Are you free to love?

It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don't use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that's how freedom grows. For everything we know about God's Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That's an act of true freedom.” Galatians 5:13-14 The Message Bible

“Death and Resurrection,” MOMENT OF CHRIST

An excerpt from John Main OSB, “Death and Resurrection,” MOMENT OF CHRIST (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 68-69.

St Benedict told his monks, “Always keep death before your eyes.” We don’t talk much about death in the modern world. But what the whole Christian tradition tells us is that if we would become wise we must learn the lesson that we have here “no abiding city.” [We must hear] what the wise of ages past and present say to us: to have life in focus we must have death in [focus. . .].  Talking about death is hard for the worldly to understand. Indeed the principal fantasy of much worldliness operates out of completely the opposite point of view: not the wisdom of our own mortality but the pure fantasy that we are immortal, beyond physical weakness.

But the wisdom of the tradition St Benedict represents is that awareness of our physical weakness enables us to see our own spiritual fragility too. There is a profound awareness in all of us, so profound indeed that it is often buried for much of the time, that we must make contact with the fullness of life and the source of life. We must make contact with the power of God and somehow, open our own fragile “earthen vessels” to the eternal love of God, the love that cannot be quenched. [. . . ]

Every time we sit down to meditation we enter the axis of death and resurrection. We do so because in our meditation we go beyond our own life and the limitations of our life into the mystery of God. We discover, each of us from our own experience, that the mystery of God is the mystery of love, infinite love—love that casts our all fear. 

Fr John Main OSB, “Religious Love,”

Fr John Main OSB, “Religious Love,” THE WAY OF UNKNOWING (New York: Crossroad, 1990), pp. 115-116.

By opening our hearts to love at the deepest and most silent level of our being, we are not repressing human knowledge or rejecting human values or relationships. On the contrary, all of these are enlightened; that is, we see them in a new light, in a transcendent light. We see a new light in them. The extraordinary thing about the Christian message is that this light is not less than the light of Christ, the light who is Christ. The call to us to enter this light is for each of us to know from our own experience. . . .that Christ’s light shines in our hearts and that the first task of our life is to be open to it, to be bathed in it, to be made whole in it and so see with it. [. . . .] Meditation is our journey to that light. 

Prepare to Meditate

According to the codifier of Yoga Science, Patanjali, the method of meditation is not that something, which one immediately does. It’s the seventh step in the ladder of yoga. In the ladder of yoga, it’s the seventh step. It means you are not prepared to practice meditation, yet you pose to meditate.

What should be the preparation of meditation?

According to Yoga Science: Sa tu dirgha kala nairantarya satkarasevito drdha bhoomih (Translated from Sanskrit, YS I.14 That practice when continued for a long time without break and with devotion becomes firm in foundation). To break the habit pattern, to change the grooves that you have created in your mind, you have to constantly practice meditation, regularly, every day, at the same time. 

Why at the same time?  Why do we stress much on the time?

Because, your mind is conditioned by time, space, and causation. 

Time is a great factor in your life; it’s a great filter in your life. If you understand what time is, perhaps you will learn to annihilate time.

--How to tread the path of Superconscious Meditation--

John Main

John Main (1926-1982) has been acclaimed as one of the great spiritual teachers of the twentieth century. He became a Benedictine monk after diplomatic service in the Far East and then teaching law at Trinity College, Dublin. By his life and teaching, John Main has helped restore to Christianity its own tradition of meditation and enabled many to discover its transforming power for themselves. He founded an open Benedictine community in Montreal from which sprang The World Community for Christian Meditation, a worldwide spiritual family linked by the daily practice of meditation.

When thoughts come to mind

Whatever thoughts come into your mind, 

whether they are good thoughts or religious thoughts, 

holy thoughts or bad thoughts, let them go and say the mantra. 

 (John Main, The Hunger for Depth and Meaning)

Meditation is the way of learning to be

Meditation is the way of learning just to be. To be who you are in the presence of God; to be who you are in complete simplicity. And that’s what the mantra leads us to when we learn to be faithful to it.  (John Main, The Hunger for Depth and Meaning)