Not long ago, a young forty-foot humpback whale on his way to Alaska became enticed by the lure of San Francisco. He veered off course into the bay, and once inside, instead of deciding he had made a wrong turn and retracing his wake, he chose to push on to Sacramento. By the time I learned of his plight, he had worked his way into fresh waters and got trapped in the shallows of the Sacramento River Delta – a most uncongenial environment for any salt-water creature, but practically a bathtub for one used to thousands of miles of open sea.

Humphrey, as reporters dubbed him, immediately became a media sensation. Every day, news services carried updates on his predicament around the world, while hundreds of whale-lovers flocked to San Francisco to help the Coast Guard try to rescue him. But Humphrey just kept swimming up blind alleys.

Finally someone hit on the idea of luring him back to the sea by the call of recorded whale songs. Humphrey began leaping joyfully, splashing great sheets of water to the delight of spectators, and churned toward the open ocean at a good thirty miles an hour. Traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge backed up in both directions as fans got out of their cars to crowd at the rails and cheer. They paid handsome fines, but as one woman told reporters, “It was worth every penny.”

Something in all of us cheers when a captive creature breaks free. We are born for freedom, even if we don’t understand what that means or how to find it. Somehow we sense that we are not meant to spend our lives in the shallows of pleasure and profit. We are made for vast spaces, to reach beyond boundaries until, as an English mystic put it, we are “clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.” We are born with intimations of a potential much, much grander than anything we can dream of in the day-to-day world.

A higher vantage

While Humphrey’s story was unfolding in the daily news, we human viewers had the advantage of a higher dimension. We could look at maps, watch aerial views on TV, and see the scene whole: the narrow confines of the river delta, the broader bay with its narrow passage in and out, the vast expanse of ocean that Humphrey needed to find. To us it seemed so simple what to do.

But Humphrey had no access to that higher view. All he could have known was that an interesting side trip had turned into a trap. It’s easy to imagine how he must have felt as he found himself alone and boxed in, with no sense of where to turn for help in a situation he could not understand.

I spent years of my early life in what seemed a very similar predicament. At that time I had not the slightest interest in the spiritual life. My days were full with a job I loved, teaching English literature at a great university in India. I had begun to make a reputation as a writer; I had friends with whom to enjoy music and tennis and the quiet pleasures of good company; everything I wanted was flowing into my hands. It was a very satisfying situation. If I had had time to think about it, I would have assured you I was happy.

Instead, I found increasingly that on some other level – not physical, not emotional, but within my heart – I felt starved for meaning. Old, old questions began to come unbidden at wakeful hours of the night: Why am I here? What is life for? What happens when I die?

Nothing in my education had prepared me for such questions. Nothing I read could answer them for me. Only when I discovered meditation could I find the higher vantage I needed to see life whole – and that discovery opened the door to a way of life so much more fulfilling that my days before seem like a dream.

Meditation on a passage

The method of meditation I developed became known as “passage meditation” because it consists in slow, sustained attention on the words of inspired ­passages that embody ideals for a higher mode of living. The Prayer of St. Francis is a perfect example of such a passage: positive, practical, and inspiring, it expresses ideals that are universal – ideals that appeal regardless of culture, tradition, or creed.

This method has two characteristics. The first is training attention: learning to focus your mind completely where you choose. This is the essence of genius, but it is not something one must be born with; it is a skill anyone can learn. Nothing is more practical. When you can direct attention wherever you like, you can do unpleasant jobs with enthusiasm, listen without agitation to criticism when necessary, and stay calm, kind, and clear-headed in a crisis.

Once this kind of sustained concentration becomes natural, it begins to draw together the scattered threads of what one thinks, feels, says, and does. When you do something with a focused mind, you are completely present – not partly ruminating on the past, partly worried about the future, and currently distracted, as is so common in the rush of modern life. In meditation, when concentration is complete, conflicts resolve, bringing about the complete integration of personality.

The second aspect of passage meditation derives from the passages themselves – or, rather, from the power that comes from sustained concentration when the words open their doors and release their meaning. I can find no better way to put it. The experience is not intellectual, and I am not talking about dictionary definitions; the truths the passages express simply become part of your life, assimilated into your character and consciousness just as the nutrients in food become part of your body.

If you are meditating on the words of St. Francis of Assisi, for example – “grant that I may not so much seek to be loved as to love” – then that is how you begin to live. Repeated experiences like this bring a sea change in personality, a complete transformation of character, conduct, and consciousness. In the simplest possible language, this is the secret of meditation: we become what we meditate on.

I want to reassure you that none of this happens unless you desire it. No unwanted changes are likely to take place. All that happens is that the loftier desires of the heart grow stronger and stronger when nurtured by the wisdom in these words. “Deep calls unto deep”: that is the essence of passage meditation.

The world within

When concentration in meditation is complete, the words of the passage fill one’s consciousness, just as the impressions of the senses do during the day.

Teresa of Avila calls this entering an “interior castle.” Wonderful things await us there, she says, but we never bother to look in. We may not even know we have a castle; we spend our lives hanging out in the courtyard, enjoying the brief hours of sun, suffering when it rains.

The simile is perfect. Yet when I was first learning to meditate, I often felt just the opposite too, as if I had been spending my life cramped indoors and just discovered the real world.

