Cravings

August 13, 2002

You crave something, and it is very specific to you. I do not know what it is, you will have to explore. This exploration is an essential part of developing the interconnectedness of your inner and outer life, your personal yoga.

Let us consider some cravings that are more general, and you can work from there to what is individual to you. Think about the words, peace, harmony, love. Spend a minute with each word. Then think about anything you crave, especially a vice, a habit, or a strong desire you have. Maybe you want to drink wine or smoke pot and listen to music. What does that do for you? What does that evoke in your body, in your nerves, in your heart? Notice how what you are going for is some combination of harmony and peace and love.

Meditation is giving yourself what you crave. Just give it to yourself. If you crave harmony that much, then give it to yourself, soak in it, drink it in. Give yourself so much that you have extra to give away.

You can soak in harmony for half an hour in the morning, and then go through your day dripping with harmony. And if needs be, you can have the word, harmony, going like a soundtrack in your heart all day long. This is not difficult.

What IS difficult is how over the top this feels. It is just too outrageously good, too much of an indulgence. There is a taboo against giving yourself what you really need. That taboo is the real reason more people do not meditate. And if you think breaking such a taboo is easy, check it out. In practice, there is a real barrier there. The barrier is made of flimsy paper, or maybe cellophane. It is nothing substantial. But it feels like something when you break through it the first time.

Pray Without Praying

So you could have the words, peace, harmony, love, going as a prayer. Prayer does not necessarily mean religious prayer. Many people have been poisoned against organized religion for one reason or another. This does not mean that in their hearts they are not spiritual. No one, no group, no corporation, owns the path to the world within.

July 30, 2002

Pray Without Ceasing

The last few days, talking to friends and meditation students, the subject of continual prayer has come up again and again. So I think I need to write about it. In the ancient literature, continual prayer is called, The Prayer of the Heart, because after saying a prayer over and over, after awhile - a few days or a week, it descends into your heart, and keeps going of itself. Your heartbeat and the prayer just pulse along, and you witness it with wonder and appreciation. Heartbeat, the ebb and flow of the breath, and a prayer - each in its own way an aspect of how life is keeping you alive.

You should know this, as a resource, because you never know when you are going to need it. I get the feeling that there comes a time in eoch everyone's life when they need to know how to live inside a prayer. Not just say prayer, but get it going inside so that it repeats itself continually all day, every day.

All prayer is ultimately turning your attention toward the source of your life. Living beings have a natural attraction toward what gives them sustenance. Not just our daily bread, but also on every level. Otherwise, we would all pray and be devoted to bakers. Tropisms are natural motions, like when flowers turn toward the sun and put out roots in the direction of water. So you dan't need to make yourself want to pray, or make yourself like a particular prayer. Just let yourself feel how desperate you are, for anything. Desperate for love, peace, harmony, a road out of here, anything.

The world religions are full of great prayers, and you can adapt your own. One year, from 1978 through 1979, I lived with the prayer, just one word, Christ. Actually it was two words, Christ light. That is just what occurred to me. There is a small pause inbetween the words. I would say Christ on one heartbeat, and Light on the next heartbeat. I came to that prayer, or it came to me, in the months after my father died. I was feeling extremely marginal, a walker between the worlds of shadow and light, as I grieved over him. One day, meditating, I realized that I had a deep craving to feel the light of Christ permeating my heart. And so it began. Looking back, it seems that before I started praying without ceasing, I was like one of those house plants you sometimes see, barely alive, because it is not getting enough sunlight and water. After I began to live with the prayer, I was like a plant that was bathed in sunlight, with plenty of water and good soil.

In another year, I lived with a prayer that invokes the Holy Spirit as flame. It is related to the ancient prayer, Come, Holy Spirit, enkindle in our hearts the Flame of Thy Love. The prayer I used was in Sanksrit, an amazingly euphonious language with great reverb on subtle levels.

During the late 80's, I lived with the Serenity Prayer for about 7 months. The background, in case you are interested, was that I had just finished my Ph.D. and was exhausted. I was in Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii, and I didn't feel like going home to California. I had an old Jeep, a faceplate, fins and a fishing pole, but no money. I ate a lot of fish, and banannas grow all over. I lived outdoors, way out in totally isolated places where you drive across miles of black lava to the ocean. And continually, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdow to know the difference.

Because this is such a long prayer, and a logical one, it took about two weeks before the prayer was repeating itself in my heart continually.

You have the whole world of prayer to use as a resource, there is likely one that will appeal to your heart.

The names of God in any language tend to be perfect for the prayer of the heart. Make a project of learning many different names of God. Just in standard generic American Christianity, as far as I can tell, there is Jehovah, Yahveh, Elohim, different words that are used in various parts of the Bible. There is Jesus and Christ. In Islam, there is Allah, one of the most beautiful and euphonious words in any language. Sanskrit is full of words of astounding beauty - Narayana, Brahma, Shiva, Krisha.

