The value of meditation

Filed under Notes on 23. January 2007 »

A Course in Miracles says in its discussion on detachment from worldly values:

“Your whole perspective on the world will shift by just a little, every time you let your mind escape its chains.”

And when I read this, I realized that it is a very accurate description of the process of spiritual awakening as experienced by most people. For some, the chains will break off once and for all in a blast of realizations, as in the case of teachers like Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle, but for most people it is a matter of iteration. Two steps forward, one step back, repeat. This is a process that many of you will probably be familiar with, the process of realizing a deep truth, see a quick glimpse of freedom, and then getting lost in the world again. And although you may be tempted at this point to think ‘easy come, easy go,’ you will find on further inspection that you haven’t really become entirely lost again. Every time you glimpse freedom, your level of awareness heightens by just a little, and when repeated over and over again the light of consciousness starts to gain more and more momentum. It will be difficult at first, but once your level of awareness reaches a certain tipping point, characterized mainly by your outlook having become predominantly positive, your practice will become easy, playful, and almost effortless.

At times you will experience giant leaps forward, for example after having just gone through a great deal of suffering, but most of the time it is a matter of patiently repeating your practice and heightening your level of consciousness in small steps. And this, as I see it, is the true practical value of meditation, because even if you only have 15 minutes of peaceful introspection in a day otherwise filled with noise and activity, your awareness will gradually become higher and higher as you go along.