Shine a red light on the wall and it appears red. Shine a green light: it appears green.
Like the wall, we perceive the world according to the light of our own consciousness. When we are sad, the world appears ugly: when we are happy, the world is beautiful. We shine our own light on the world, and so the world appears.
Looking at the world, we see ourselves.
Each level of our being – body, vital, mind, heart and soul – has its own consciousness, its own light. Looking from our mind, we see our mind; looking with our heart, we see our heart.
The mind is finite; the heart infinite. Being finite, the mind sees itself as “inside” and the world as “outside.” For the heart, being infinite and all-encompassing, there is only “inside” – there can be no “outside.”
The mind walls itself in, isolates itself from the world. From the inside there will always be fear, doubt, suspicion, misunderstanding, jealousy and even hatred towards what is outside, toward “the other.” The heart however knows no boundaries, no separativity and hence no outside, no “other”. Where there is no “other” there can be no fear, doubt, suspicion, misunderstanding, jealousy or hatred, for all is oneself.
How can the light of the heart replace the light of the mind? The same way the light of the sun replaces the light of the moon and stars – naturally, effortlessly and spontaneously.
We have only to meditate in our hearts to become our heart’s light.
When we enter into and become our heart’s light, we shine our heart’s light on the world and thus see everything in a new light, the heart’s reality-light, the light of love, peace, joy, clarity, oneness and perfection.
