Lesson 9 Meditation,
Prayer and Art We'll begin with a meditation.
Meditation here and now offers us a chance to gaze into our essence with the same tender passion of gazing into the eyes of our beloved.
Meditation is a process of purification,
Distillation,
Simplification and arrival at essence.
To meditate is to create a time and space for silence and reflection.
Deeper depths of spirit are revealed.
We don't know the source,
We just know the depths are present in the mystery of not knowing.
Meditation has these many layers and an early layer is to listen to the thoughts and feelings that arise naturally.
First,
We can harvest the insight.
It can be interesting to see what shows up.
We learn what our preferences are.
Second,
We have an opportunity to harvest the garbage for fruit.
Notice the noise,
Judgments,
The obscurations and obstacles.
With meditation practice,
Slowly,
Over time,
This confusion and discomfort can quiet.
These are but layers of habituation that have been ignored over time and have been built up and confused as the egoic self.
This ignorance leads to attraction and aversion,
As the Buddhists say,
And they obscure essence.
We can learn from what we are attracted to and what we avoid.
Monkey mind happens.
It will happen.
When it does,
After the illumination of the harvest,
We can let the thoughts and feelings slide on through.
We can give them grease so they will slip away.
In Buddhism,
These busy messages are disturbances that obscure our true nature of tranquility,
Luminosity and spaciousness.
Precisely because they can come,
They can go.
We need to keep that tiny thin slice at the top of our awareness of the present moment free and open so that the love available to us can arrive.
We looked at that in Lesson 6.
Meditation is a time to screen out distractions,
Internal and external,
In order to find and experience our true nature under all the thoughts and feelings we have about our stories.
Meditation can be a time of healing.
The similarity between the words meditation and medicine is significant here,
Particularly because one definition of medicine,
Which we associate with healing,
Is ritual practice.
Meditation is a form of ritual spiritual practice.
Eventually we understand that we are addressing the ultimate question,
Who is this person who meditates?
Who am I?
Simply by asking this question,
We become an observer.
We create a valuable separation from all our thoughts,
Feelings and monkey mind.
This is a valuable insight because now we realize that we are not our thoughts and feelings.
They come and they go.
They arise in consciousness and they disappear from consciousness.
We are human,
So thoughts and feelings always come and always go.
But what is stable and consistent is our very consciousness itself,
The essential core of our being,
Our essence.
Now let's look at prayer.
Prayers are conversations with spirit,
The word I am using to describe all the various names for God the Creator,
The Holy One,
Essence.
Prayers are two-way communications,
Essence to essence.
To speak or to imagine words is only one dynamic.
To listen is the crucial second dynamic.
Spirit speaks to us in many ways.
We may hear literal words from the divine inside our heads and from other people whom the divine is using as spokespeople.
These could be recognized religious leaders or spiritual teachers or the neighbor next door or animals or the trees,
Bushes and flowers of the natural world.
It is equally true that God,
Spirit,
Communicates praise with us in myriad forms other than words,
Forms as many and varied as God herself,
As creation Himself.
As many faith traditions tell us,
Whatever we name this,
It is very often found or revealed in silence.
Several years ago I wanted to encourage grieving families and gently suggest to them that they were not as alone as they sometimes felt and that a source of strength might be found in prayer.
I wrote the following words for them,
Which now stand in the entryway to the Center for Grieving Children.
May the grieving children and their families who enter these doors find here a new kind of home,
Or perhaps an old kind of home,
Created by people who ourselves know tears and anger and love.
We create this home anew every night the stars come out,
Every day the sun shines,
Though clouds may hide the light.
Those old stars have been in our sky for over ten billion years.
That old sun has been in our sky for over a billion years and will be tonight and will be today.
Parents have been here for a hundred and fifty million years.
Cats and dogs have been here for thirty-six million years.
When we came two and a half million years ago,
We began loving,
We began grieving.
And we are grieving still,
Tonight and today,
Here in our new home,
Where tears are welcome,
Where anger is welcome,
Where love is welcome,
Where you are welcome.
I want to share a story about what I call a natural prayer circle.
As a volunteer with the Center for Grieving Children,
I received a call from the local high school principal.
She called the day after an eleventh grade student named Jeff had fallen out of the back of a friend's pickup truck,
Hit his head on the pavement,
And died.
She said the accident had happened a block from school,
When the students were on their lunch break and now the students were distraught.
She wanted to know how to help them.
I arranged to meet with three of Jeff's friends at the high school.
The students were sad and red-eyed.
They didn't have much to say,
But I listened.
After they told me a little bit about Jeff,
They said they wanted to have a memorial for him.
They wanted it at the street corner where he died,
And they wanted it now.
We went to see the principal,
And thankfully she agreed to use the school's public address system to announce that there would be a memorial service for Jeff at the lunch break in half an hour.
The students and I walked over to the street corner.
Soon other students began arriving.
There was a little sand sprinkled on the spot in the street where Jeff had died the day before,
And the students gathered in a ragged circle around it.
Nobody said anything.
We stood in silence.
The feeling was reverential and prayerful.
We were just there together.
