#12 – From Isolation to Love

Listen to Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians:  “Your world was a world without God or hope, but now, in union with Christ Jesus, you have been brought near.  He is our peace.”

Meditation is the natural, obvious thing to do.  We know with certainty that we must pass beyond our own closed minds.  We must pass from isolation to love.

Introspection is the mind turned in on itself.  If I try to analyze an experience of my own, I end up in the state of observing myself which is fixating on my own self-consciousness.   We end up in a hall of mirrors, trapped where we take the image for reality.  All we have are images of ourselves.  Why is meditation different?

The first crisis we experience in meditation is sterility; dryness, nothingness – we ask ourselves, “What am I getting out of this?”  The temptation is to give up, but we must commit ourselves to meditation and to the mantra. When we commit ourselves to letting go of our own self-consciousness, we receive in God all riches and all love; a poverty of spirit.  Saint Francis of Assisi knew and experienced the commitment to total poverty.

It takes time for our conscious mind to keep up with what is happening in our deepest being.  If we continue meditating and saying the mantra, sterility becomes poverty; poverty, simplicity and abandon to God and His love.

God is love.  Introspection transformed into vision, we see in the divine light.  Faith in our own destiny is finding ourselves in God.  We must be serious in our commitment to joy, to love and to God.  There are no half-measures.  You can’t be half committed; you either say your mantra or you don’t.

Allow yourself to be committed to Meditation.  Enter into the inheritance that is yours in Christ.  Liberty of spirit is union with God.

Notes from John Main’s Christian Meditation Lectures
Presented by The World Community for Christian Meditation
www.wccm.orgor www.wccm-usa.org