Blue Mountain Articles

The Goal of Meditation

Last Christmastime I sat in a
 café inside a fashionable department store, watching the shoppers 
 come and go. Most of them, I thought, had not come to buy things they already wanted. It was as if they had come looking for something to want – something that might fill a nameless need, even if only for a moment. Above the glittering displays a poster bearing the name of the mall promised proudly, “The Fantasy Is Real.”


To me, it is a comment on the nobility of human nature that even in the midst of such a smorgasbord of things and activities and sensations, we still feel a need for something real. For although modern civilization has made remarkable progress in many fields, it has neglected others that are vital for well-being. “Progress is a good thing,” said Ogden Nash, “but it has been going on too long.” Material progress does improve well-being up to a point; but beyond that point, instead of lifting us upward, it only leads us around in circles. Making things, buying and selling them, piling them up, repairing them, then 
trying to figure out how to dispose of them: for sensitive people, boredom 
with the carnival cycle began some time ago. 


Wealth, possessions, power, and pleasure have never brought lasting satisfaction to any human being. Our needs go too deep to be satisfied by anything that comes and goes. 


Today, I think, millions of people find themselves at a crossroads, forced to ask penetrating questions that in simpler times were the province only of philosophers: What is life for? Why am I here? Is there more to me than this body? Is happiness a foolish dream; can it actually be found 
without closing my eyes to what I see? New Age philosophies, and new sciences too, search for answers. But do we need new answers to enter a new age? 


Timeless truths

I have spoken at times of a light in the soul, a light that is uncreated and uncreatable . . . to the extent that we can deny ourselves and turn away from created things, we shall find our unity and blessing in that little spark in the soul, which neither space nor time touches.
–Meister Eckhart

These words, addressed to ordinary people in a quiet German-speaking town almost seven hundred years ago, testify to a discovery about the nature of the human spirit as revolutionary as Einstein’s theories about the nature of the universe. If truly understood, that discovery would transform the world we live in at least as radically as Einstein’s theories changed the world of science. 


Meister or “Master” Eckhart – the title attests to his scholarship, but seems to fit even better his spiritual authority – lived almost exactly at the same time and for the same span as Dante, and both seem born to those lofty regions of the spirit that do not belong to any particular culture, religion, or age but are universal. Yet, also like Dante, Eckhart expressed perfectly something essential about his times. The end of the thirteenth century was a period of intense turmoil in Europe, and the Rhine valley, where Eckhart was born, was the breeding ground of various popular religious societies which alarmed conventional Christians. Yet a God who could be known personally and a path by which to reach him were what an increasing number of people yearned for, and Eckhart’s passionate sermons, straining to convey the divine in the words of the street and marketplace, became immensely popular. 


And what did he teach? Essentially, four principles that would later be called the Perennial Philosophy, because they have been taught from age to age in culture after culture:


First, there is a “light in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable”: unconditioned, universal, deathless; in religious language, a divine core of personality which cannot be separated from God. As St. Catherine of Genoa put it, “My me is God: nor do I know my selfhood except in God.” In Indian mysticism this divine core is called simply Atman, “the Self.”


Second, this divine essence can be realized. It is not an abstraction, and it need not – Eckhart would say must not – remain hidden under the covering of our everyday personality. It can and should be discovered, so that its presence becomes a reality in daily life.


Third, this discovery is life’s real and highest goal. Our supreme purpose in life is not to make a fortune, nor to pursue pleasure, nor to write our name on history, but to discover this spark of the divine that is in our hearts.


Last, when we realize this goal, we discover simultaneously that the divinity within ourselves is one and the same in all – all individuals, all creatures, all of life.


Words can certainly be ambiguous with ideas such as these, and “mysticism” is no exception. In my teaching, a mystic is one who not only espouses these principles of the Perennial Philosophy but lives them, whose every action reflects the wisdom and selfless love that are the hallmark of one who has made this supreme discovery. Such a person has made the divine a reality in every moment of life, and that reality shines through whatever he or she may do or say – and that is the real test. It is not occult fancies or visions or esoteric discourses that mark the mystic, but an unbroken awareness of the presence of God in all creatures. The signs are clear: unfailing compassion, fearlessness, equanimity, and the unshakable knowledge, based on direct, personal experience, that all the treasures and pleasures of this world together are worth nothing if one has not found the uncreated light at the center of the soul.


