From In Times of Anxiety by John Main OSB, Meditatio Talks Series 2009 C
One of the things that we are all interested in is finding our way not just to harmony in our lives, but something that we can only describe by the word ‘peace’. The sense of peace is the sense of being intact, being together, being complete. It isn’t just the sense that one is be calmed. It’s not that; it’s something much more positive. It is a sense of well-being, when you have discovered your own harmony, the harmony within yourself, and the harmony of which you are capable in relationship with others, the harmony for example that you experience with nature when you see a beautiful clear day or wonderful view, the marvellous sky. In those moments of revelation, it flashes in on one that this is what it’s about: a sense of oneness with nature, with oneself, with others. That is why we meditate.
When you begin to meditate, you have to have some motivation. You have to have some objective to get you going, to start you on the road. To achieve that state of harmony, of peace (which in many of the sacred scriptures in both the Eastern and Western traditions are described as the state of blessedness, of glory, of salvation, or of life, the sense of being fully alive) if you want a motivation, that would be as good a motivation as any. But once you start to meditate on a daily regular basis in your life, you will begin to realize that meditation operates by its own dynamic. It is not just like any other activity in your life. You don’t approach it in the way: If I meditate so many times then I will get this return, x level of peacefulness; if I am particularly faithful then I will get to x plus one, or whatever.
Once you start to meditate you realize that you come to it without demands, without looking for any pay-off. We meditate simply because this is the only way that we can find that will lead us to this very sense of wholeness, of oneness. In meditation we discover that this is what life is given to us for: To be one, to activate all the potential that is ours for life, for happiness, for being.
Meditating is to the spirit just the same as breathing is to the body. If someone asked you what is your motivation for breathing, you would reply, ‘I have no motivation. It is necessary to breathe; it is necessary for life. I have no conscious motivation for it at all.’
Excerpt from Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
