Meditation Readings: 23/10/2014

The writers of the Eastern Church, the Orthodox tradition, said that the task of prayer is to awaken the heart, to awaken the heart above all to the reality of the presence of God’s indwelling Spirit. They speak of our hearts being asleep. I think there is a real sense in which learning to meditate is learning to become fully alive, fully alive in the Spirit. And we are of course fully alive only when we are fully awake. When the Buddha’s disciples went to him and asked, ‘Who are you? Are you the all-wise? Are you the almighty? Are you the all-powerful?’ the Buddha replied, ‘I am the one who is awake. I am awake.’ That wakefulness is of the essence of meditation.

 

Now when we begin to meditate, as you may know already from your experience, we have to face that fantastic indiscipline of our minds. Our minds are just hopping away like a little child who has just been given a hoop or something like that, and we cannot control it. It’s just whizzing around everywhere as we are trying to say our mantra and just saying, ‘It’s impossible; I can’t do it.’ That is the first thing you’ve got to do, you’ve got to face that initial shame that you cannot control your mind. And as long as we cannot control it we cannot come to that deep silence within us, because the din is too great. That’s where the mantra and the simplicity of it fulfils its first task: to bring those surface areas of the mind into harmony with the deeper peacefulness within. That is the first task of the mantra.

 

Take the words that Jesus himself spoke to the disciples in Gethsemane – you remember, he had gone off to pray, to pray by himself. As Matthew puts it, he went by himself to ‘stay awake and pray’; and when he came back to the disciples, who had fallen asleep, he said: ‘Could you not stay awake and pray with me?’ Mark puts a slightly different emphasis when he says: ‘Could you not be alert and be wakeful?’ Meditation therefore, in the Christian tradition too, is this process that helps us to move towards a totally wakeful state by becoming deeply sensitive to the living Spirit of God dwelling within us. To achieve this we need to develop a certain skill that isn’t at all common among our contemporaries: being totally relaxed and totally awake at the same time. Falling asleep at medi- tation has always been a big problem because once we start to relax, we immediately get into the area of sleep.

 

Saying the mantra is just the coming to this alert stillness. And it can be quite a problem as most of us are used to becoming quite busy in our rites and our rituals and the saying of our prayers.

 

From Meditation & The New Creation in Christ, BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB

For most people this capacity for depth has been almost lost. It has been so obscured  that they are no longer aware of it. Particularly in the materialistic civilization in the West, people have lost this dimension in their lives. They are so occupied with the world around them and so absorbed in its problems, pleasures and pains, that they do not have the power to get beyond.