These are demanding criteria, and few people in the history of the world can be said to have met them. I often refer to these men and women collectively as “the great mystics,” not to obscure their differences, but to emphasize this tremendous undercurrent of the spirit that keeps resurfacing from age to age to remind us of our real legacy as human beings.


On this legacy the mystics are unanimous. Nothing can change that original goodness. Whatever mistakes we have made in the past, whatever problems we may have in the present, in every one of us this “uncreated spark in the soul” remains untouched, ever pure, ever perfect. Even if we try with all our might to douse or hide it, it is always ready to set our personality ablaze with light.


Our original goodness


Early in the third century, a Greek Father of the Church, Origen, referred to this core of goodness as both a spark and a divine seed – a seed that is sown deep in consciousness by the very fact of our being human. “Even though it is covered up,” Origen explains,
because it is God that has sowed this seed in us, pressed it in, begotten it, it cannot be extirpated or die out; it glows and sparkles, burning and giving light, and always it moves upward toward God.


Eckhart seized the metaphor and dared take it to the full limits it implies:


The seed of God is in us. Given 
an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is, and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God.


Nothing is required but diligent gardening to bring into existence the God-tree: a life that proclaims the original goodness in all creation.


The implications are far-reaching. Rightly understood, they can lift the most oppressive burden of guilt, restore any loss of self-esteem. If goodness is our real core, goodness that can be hidden but never taken away, then goodness is not something we have to get. We do not have to figure out how to make ourselves good; all we need do is remove what covers the goodness that is already there.


Having a core of goodness does not prevent the rest of personality from occasionally being a monumental nuisance. But the very concept of original goodness can transform our lives. It does not deny what traditional religion calls sin; it simply reminds us that before original sin was original innocence. That is our real nature. Everything else – all our habits, our conditioning, our past mistakes – is a mask. A mask can hide a face completely; like that frightful iron contraption in Dumas’s novel, it can be excruciating to wear and nearly impossible to remove. But the very nature of a mask is that it can be removed. This is the promise and the purpose of all spiritual disciplines: to take off the mask that hides our real face.


A deep need in a troubled age


Among the disturbing trends of our age is the tendency to identify the human being as nothing more than a biochemical entity and then argue, “There is no such thing as spirit. How can the center of personality be something ‘that time and space cannot touch’?”


Yet even this skepticism is not new; in a sense, it is nothing more than the modern echo of an age-old doubt. As Hans Denk, a German mystic of the sixteenth century, exclaimed to God, “Men flee from thee and say they cannot find thee. They turn their backs and say they cannot see thee. They stop their ears and say they cannot hear thee.”


Centuries before, Eckhart had urged:


You need not seek God here or there: he is no farther off than the door of the heart. There he stands and waits and waits until he finds you ready to open and let him in. You need not call him from a distance; to wait until you open for him is harder for him than for you. He needs you a thousand times more than you can need him. Your opening and his entering are but one moment.


But from time to time mysticism does flourish, often in response to some deep need in a troubled age. The late Middle Ages must have been such a period in Western Christendom, for it fostered one of the most remarkable flowerings of the Perennial Philosophy the world has known. The amazing popularity of Eckhart’s sermons, delivered with the ardor and humanity of a Saint Francis but about as accessible to the average person as a talk on quantum mechanics, is just one piece of the evidence. From roughly 1200 to 1400, from Saint Francis himself to Thomas à Kempis, there arose not only some two dozen of Christianity’s greatest mystics but also a wave of popular response among the common people.


What has this to do with us in the twenty-first century? A great deal, I think. The fourteenth century was a time of turbulence not unlike that of our own age – “a distant mirror,” to use the historian Barbara Tuchman’s phrase. The popular appeal of a man like Eckhart, a quiet friar who did no more to rouse a following than preach in church about things the intellect can scarcely grasp, is evidence that ordinary people do need and respond to the idea of a spark of the divine in their own soul. 


