A Love Affair, a Marriage and Then....

See the golden light behind all the figures

If I said to you that taking up Meditation was like a love affair you might not believe me.  You might say that meditation is there to help relieve stress and cope with life and although it may, I maintain that if you are lucky, it is like a love affair which can turn into a marriage which will carry you towards the real goal of your life.  Now the real goal of your life turns out to be finding the key to the life and death conundrum.  It is a conundrum because like a love affair which doesn’t go anywhere, life can offer you its treasures and its pleasures, its fun and its frolics, its power to succeed and its power to be wealthy, healthy and beautiful, life like that is only on loan, it will withdraw all those things from your body and mind and hand them to the next generation.  It will appear to dump you.  Now the trick is to find out what that life really is, to concentrate, to meditate on it so that you are so married to it, so united to it that you follow it to its source.  Now this is how meditation works, you are given a mantra perhaps or a method and you practice.  Maybe to start with you have wonderful transcendental experiences, you soar out of your body to realms where angels dance but you are so taken by the experience that you forget the method of concentration on the word or the point of light which is the real focus.  Meditation is going to take you on a journey through all the worlds and ideas you have ever had, it will test you with good ideas, great bright inspirations for books and pictures and even a shopping list, it may flash up scenes which belong in films and try to shift you from your seat of contemplation into action. This is the marriage taken place, not just the wedding but the long old slog of marriage where everything must be faced together, better or worse and all the rest of the opposites.  You just sit it through and then perhaps suddenly, just when you need it, the word, the mantra, the point of light will bend towards you and completely wrap your individual self in its loving embrace and you will know the power and completeness of love, life where there is no dying off.  Now that certainty is worth the hour you give to it each day.