Meditatio Talks...
2. The Way of Meditation (Part I)

2 The first element that we develop and practise when we meditate is silence. That means being quiet. So the first thing we do when we meditate is to sit quietly, to be as quiet physically as you can. That means also not moving, not coughing, not unwrapping your sweets, not unzipping your bags or blowing your nose or rubbing your feet together. Basically not making physical noise. This sounds a very elementary step in the great mystical journey perhaps, but it’s one that will always teach you a great deal. John Main says that just learning to sit still and not making noise will teach you an enormous amount about the spiritual journey, because it is a major step, for some of us the first step, beyond desire. So being as quiet as possible, in a relaxed but serious way, is the first step.

3 Then the work of silence becomes interior, because then we all discover that the mind is not still. The mind is not quiet. The mind is running around in circles; it is agitated; it is full of fears, of desires, of fantasy, of memories and plans. The agitation, the turbulence, of the mind, according to the early Desert Fathers (the first Christian monks from whose teaching John Main recovered this tradition of meditation), the distractedness of the human mind, is the real meaning of original sin. It is our incapacity to pay attention to God, in the present moment. What could be more simple than paying attention in the present moment?

4 But simplicity is not necessarily easy. God is; God is here; God is now. I am here; I am now. Why does God seem absent? Why does God seem distant? Why does God seem non-existent sometimes? It is not because God is absent or non-existent, but because I am not here in the present moment with God.

5 When we meditate, we see all of this as in a mirror. As soon as we sit to meditate, we see ourselves reflected in our own mind as very distracted, turbulent, agitated, insecure, frightened and egocentric people. Full of dreams, fantasies, fears, anxieties, anger and the fear of violence. If you could analyse what is going on in the mind at any one moment, you will find that there are thoughts of the past, whether it was what we did earlier today, or what happened last week, or what happened at some traumatic moment in our life in the distant past. If we are living in the past, we are not likely to be feeling very peaceful or joyful. We are going to be feeling sad or regretful or guilty or nostalgic.

6 If we are not in the past, we are usually in the future. We are planning for what we are going to do tonight, tomorrow, next year or when we retire twenty years hence. As soon as we start to plan, which we are always compulsively doing because this is our way of controlling reality, we begin to feel anxiety, because we know that we can’t control reality. Anything can happen at any moment. So as soon as we start to plan or reflect on the future, we begin to stir our basic fear of death as well.

7 So where do we go then? Not much peace in the past. Not much peace or joy living in the future. So the mind looks rather desperately for somewhere else to escape to, and it goes to Disneyworld. We move into a realm of fantasy, day dreams, self-indulgence. Day-dreaming may be a little break from reality but ultimately we have to come back right down to earth with a bump. So we don’t find much peace and joy in Disneyworld either. So then where do we go? That question is the beginning of the spiritual journey, which we see in this distinction between the three states of mind: living in the past, living in the future, living in day-dreaming. None of these gives us peace, deep satisfaction or happiness. We can’t feel the spring of joy and pure happiness in any of these states of mind. So where do we go? Is there peace? Is there joy? Do we look for it outside, and if so, where?

8 Eventually, this search and discernment that it involves will lead us back to the only place where we do find God, which is here, and the only time and the only moment where we can experience God, which is NOW. This is what we mean by contemplation, or the contemplative way of life, or the contemplative state of mind. It’s living, being, in the present moment. This is precisely what we are practising when we meditate.

9 When we meditate in a few moments, our minds will be running around from past to future with a lot of day dreaming in between, all mixed up together. But what we do during this period of meditation is to pay attention, as fully and as generously as we humanly can, to the present moment, in the present moment.

10 We need some way of doing it? We do it with a very simple discipline, a spiritual practice, a very simple little method that you actually find in all the great religious traditions. John Main first encountered it when he was living in the East. He later rediscovered it as part of his own Christian tradition in the writings and the teaching of the early Christian monastics, the Fathers and Mothers of the Desert. What they recommend is the way of the mantra.

Laurence Freeman OSB
Excerpts of Talk given at Retreat,
John Main Seminar 2002, Montreal, Canada

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