Notes on Contemplation — by Mary Sargent

#17 – Commitment to Poverty

“Your faith may be built upon the power of God” – Saint Paul.  The same experience that we discover as we meditate is that the truth of Christ is not a philosophy but a spiritual path. Confidence comes from contact with that power on that path.

By opening our hearts to the power that dwells in us, we communicate that power.  The sign of progress in your meditation is found in the quality of your life; the depth of your love, the selflessness of your actions, and the depth of your perspective.  The deepening of your way of life makes you see life as a mystery rather than a problem.

The practice of meditation takes us into the depths and out of the superficial.  There is a harmony we come to know.  That harmony
becomes deeper and more resonant.  It is a source beyond ourselves.  We know that harmony is the unifying love of God.  The presence of God now seems more real to us.  The presence becomes a reality of consciousness of our being. We make a commitment to poverty.

Where we are, God is.  God is with us.  The natural evolution is that we think less about ourselves and more about God.  We are not the center of our lives.  He is. As we meditate we discover that the way into that deeper level is so simple and obvious.  We are then in harmony with the power of the love of Christ which is open to us.

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

#16 – New Path of Life

When we set our feet on a new path of life, we are able to do it because of Christ’s resurrection.  All are invited to share in his glory.  Jesus, after he has arisen, could only be seen with the eyes of faith.  His is mistaken as a gardener or workman, and then, is recognized by Mary Magdalene.

We can see Christ and all of life with this new dimension of faith.    We need the wisdom to penetrate beyond all appearances;  to be open to a new dimension beyond reality.  We are getting in tune with the basic structure of reality.  Everything we see is the reality of God.

Meditation is seen as a way of vision.  We open the eyes of our hearts and learn to see with love.  When we fall in love, we love someone deeply and see them in a new light. Falling in love takes us out of and beyond ourselves into the reality of the other.  Profound meditation follows the same pattern.  We abandon our isolated view of life and travel through the limitless ocean of God’s love.  When we open the eyes of our heart, we begin to see with a new vision startlingly and profoundly intoxicating.  We see knowledge.  We see the one who knows that he is.  We see one-ness; all divisions must be transcended.

We see love.  All is revealed in this love. Revelation takes place in the moment of God’s choosing.  It is a tragedy not to be ready for this moment of love.

Meditation is the commitment to setting out on this road of faith and leaving egoism behind. Meditation is the acknowledgement that God is God; God is One, God is love.  The discovery is the revelation that each one of us is summoned into that One-ness and into that love.

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

#14 – Fulfillment Through Dispossession

“Maranatha” – Say this mantra from the beginning until the end of your meditation silently without interpretation and…” nothing happened”, you say to yourself.

The way toward fulfillment is not on the basis of success.  We are not seeking to acquire anything, but to let go of everything.   Most of what we’re letting go of, we’re better off without anyway.

Go beyond thought and imagination.  Being is what life is all about.  Learning to be the person you are without justifying or making excuses for your existence. You simply enjoy the gift of your own being. Begin in faith.  You can’t come to faith with demands.

The way to faith is the way of dispossession.  Let go of thoughts, ideas and just be.  Say your mantra and gradually unhook.   Sit upright, sit still, close your eyes, relax your face, and quiet your mind.  Listen to the Jesus:  “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

During meditation, forget results for the first twenty years or so.  Keep up a daily fidelity to your meditation practice.  We find the strength and power by our encountering with the spirit that dwells in our hearts -the fullness of God Himself.

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

#13 – The Myth of Eternal Youth

In our society, one great fear and source of sadness is the fear of aging and of declining.  The sadness arises because the aging process leads us to believe that the myth of eternal youth is an illusion. We feel a limited store of energy and a period of long decline.

The myth of eternal youth contains and expresses a profound truth of human condition – to discover the spring of eternal youth hidden deep in the forest.  This journey symbolizes an interior journey.  If we search for the eternal youth-spring in the externals only, we will suffer
mortal disappointment.  But if we face the discipline of the journey, we find the spring that Jesus speaks of; the spring that is there for all of us to drink deeply from, the spring of living waters.

If we follow this internal journey as we get older, we become more childlike and open.  We experience happiness and freedom along with the knowledge of experience.  Together, we have Christian maturity.

A child has this innocence naturally.  We lose this innocence when we feel we have been hurt and betrayed.  We become, not
wise, but cynical.  Instead of being reachable, we become hardened where we’ve been wounded.  We build up defenses around ourselves to
protect our vulnerability. At that point, we begin meditation.

We often have an urgent sense that we must find our way back to that innocence; to recover the innocence of Christ.

Follow the stream that flows from the spring on our journey.  All the refreshment and guidance we need are there.  Meditation is the stream in our hearts.  The mantra clears the way through the forest.  Stay on the journey.  Say the mantra.

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

#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

#11 – The Time To Be Silent

To learn to meditate is to learn to be profoundly silent; to learn to sit really still and say our mantra with total attention.  Sit with your spine as upright as possible.  Close your eyes and internally say your mantra silently in four equal syllables – Ma-Ra-Na-Tha, from the beginning until the end.

Use all of your energy saying your mantra.  Meditation is a process.  It takes time.  All of us have to be very patient with ourselves.  We must find the courage and humility to start again every time we stop.  We learn to let go of our ideas, plans, thought processes and memories, and to enter into total silence.

You may ask yourself, “does this mean to let go of everything I’ve learned in order to meditate?” No, we are only suspending all operations of our being;  The mind – rational analysis; The heart – knowing and loving people; The body – movement.

