October 08, 2012   creation , Edward Viljoen , environment , garden , how can I survive , Nature , sitting still , the power of meditation , What am I inside , What do I believe , world within

The Power of Meditation: How Sitting Still Reveals A World Within

I love the fall for its light and color and sense of change.  I love being outside and inside during the fall.  I love watching the world a...

I love the fall for its light and color and sense of change.  I love being outside and inside during the fall.  I love watching the world and learning from life.  Sometimes I just sit in my garden and watch the plants approaching their winter.

If I sit long enough and look and listen I notice a voice inside saying “Oh my goodness, the bounty of creation, I’m made up of the same stuff. The beauty that is all around me in this county, I’m made up of the same stuff”.
This thought lingers in me through a whole day, and cause me to visit thoughts such as “I’m more than a separate creature in the world fighting nature to get ahead. I’m actually interacting, interfacing, moving with creation in a beautiful dance.”

It’s so beautiful to stumble on this thinking that I have made a practice of taking time, and built a pattern, a regular practice of doing so, of sitting still and listening and looking.

Take time regularly in nature and be by yourself, is my advice, to myself.

Sometimes the closest I can get to nature is to sit in my garden.

So there I sit for thirty minutes and my goodness, in just sitting there for thirty minutes alone with my inner world, I feel like I have never been in that particular garden before and never will again. I slowly, sometimes suddenly, begin to realize that I am alive in a world that is teaming with life, strange and beautiful life, and I begin to contemplate the power of the universe that is greater than I am and to which I am connected.

Taking time to be still lets me also notice things like:

• “What am I thinking?
• What is the tendency of my thought?
• When I am just being by myself, and what is this thinker inside me?
• When I take it all together and I add it all up, all my tendencies and my thoughts, my fears, that which I am aware of and maybe the stuff I’m not even conscious of, what does it tell me about me?
• What do I believe?
• What is the mood and flavor of everything that is in my inner world, what does it add up to?
• What kind of song, what kind of hymn is it in me?
• What am I inside?”

I'm not talking about noticing specific thoughts so much, although I do.  I am talking about noticing the whole profile of what I am inside, and that takes time to make friends with.

When I sit quietly in the garden, I just sit there.  I start to notice the thread of voices that are in me.  Do you know what I mean?  We all have got voices in us, characters.  But sometimes I am so busy doing things that I don’t notice there are all these voices.  So I take the time to sit still and make friends, become acquainted again, to say “Oh, I know that voice, that’s the voice of fear.  Oh, I know that voice, that is the voice of excitement. But that voice, I don’t know what that is.

As I start to sit and listen, I remember again the thread. There is a thread, there’s something beyond the voices that nature is reminding me of, that the peace is reminding me of. There’s a thread in me; there is something that is beyond all the voices in me, an inspiration, the place where intuition comes from.  I can’t find words for it, yet I know it when I’m looking / listening with it.

I find myself thinking, “How can I survive? How can I possibly know what to do and where to go if I have no access to this thread? How can I solve what to eat for breakfast if I don’t access that thread? How will I know how to solve the issues of the environment if I am not at all connected to the very intelligence that pulls the molecules of my body together?”

It occurs to me that it makes not a smidgen of difference in the world that I am connected to all of the intelligence of creation if I have no access to it consciously. If my mind is rushing around, I am fighting nature, and my own nature, what does it matter that I am in league with the Power? I can pray all the prayers I like, and think all the beautiful affirmations I like, and do everything I want, but if I am unconscious, unconscious to the very thing, the thread that connects me, that talks to me, then what is it all about?

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