The Power of Meditation by Edward Viljoen

Author:Edward Viljoen [Viljoen, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101601525
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

KEYS:

1. Shifting your mental focus for a while to inspiring writing helps unlock new depths of meaning in the words not easily accessed on the surface.

2. Memorizing inspiring words will help you easily refer to them as needed and can serve as an anchor in your mind for inner peace.

Food for Thought—Untapped Resources

We have so much available to us, so many untapped resources that we have yet to discover. There is so much more we could let through the slit we call reality, if we only knew how. And when we do know how, we can make our personal world so much brighter. Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz said, “Life is like a ten-speed bike, most of us have gears we never use.”

I have found meditation to be an effective means to learn how to use all the gears of awareness, because in the quietness I have been able to observe how loyal I am to certain narrow ranges of information and responses. If you accept the invitation given above to experiment with sitting and listening in a way that you haven’t done before, you may discover how full the world is of sounds you hadn’t noticed, especially if your awareness has been arrested by urgent stressful thoughts. By sitting quietly I became aware of how easy it is for me to focus down on something to the point that it looms over me and displaces any of the other information that is available to me, information that remains unavailable because of my narrow focus. Certain types of ideas capture my attention (when I’m not being mindful) more powerfully than others. Thoughts that cause stress or worry or that seem urgent are strongest in this ability. Yet if I sit long enough with them in the sanctuary of my quiet-mind, they often lose their grip and give way to untapped resources of calm wisdom.

You’ve got six months to live; you’re not suited to this job; the job market is tough now; you’re too old for this position; you’re too young to understand; you’ll never dance again. Worrisome ideas like these have provided me with powerful focus opportunities during my meditation practice. I have found it useful to sit with such thoughts, whether they are accurate or not, and consider them. Sometimes I have to let them run their course and exhaust their worst-case scenarios, until at last there is quietness enough to hear what has not yet been heard.

That is what I think of when I read Krishna’s words “the wisdom of the Self” as opposed to the wisdom of the self. The Self to me is the untapped resource, the additional gears, the capacity we have to live in this world without being governed by it. And I believe it is available under or beyond the realm of surface-level mental activity, in a quietness that is accessible through meditation.

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