Imagine living in one little room all your life! You would forget what the outdoors was like. Gradually you would come to believe there is no such thing; only your room is real. That’s why I say I felt like Humphrey escaping into the sea. Early every morning, while the rest of the world slept, I would open the door of consciousness in meditation, slip inside, and set about homesteading the world within.

World mysticism

Always a reader, I turned to books to get my bearings in this inner realm. Instead of philosophy and psychology, however, I turned to the world’s mystics – men and women like Mahatma Gandhi, Francis of Assisi, and Teresa of Avila, who had undertaken this journey and written not from theory or speculation, but from personal experience.

I read widely, drawing no distinction between East and West; I cared only whether the testimonies were authentic. I discovered the Upanishads, and through them my own Indian heritage; Patanjali’s classic text on meditation, the Yoga Sutras, helped greatly in providing the framework my intellectual training required. I read the Catholic mystics, the Buddhist scriptures, the passionate poetry of the Sufis. I discovered that religion has nothing to do with dogma, theology, or anything else that divides; religion is realization: making the truths of the world’s great scriptures a reality in daily life.

Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy, with its selection of personal testimonies from mystics of all religions, provided my first glimpse that the voyage I had embarked on was not unique but universal. Throughout history, I discovered, men and women of all faiths and backgrounds had stumbled onto a hidden path that led back to this same heartland of the spirit within.

Those paths varied according to creed and culture, but the journey was the same, and all the paths converged on the same land. “The mystics must come from the same country,” Evelyn Underhill wrote, “for they all speak the same language.” That was what Huxley meant by a “perennial philosophy”: the experiential discovery that underlying the world of change lies a changeless reality that can be realized by any man or woman willing to make the effort.

In this way I discovered other voices, in beautiful passages for meditation from every major spiritual tradition. Often they were the voices of monastics, but I found a few who, like me, had chosen not to withdraw into monasteries but to seek a higher reality right in the midst of everyday affairs. I had found a way to bring the ancient art of meditation out of the cloister into daily life.

Daily living

One of the first discoveries I made when setting out on this journey was that meditation was a kind of bridge between this world within and the everyday world I dealt with during the day. I found a deep connection between the wisdom in those passages and the way I conducted myself at home and work. It was a thrilling discovery. Certain skills, such as slowing down and focusing on one thing at a time, deepened my concentration during meditation, and in turn that brought depth to whatever I did during the rest of the day. The passages were lifelines, guiding me to the source of wisdom deep within and then guiding me back into daily life.

Once I made this connection, I began to work on my life as systematically as a professional athlete. I am a very ordinary person; I had no difficulty finding weaknesses that needed correction.

To take just one illustration, I had a few habits that could charitably be called self-centered. In fact, they were disrupting my life. And I had never been able to shake them off. For one thing, I liked to think they weren’t really all that bad.

As the words I was meditating on took root in my consciousness, however, they gradually ran deeper than those habits. Then I could look up and see my precious foibles were no more than weeds preventing some beautiful qualities from blossoming. And that brought the will to pull them out. Some even withered away of their own accord, simply because they were no longer getting nourished by my attention. Meditation on passages was unifying my life.

All this time I was continuing a very full life at the university, with a heavy load of classes accompanied by administrative duties and a good deal of time given over to students every evening. Making time for meditation was a challenge, but I was benefitting from it so much I made it my first priority. I gave myself one simple rule: “Put meditation first.”

Invitation to a journey

The media lost interest in Humphrey once he escaped. But I like to imagine how it must have felt to be free at last, charging out under the Golden Gate Bridge deaf to the cheers of earthbound creatures above him, into the open sea where he belonged.

There’s not much to the continental shelf in northern California, and whales swim fast. Within a few minutes Humphrey would have been in mile-deep waters again, with half a planet of open ocean to roam in as he pleased.

Then, free to go wherever he chose, he must instead have felt a silent command: “North. Go north. Go home.” No details, no map, no companions, no guide, just a direction and a desire in response to an overriding imperative from within: go home.

It is very much like that on the journey of meditation too. Once you turn inward, the words of the passages urge you forward in response to a summons from the very depths of the heart.

This need to return to the source of our being is nothing less than an evolutionary imperative – the drive to realize our full human potential. As Meister Eckhart says, “Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly Nature seeks and hunts and tries to ferret out the track in which God may be found.” Something deep within us must find expression beyond the plane of pleasure and profit; that is our glory as human beings.

We need a higher dimension than physical existence to understand our need to find a place in the world. Beyond the familiar plane of biological and emotional needs lies a third dimension of spiritual needs that cannot be denied: the need for meaning, a purpose for living, a place in the fabric of life where we belong.

Because this dimension is part of our very being, we live inescapably in two worlds, the material and the spiritual. To live fully means being at home in both these realms, and that requires a way to bring the deep wisdom of the heart into daily life.

There are many reasons today why one might choose to meditate – health, concentration, reduced anxiety, deeper relationships, security, serenity, the creative resources for making a lasting contribution. Meditation can help you attain all these goals – or, rather, it provides the path; you will need to do the traveling yourself.

But the path leads much, much farther – as far as you want to go. It opens onto a journey that is literally without end, since its goal is only the beginning of a fully human life.

The journey holds challenges enough for the most daring adventurer, wonders and treasures that would make Marco Polo’s accounts of Cathay trivial by comparison. It is, without exaggeration, the adventure of a lifetime. If challenges appeal to you and meaning and purpose are what you seek, I warmly invite you to join me. •