When we stand back from these processes, we discover a harmony, peace and stillness.  This harmony we experience in meditation becomes the basis for our judgments.  We are inspired by love, so we persevere in our meditation.

It appears that nothing is happening.  But gradually, our lives will be changed.  We are made free to love.  We find a holy, new ground to stand on.  We discover a rootedness in being when we discover ourselves rooted in God who is love.  All of this because we found the courage to take the attention off
ourselves and allow ourselves to be.  To be still; to be silent…in God…in love.

Unity in Christ:  Meditation is the great way of unity. We are unified and made whole in Christ.  We find our own essential and unique place in the Universe…in unity with all.

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

#10 – Detachment

Detachment in meditation means a turning away from your own life situation.  It is detachment from self-pre-occupation and self-indulgence.  Detachment means not using other people for our own events.  Detachment is liberation from the anxiety we have about our own survival of ourselves.  This detachment from self-centeredness liberates us for love.  We are no longer dominated by our quest for survival.

Detachment requires a trust in God, in others and the willingness to let go; to give up controlling and to just be.

In meditation, we simply say our mantra.  We learn to trust and learn to be.  It is a celebration of being – a shared joy in receiving life as a gift; kissing the joy as it flies by and not possessing or controlling it.

Meditation leads us to centered-ness.  It is the still point, and what you learn is that there is only one center – the center of all centers, the profound unity of being.  It is a commitment to be sufficiently detached from self-conscious pre-occupation and to commit time each day to meditation.

God is love.  Jesus said, “Love one another.” By letting go, we have an open-ness to being.  In that we learn to love.

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

# 9 – Thought, Feeling Love

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

Notes compiled By Mary Sargent

Each one of us can know that the love of Jesus – his power and purifying energy is released and working in our hearts.  When we think of our inner lives, we think of emotion.  Thinking and feeling lead us to imagination, not to the reality of Christ’s presence in our hearts.

Spiritual life based on emotion leads us to religious intolerance.  Our goal is to be rooted in love.  Thought and feeling are essential elements on every pilgrimage, but we can pass beyond them into reality.  What we discover in meditation is that God is the only foundation we can build on.  In Him alone can we find the courage to see
what we need to see and travel the road we must travel.  In Him alone can we find the strength to take up our cross.

If the pilgrimage is to bring us to fulfillment, we need the discipline of meditation.  Do not think about God or analyze our feelings about Him.  We say our mantra with faith in the presence of absolute love.  In meditation, our thoughts and emotions are purified by his forgiveness; his love.  This purity frees us for the great task of brotherly love – to leads others to this purity of consciousness and clarity of vision. There is nothing greater we can do for our neighbor.

Never forget the discipline of The Way:  Say our mantra; return to meditation with love.   Listen to Saint Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews:  “Now Christ has come.  His priesthood is not belonging to created world.  His blood has secured eternal deliverance in his spiritual, eternal sacrifice.”  Meditation is the entry into that reality.

# 8 – Benedictine Tradition

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

Notes compiled By Mary Sargent

Meditation is to the spirit what breathing is to the body. It is not easy to understand how simple meditation is.  We live in a complex society where it is difficult to believe that anything simple, clear and straight forward could be very important or effective.

As Benedictine monks, we are the inheritors of a long, rich, spiritual tradition.  It has been passed on and survived for hundreds of years despite attacks, misunderstandings and simple neglect.

Once something has been written down, it has power to survive on its own.  Tradition cannot survive merely by being talked about or written down.  Only when men and women enter into the tradition can we re-create the tradition in every generation.  Then it becomes a living tradition, and in that moment of discovery, the tradition possesses the power to enlighten, guide and warm.

How do we enter into that tradition?  We let go of our own ideas about meditation, God, the spiritual paths, all concepts and images in our minds.  We learn to be still; to be silent.  Each of us can learn if we have the courage.

In the silence, we learn to be who we are now.  Meditation is simply becoming one with the basic energy of the universe.  It is realizing that you don’t have to make this harmony happen.  It already is.

We simply have to be so we can know.  Be, so that we can truly know what is.  We are released by opening our hearts and minds.  This energy then transforms us from within.  Travel through illusion, through the wall of ego into infinite space and freedom in God.

Remember to sit upright; sit still.  Next, close your eyes and gently relax your face.  Then say your mantra interiorly and silently.  That is all you have to do.  Let go.  Learn to listen to the sound of your mantra from the beginning until the end of your meditation.

# 7 – Vision of Unity

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

Notes compiled By Mary Sargent

The Christian vision is a vision of unity.  Early Christians understood from Jesus that all people are united with Jesus.  It is not an abstract vision.  It is a conscious vision of unity and harmony.

As Christians, we are called to respond to what is.  It is a call of deep personal joy.  Each one of us is brought to fulfillment.  It is only in this divine cosmic union that we finally become ourselves.

The great task which is given to each of us is to grow up; to find ourselves beyond ourselves and in union with all.  We learn to see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears, and love with our own hearts.  Going beyond all dividedness, we transcend barriers that separate us from other and from God.

We are summons to a fundamental simplicity – to learn to be; to be in love; to be in trust; to be in total openness of heart to what is.  To be rooted in what is, we all need
to be humble.  We must renounce power and force, trusting in the power of Christ – the power of pure love.  The power to truly know ourselves, to love ourselves, to know others, to love others;  to be known and to be loved.  This power is to be found in our own hearts. The only condition is to seek it above all things- beyond all compromise, timidity and fear.

Will we be real?  Will we respond to what is, or stay asleep in a world of fear and illusion?  The call is to be the unique, loveable person God has created us to be; wholly real, completely free with liberty of spirit.