Introductory and Intermediate Meditation

Meditation is the art of life. All of life is meditation.

Meditation is not simply a practice. It is an experience, an awareness, a way of perceiving and also a way of life. All of life, from the personal point of view, is dependent upon our perception. When we can perceive life as it really is, then no emotional cloud or discordant melody from the world can distract us from our own original, perfect being. If we trace life back to its source, we find perfection.

Life itself, in essence, is light and consciousness. Beyond this world and other worlds, beyond time and space and dimension, beyond what we call duality, is God. God is not a person. God does not have a history. God does not have a future. God is beyond definition. We can say that your perception of this world is God. We can say that this world is God, that perception, this world, and you who are having the perception are all part of God. As a matter of fact, there's nothing that isn't God.

When we think of God, normally we have an apprehension of a celestial being. We think of a big person who lives in heaven. God is not particularly personal. God is existence. Try to redefine the word through your experiences in meditation. Let us just say that there is an all powerful force or energy that creates all, sustains all and draws all back into it again. This is God. It is beyond intelligence, beyond analysis.

Now, in meditation what we do is something original. We experience God. That is to say, we experience that essence of existence from which we have come forth, which sustains us and to which we will eventually return. From the point of view of meditation, there is nothing that is not God. So when we meditate, we are participating in a spiritual experience. We are seeing that life is not perhaps as we thought, but a little bit different - vastly different.

The results of meditation vary. It depends upon many, many different things. Have you meditated in your past lives? How hard are you trying to meditate? How long have you been meditating in this life, or are you just starting? How old are you? In what condition is your psyche? What kind of influences do you have around you? What are the people like that you associate with - your family, friends, acquaintances, people you work with or study with? All of these people have fields of energy and through your association with them, you touch those energy fields and they enter into you, as does your energy field touch and affect everyone in your life.

All of these things affect us. Our past affects us, our present affects us, even our future can affect us. We live in a relative world of time and space. We're born and we die. The space in-between we call life. The space on the other side of life we call death. We've developed a very complex filing system for existence. We see things in terms of good or bad. We feel happiness, joy, pain, loss, guilt, remorse. And very few people are happy in this world. Most are miserable. Even in their so-called happiness, they're unhappy because compared to what real happiness can be, the transitory happiness that most human beings experience is ephemeral; it does not last and it's so short of complete ecstasy, of God consciousness, of true being, that it's almost pitiful.

You as a human being are capable of so much more than you realize. You are capable of being consciously eternal. You are not a body or a mind or a group of perceptions. You're not a history or a future, or even a present. If you can look beyond the physical and the mental, you'll see that that essence which we call God, that perfect reality that is within all things and sustains and nurtures all things and transforms all things, that essence is you.