I thought to help us understand better and perhaps experience more profoundly the real benefit of meditation prayer is that I would just refresh a couple notes that we've looked at and then expand slightly on it,
Maybe 10-15 minutes.
The key lesson on the board reads meditation,
Contemplation,
And surrendering prayer.
All are needed to see through and to gradually rise above the illusion of duality,
Ending the painful delusion of believing that we are a part from the Divine.
Why do we meditate if we meditate?
Why do we have a prayer life if we have one?
The bottom line is because there is something in us that senses that if the mind becomes quiet enough on one side that we wouldn't be tormented by it.
Many people practice meditation and other disciplines like that to escape the basically rampaging mind.
But the other reason and connected to that is this idea that we know inherently that we are not just this body,
Not just this mind as it is,
Not just this heart with all of its holes,
But that our lives are meant to be in a relationship with another order of being that we have each or wouldn't be here have been touched by at some point.
I want to stress that not that we have touched but that we have been touched by.
We may reach out and that's what meditation and prayer is.
It is a request and if you understand that it's a request you understand that requests while on one hand begin with an intention are not this feverish activity of trying to acquire or to become something.
When we sit to meditate if we have an intention in mind from the meditation that somehow we're going to achieve something through it we're dead in the water because the nature that begins that is the nature that will finish it although perhaps and to the point of my opening comments I found a really lovely idea quite by accident.
How many of you know who Nikos Kazantikis is?
Good then I'll just make up anything I want.
Zorba the Greek.
Quite an unusual man an author a philosopher.
My mind wants to tell you a story now that one of the things there was a no I'm not gonna do it.
No you know what makes a great author it's when he can tap into these archetypes and then bring the ancient almost undescribable relationship that humanity has with this life and then exemplify it through an action or a scene in a in a movie or a play or a chapter in a book because it's objective and everybody in the world looks or reads or sees that and experiences directly the inherent quality of that principle and so he had he wrote this and I want to it's just one sentence but you'll see how it connects to everything we've been studying together.
Only those who obey a rhythm superior to their own are free.
Only those who obey a rhythm superior to their own are free.
You know from just hearing that is freeing in a way because it points to at least for myself and maybe by the time we're done all of us a relationship that we already have in life that by and large it's just completely unconscious to us.
Have you ever seen those videos they go viral of a one-year-old can barely stand up and they're playing Papa was a Rolling Stone in the background.
That's how some people dance too.
I mean what's going on?
Long before there was some order of being picking up a stick and looking at a log and going.
Long before that happened there was a pulsation.
And all that man or woman did when they started banging that stick on that log was align themselves to something that began before they had a body.
And in fact in one respect before there was an earth formed because the earth is formed from pulsation.
Long before there was a Bach or a Beethoven a Ravi Shankar any great musician there were tones,
Sounds and that's what these men and women these composers the Matisse the great artists the da Vinci who captured light form art onto a canvas there was an impression there was a picture.
Long before any human being did anything there was as gazanticus hence a rhythm superior to their own and that they these individuals over time as we were progressed in our capacity to sense and reflect these things gradually reached a point where there was a an innate longing to instrument the original note the original pulsation the original rhythm all of these things begin in a world that we are presently by and large most of us completely cut off from.
You watch people when we you know we have some really fun performances didn't we have nice music this you know and if you watch there they don't and most of us some most of us don't even know we're doing that there's just an organism responding to another organized system that is greater than our own from which all the things that we instrument come I want to restate that from which all the things that we instrument come including thought including feeling including character so that if you can put this into the context of our studies there is a vine and everything that is the branch of it is the expression of that vine and there would be no need for the expression of the vine unless the vine willed that somehow its qualities and characteristics could be manifested and this is a little deep but I have to throw it in until it gets down to a human being you know a deer doesn't look out and see the Sun reflecting on a daffodil and think to itself that's the most beautiful thing in the world what does it think?
Right?
It doesn't the fragrance of the rose doesn't stir any memory in the creature instead it stirs an appetite because that's the level so something was required to be able to see and hear and feel and smell all the things that began at the top of the vine and have radiated down to the branch and you and I are that instrument when and as it happens that a human being begins to wake up the whole idea that there's a duality that there's a difference between ourselves and the divine and believe me there is don't you start thinking you're God God help you if you think you're a God but you and I are for all intents and purposes the eyes the ears the nose the senses that we have our inlets to take in the the pulsations the tones the movements all of those things are a way in which we ourselves kind of receive and return back into this beautiful vine the awareness of it and that's what what is the glorification of the divine of God how is it glorified is it glorified because we're taught that if we glorify something beautiful or divine that somehow or other will escape pain and punishment or is it glorified in the moment when you love it because you have experienced it and when at last you start to see that all the experience that we have without exception is because it's a gift that has been given to our being then everything in you is going to want to begin to have this being get quieter to have it more open and receptive because you start to understand you are an inlet you are the place at which one order of being intersects another and in that intersection that it is strange as it sounds that do you understand that when you move to music when you when your heart is stirred by a sight that that takes place because there has been a communion it's just that we're not conscious of the communion we want to become conscious of the communion why not just so that there is this experience that we have which is indeed good and beautiful of what is good and pleasing passionate powerful but because the more open that gate is between ourselves and the vine from which we are the extension the more clearly we see everything that interferes with that which is the vine and the branch the key lesson says to end the painful delusion born of believing that we are apart from the divine meditation in our effort which is required gradually allows us to start experiencing another kind of being now I know for some meditations a great frustration and yet the fact of the matter is that the frustration isn't because of the meditation the frustration is due to ambition you can't be ambitious in meditation and lots of us are so when you become frustrated with what's taking place you don't understand meditation meditation is the experience of yourself as you're happening not as you want to be but as you're happening haven't you always wanted to have somebody tell you you're a happening you are you and I are happening right now and when we close our eyes as we're gonna do in a few minutes what I've hoped to convey and will continue to do at the end of the day today we work is an understanding that what we are what we are working at here isn't so much to become something as it is to take part in what is a ceaseless becoming as vine gives way to branch and branch becomes vine then you see there is this I'll say it this way and then we'll start when Christ talked about kernel of corn being put into the ground and having to abide alone if anything was to come from it he was simply referring to this extraordinary impossible to understand with the mind idea that real life has no beginning and no end it is a process of something coming into existence fulfilling the purpose of its existence in that moment and then passing out of existence and in doing so providing the matrix that the humus for the next thing to come and to be born and to pass again that in scale is what the spiritual life is meditation is the experience of an order of ourself that never ceases to become and never ceases to disappear at the same time the more quiet you become the more you reflect this principle this vine and in the reflection of it not that you are it but you went created as that which can reflect it get to experience that same thing just like we experience the sound the music the pulsations the more you understand about yourself not intellectually although we begin by gathering new knowledge the more you understand the freer you are from yourself