With prayer, I recommend getting into what I call infinite leisure. That means once you begin, once you utter the first syllable of the first word of the prayer, then you are on your way. There is no hurry to speed up the pronunciation, no hurry to get through it and on to the next, no need for speed. The pauses between words actually become the most delicious part of the prayer, because the word or phrase sets you up, and in the silence you can feel your heart beating, your breath flowing with the feeling tone of the prayer. Just the silent current of the feeling. Then spontaneously, the next word of the prayer arises in you, and you enjoy it.

Last night, a friend called, and his father is dying. He mentioned that he feels attracted to the Gayatri, a very old prayer in Sanskrit. Om bhur bhuvah swah Tat savitur varenyam Bhargo devasya dheemahi Dhiyo yo nah prachodayat. When I asked him about it, he said that he had a hunch that he needed to take refuge in this prayer, but had not realized that you can just get it going continually within yourself. I said, yes you can, and you'll find you can function very well. The only thing you really give up are all those random, chattering thoughts that otherwise occupy your brain. And, by the way, do not say the prayer in such a way as to block any thoughts. If you do so, the prayer will take on the attitude of oppression and repression. That does not have the same effect as delighting in a prayer because you love it, and letting whatever thoughts come, come.

Can You Do Two Things at Once?

If you can walk and chew gum at the same time, then you can walk and pray at the same time, or work and pray, or drive and pray. As you get used to the prayer of the heart, you may find that you are functioning better, and that the prayer is actually a support for concentration.

Yeah, But Isn't Religion Just for Terrorists?

All over the world, billions of people pray, often using the names of God, every day, and live in peace. Seek to live in love. It is not fair that a few terrorists lay claim to these words.

It is true that religion has always been the best cover for people of hatred to operate behind. It is just so tempting, all that money, power, and justification. What assassin could resist such a convenient front organization?

July 8, 2002

Secret Vices

Today someone asked me a question about their deepest cravings, and how to feel them in meditation. This reminded me of something I wrote in Meditation Made Easy.

Everyone has some secret desires they consider sinful according to some scheme of things. Something that feels like a vice. You may have had experiences being wild at concerts, or drinking and dancing all night. Times when you felt really good being bad.

Every vice has a secret to teach us. The secret is in the desire for a certain quality of experience: intensity, freedom, wildness, vivid colors, aliveness, total joy, free-flowing sexuality, innocence, a heightening of all senses, universal love, lack of inhibition. These are all good qualities. There is much to be said for each. As a matter of fact, they are much too important to be left to chance, or to imported illegal substances, or complicated arrangements of people. Using substances to experience these qualities can physically destroy you. Face up to it, drugs are obsolete.

Meditation is for passions and cravings so deep they can’t be fulfilled by ordinary experience. All of us have desires that can’t be fulfilled — we want to live forever, be perfectly thin or muscular, have unlimited money, be on vacation eternally, have all the love in the world. In meditation you ride these cravings and they take you into something, some level of life where the joy of movement is itself enough delight; where it is better to be in movement, playing with life, at peace inside yourself, than it is to have arrived at any goal.

The ancient word meditarai, from which meditation is derived, speaks of this connection of mindfulness, rhythm, and the harmony that heals. This means meditation is an interior kind of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll. The sex is the passionate current of desire. It’s subtle, but sexy. Relaxation is very sexy, and most people get turned on when they are deeply relaxed. The drugs part is the body’s own internal pharmacy as it heals itself, rejuvenates itself, and juices up the senses and nerves for pleasure. Dozens of scientific studies have shown dramatic drops in the stress chemicals and increases in the natural opiates during meditation. The rock n roll is the inner music, the pulsation of the heart beat and breath. The harmony can be a measure of music, a measured sound such as a mantra, or exactly the right song played at the right moment to satisfy the soul. The meditation traditions of the world have explored ways of paying attention to flow, pulsation, and inner songs so that you never tire of them, but actually get more and more interested.

Meditation is taking the same circuits you use when you are having a good time, and then underwhelming yourself. We should be bored, but we aren’t. It is a delicious underloading of the senses and something very magical happens. When you do this, when you let yourself be shaped by these moments, your whole body and heart and mind realign with life. Believe it or not, this is what the sacred traditions have been saying for thousands of years.

The ecstatic longing to be transported is the same whether we are at a rock concert, the opera, watching our favorite television show or in a totally silent meditation room. The main difference is that in meditation you follow the impulses of pleasure beyond themselves into the silence and you rest there. In meditation you learn to respond more and more to less and less, so that the more quiet the music, the more intensely you feel it. In meditation even the simple action of breathing or listening to the rhythm of the vowel sounds becomes intensely pleasurable.

Meditation is not taking something away or denying ourselves something. Meditation is adding something: the willingness to follow the music into the silence; to follow the beat into the space between beats; to follow the rhythm of breath into the great interior dance.