Does Meditation Make a Difference?, Laurence Freeman on Medium, 1st Jan 2025.Â
I am thinking of our theme today, the question of sentience and consciousness, and of what someone said about the universe itself being both sentient and conscious. This might sound like a fairly metaphysical sort of question. Well it is; metaphysics includes the study of fundamental and essential structures of reality, ontology, cosmology, the nature of the mind, space and time. Our present crisis is so deep and urgent that we need to throw ourselves open on all these fronts to the mystery of reality and to the power of wisdom. But we need also to link our enquiry to a practice that bridges the gap between thought and action. That practice is meditation practiced at depth.
If meditation is capable of changing not only those who practice it but the world they care for, is one of the truly redemptive questions for our time. If we find the right questions to lift us out of sterile, self-repeating patterns of consciousness, then we can find our way to the threshold of the self-revealing nature of truth. This metanoia will help us to navigate the confusion and anguish through which we are suffering at this stage in our evolution.
By identifying the right questions, we can see how what we are passing through does not need to collapse us into despair. True, it is a dark night of the soul, with an unleashing of chaos and self-destructiveness. Yet, a dark night, as St. John of the Cross calls it, is dark because we cannot see far ahead. We cannot easily say where or how long or even why. However, while knowing that it involves unavoidable suffering, it is purposeful. Hope carries the conviction, not the prediction, that it will lead to a new point of development in human consciousness which we cannot yet see clearly because we cannot see around corners and uncertainty is a purification of vision. We must therefore ask the right questions, and the question about the effect of meditation is one of them. Understanding the mutation of consciousness we are passing through will show a direct and grounded path forward and therefore, most necessary in a crisis, a way of hope.
The Second Coming, By William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
