This is how to meditate. Sit down. Sit still and upright. Close your eyes lightly. Sit relaxed but alert. Silently, interiorly, begin to say a single word. We recommend the prayer phrase maranatha. Recite it as four syllables of equal length. Listen to it as you say it, gently but continuously. Do not think or imagine anything – spiritual or otherwise. If thoughts or images come, these are distractions at the time of meditation, so keep returning to simply saying the word. Meditate each morning and evening for between twenty and thirty minutes.
We have three simple goals to guide us in our twice daily meditation.
1.) We say the mantra for the complete time of the meditation. This is a skill and it will take time to create a steady habit.
2.) We say the mantra throughout the meditation without interruption. The task here is to continually return as soon as possible from the relentless distractions which are the ego’s hunger for control.
3.) In saying the mantra consistently we let it draw us into the depths of our being beyond thought, imagination and all images. We rest in the presence of God dwelling in the depth of our heart. Merton calls this depth of the heart The Hidden Ground of Love.
People are often interested in what meditation can teach them about themselves. It is easy for us to see everything in terms of self-improvement, auto-therapy and self-understanding. There is value in this but self-fascination can be disastrous for the spiritual journey. There is a danger that after we take up meditation we see that we understand ourselves better and then get diverted from self-transcendence to self-fixation.
When we start, we are concerned with progress, and how perfectly we are following the practices. But we learn that we have to let go of the attempt to measure progress. This is the challenge. It simply means to keep saying the mantra from the beginning to the end.
To learn to meditate we need to meditate every day, morning and evening. This should be between twenty and thirty minutes for each session. It is necessary while you are meditating to say the mantra from the beginning to the end.
Whatever thoughts come into your mind, whether they are good thoughts, religious thoughts, holy thoughts or bad thoughts, let them all go and return to say the mantra.
Here is a scenario that evolves from our faithful practice of daily Christian Meditation. Over a period of time we grow in self-transcendence along with a deep sense of personal unity. We develop a solid sense of personal integrity. We experience a new openness and maturity in our personal relations. We steadily move away from self-centeredness towards inner unity and harmony. An expanded consciousness draws us into a deeper sense of the presence of God.
All the masks, illusions and false perceptions of ourselves and others and of God are shaped by the ego. The ego is like a prism. The light of reality passes through it and is refracted. The shape of pure light is split up into different parts that are ricocheted from their true course. These distortions create the false self which centers on the needs of the ego.
Meditation dissolves the prism. It reunites the fragmented beam of light. It enables us to enjoy the gift of our being without shame and fear. We are on the road to wholeness. It enables us, as sheer gift, to be completely open to the wonder of God’s oneness.
The ego is always working to protect its interest. This is the maintenance program of the false self. The true self, the center that is the Hidden ground of Love, is created for self-transcendence. The return to the center which is the full expression of Christian salvation is like our creation itself, a gift of God. We say our mantra by the gift of God and we arrive at the true self in God’s own time. All we have to do is dispose ourselves, to make ourselves available. That we do as we meditate morning and evening. We do this by leaving behind all thought along with a wandering imagination.
In meditation our way forward is growing awareness of the Spirit praying within us. This comes from our fidelity to repeating the mantra. The prayer is saying the mantra and listening to it. We let it engage our attention as one falls deeper into silence. It is the faithful repetition of our word that integrates our whole being. It does so because it brings us to the silence, the concentration, the necessary depth of consciousness that enable us to open our mind and heart to the work of the love of God in the deep recesses of our being.
As self-knowledge blossoms we become aware how deeply we are wounded by the consequences of Adam and Eve’s fateful apple. There is a basic division of the mind and heart that affects everything within us and our encounter with all reality. In meditation all the alienations of powerlessness, isolation and emptiness along with the corruption of our personal and social relationships gradually surface. They all fuse into one basic division, an estrangement between mind and heart.
All our alienations are resolved and all our thinking and feeling powers united when the fragmented heart is healed. The essential Christian task is to restore unity between mind and heart through prayer. The mantra provides this integrating power. It is like a harmony that we gradually experience in the depth of our spirit, bringing us to an ever-deepening sense of our own wholeness and unity. It leads us to the source of this harmony, to our center, our true self, as a radar bleep leads a ship home through thick fog. It also rearranges us, in the sense that it brings all our powers and faculties into line with each other just as a magnet drawn over iron filings pulls them into their proper force fields.
The grace of this healing flows from the center. The tradition of Christian prayer teaches us that we are irresistibly and continuously summoned back to the center of our being through the hunger of our heart for unity. Through the daily pilgrimage of meditation we begin to live from a new and creative awareness flowing from the center.
In meditation we put ourselves in contact with the source of energy for all creation. We abandon the false self with all its deceptions and obsessions to enter the reality of God who is love.
This encounter in silence in the depths of our being renews and sustains us. It opens our relationships, our work and all of life to the call of love. All other forms of prayer are deepened. It engulfs us with creative energy. The fears, anxieties and distortions of the ego gradually fade away. We are on the journey to wholeness. We are on the journey home.