Seeing through the game


In almost every country and every age, there are a few men and women who see through the game of personal satisfaction and ask themselves, “Is this all? I want something much bigger to live for, something much loftier to desire.” Nothing transient can appease this hunger. It touches something very deep in us, caught as we are in our predicament as human beings: partly physical, partly spiritual, trying to feel at home in the world into which we have been born.


Jewish mysticism puts this idea into haunting imagery. Shekinah, the Presence of God, is dispersed throughout creation in every creature, like sparks scattered from the pure flame of spirit that is the Lord. And each spark, seemingly alone in the darkness of blind matter, wanders this world in exile, seeking to return to its divine source.


This scattering brings what the Sanskrit language calls ahamkara: literally, “I-maker,” the sense of being “an island unto oneself” – something separate from the rest of life, with unique needs and peremptory claims. In the end, it is this driving sense of separateness – 
I, I, I; my needs, my wants, apart from all the rest of life – that is responsible for all the wars in history, all the violence, all the exploitation of other human beings, and even the exploitation of the planet that threatens our future today.


Yet underneath that separateness, what we seek is very natural – very simple, basic things, common to all. We want to love and to be loved. We want happiness and fulfillment, though we may have differing ideas of what that means. We want a place in life, a way of belonging, a sense of purpose, the achievement of worthy goals – whatever it takes; otherwise life is an empty show. 


These are all natural desires, and no amount of experience can erase them from our hearts. Why? Because these are the demands of Eckhart’s “little spark” of the spirit, and that spark is real and inalienable: “nearer to us than our very body,” as the Sufis say, “dearer than our very life.”


What happens is that we interpret these yearnings wrongly. They are messages from the spirit which have somehow got scrambled by the world of matter, and we lack the decoder by which to understand. That scrambling is what Hindu mysticism calls maya: the wishful, willful illusion that the thirst in our hearts is physical and can somehow be slaked by physical experience. We wander searching for the right things in the wrong places, and life itself seems to delight in frustrating us. What we seek is always just around the corner...and when we reach the corner, it has ducked out of sight down the block. 


But there comes a time when the corners no longer beckon – we know they only hide blind alleys. 


In the end, then, life itself turns us inward – “away from created things,” as Eckhart says, to “find our unity and blessing in that little spark in the soul.” 


Finding heaven on earth


The purpose of all valid spiritual disciplines, whatever the religion from which they spring, is to enable us to return to this native state of being – not after death but here and now, in an unbroken awareness of the divinity within us and throughout creation. Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language, and the practices they follow lead to the same goal.


Whatever our religious beliefs – or even if formalized religion is anathema – it is possible for every one of us to uncover the core of goodness of which Eckhart speaks. It has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with practice. In other words, what we say we believe in is not so important; what matters is what we actually do – and, even more, what we actually are. “As we think in our hearts, so we are.” Goodness is in us; our job is simply to get deep into our consciousness and begin removing what stands in the way.


Doing this, however, is no small task. I would go to the extent of saying that there is no way to accomplish this today except through the systematic practice of meditation.


How can I make such a sweeping statement? Because I mean something very particular and practical by the word “meditation.” Although it is a spiritual discipline, meditation stands above the differences that define the world’s great religions. Meditation is not dogma or doctrine or metaphysics; it is a powerful tool. Just as everyone can use a shovel, everyone can use meditation to dig into consciousness and change it 
to conform with her highest ideals.


“There is no greater valor nor no sterner fight,” attests Eckhart. As always, Eckhart is terse and to the point: because “he who would be what he ought to be must stop being what he is.” That is the challenge of the spiritual life – and that challenge is part of its appeal. It is precisely because the quest to realize God is so difficult that those who are really daring – and there are many in this country – should be eager to take it up. In fact, the mystics say, all the daring and aggressiveness in human nature are given to us for one supreme evolutionary purpose: to remove what covers our original goodness so that we can reveal more and more of the divine in our own lives.