Meditation comes

For several days I've been working on a project that took all my attention for most of every day. There was a day a few days ago when I sat down to meditate at 8:11, but meditation wouldn't come.

Meditation isn't something you do; meditation comes. Christian Pilastre

My head was full of facts (nice facts about chocolate, but facts nonetheless) and my body full of adrenalin. I was late starting, so I skipped the stretching and wiggling part of my routine and the rapid exhale cleansing breaths and went straight into long, slow deep breaths. Over and over my mind was drawn back to the same mental pathways I had been using all day. Once on those comfortable tracks, other thoughts of similar vibration flooded in.

Recognizing and accepting that my head needed extra time to empty, I patiently returned to breathing consciously and refocusing on the third eye and listening to the OM again again. It was well after the 11 minutes passed before I was able to move beyond the day's issues. I missed the pleasure of knowing and feeling that I was part of a worldwide phenomenon. There was a time when I'd have been hard on myself for missing the opportunity, but over the years I've learned not to judge myself - or others - so harshly. We're all evolving at our own pace.

Most of us are like seeds that grow a long time in darkness before pushing our heads up into the sun. Ganesh Baba

I probably sat for 20 minutes before I unwound sufficiently to be relaxed and receptive, which is the key to real meditation.

Then the vision of a world built on love returned. At first I saw people and animals interacting in a landscape of lovely soft hills, like the ones in South Wales. Around each person, each animal, and each feature of their surroundings was a swirling cloud of changing colors. The colors moved in and out of the center of whatever they are massed around, concentrating at the center, dissipating at the edges. As they shifted, they interacted with and affected the colors of nearby swirls.

Then my perspective rose, and I could see that the colors were also interacting on at a higher level of organization. Similar patterns on a larger scale emerged. Some areas were darker and some lighter, some larger and some smaller, but the fluid dynamic remained constant. Colors flowed into other colors intensifying and then fading, a shifting flux of twisting spherical swirls.

At the center of each swirl, no matter what its size, the color was so dense it looked black. I tried to let my relaxed attention focus on one of the points of darkness, but as I drew near, my field of vision was flooded with light.

Spiritual practice streamlines the turbulence of mind. Then the Sun of Suns, Absolute Consciousness, clearly reflects on the mirror of mind.  Ganesh Baba

I bathed in the inner sunshine for a time and then came back to the world slowly, with a smile.

The Cosmos is differentiating, diversifying and preparing itself, always, for the coming of life, the coming of consciousness. Ganesh Baba

Getting there from here

When I sit for 11 minutes at 9:11 every evening, I go through my crea routine (from page 61), set the stage quickly with a thought - tonight it was "getting there from here"- and then slide easily into taking ten or so of the longest, slowest, deepest breaths I can take - it's like getting into a pool and swimming. When I get to the end of an in- or out-breath, I usually pause and listen. Pranov, the OM, rushes in between breaths.

As I breath consciously and rest in the OM, I focus my attention on the area just in front of my forehead above my eyes and at the forefront of my brain, the third eye. Baba's name for the energy center there is the gyral center, which is very fitting, since, with sufficient attention and appropriate action, the spinning of the gyral center will take you into other dimensions.

The answer to how do we get from here, this collision-course existence, to there, a world built on love, comes slowly, over days of meditation.

We get there by doing what we're doing: millions of us are sitting together for 11 minutes a day envisioning the new reality, creating it consciously in the light of the highest good; and we get there by living as if a world based on love was already our collective reality. Instead of physical gifts, gives gifts of attention. Pay attention to where your attention is going. Notice the vibration.

When Ganesh Baba noticed that one of us was being insensitive to the general vibration, the ambiance, he would say, "Don't screw up the pitch!"

Don't screw up the pitch.

Money or Love

In today's world it seems pretty clear that the great myth we all believe in is the economy. As my father used to say, "The Mighty Dollar is our god." He was right when he said it in the 1950's and he'd be even more right now. The bottom line is indeed the bottom line.

What if the bottom line was love? What if love was the main myth, the most valued, the way goods are passed?

Relationship would be more important than acquisition. Love would be our currency.

What we pay attention to grows. - Ganesh Baba

The first definition in the dictionary for the word currency is "the metal or paper medium of exchange that is presently used"- money - but it is also "the property of belonging to the present time." To be current is to be up to date. Time, like a river or like electricity, moves in a current. A current, like the passage of goods, flows.

So currency in a broad sense is a very interesting concept: the warp of space and the weft of time coincide in currency. Currency refers to the Now in the Tollean sense. How telling it is that our civilization values physical currency so highly and gives so little value to currency in time - when currency in time is the key to such treasures.

Live it light. Only a touch. It is all right here. - Ganesh Baba

What if love replaced money as the medium of exchange in society? Good relationships would be more important than things. We would take care of one another and share whatever we have instead of holding onto it. Being rich would mean being in good relationship with the entire environment: family, neighbors, animals, plants, the earth itself.

Once again, John Lennon had it right:

Love as currency

A few years ago, when the economy was failing all around us, a surprising thought came to me: Tomorrow's currency is love. The idea arrived with such force that I had to consider it then and it came back again and again, even though the phrase didn't make much sense to me at the time.

The first night of my 11.11 meditation, the thought came to me right away. My mind would have been happy to analyze and ponder it, to take it apart etymologically, historically and philosophically, to stay with it for the entire eleven minutes, but I chose not to follow any of those enticing pathways. I pushed it aside in favor of a quick wish for a world built on love, listening to the OM and sinking into silence. After the meditation, I was left with a series of questions. How would such a world work? Could it work? How can we get there?

The following evening, I began with the thought of a world based on love again. Images of people relating to one another in loving instead of warlike ways, of unraped landscapes, of harmonious interchanges with animals, arose.

On the third night, the vision took form fairly rapidly but it was less detailed. In fact, its details were veiled in airy color, as if washed over with watercolors. The colors, which were varied, soft and lovely, flowed and changed as people and animals moved and interacted. The changes in their colors in turn affected the colors of the landscape. It all blended together harmoniously in a softly swirling fractal pattern. Afterward, it came to me that I had seen a version of the "fractal world of rainbows and scales iterating about us endlessly" that Ganesh Baba describes and I write about in The Crazy Wisdom of Ganesh Baba.

http://evolutioncult.com

I realized that to live in a world built on love our senses would have to be much more finely tuned than they are in this world. A world built on love would be based on intuition and inspiration rather than hard sense data; on metaphor, symbolism and ta'wil rather than literal interpretation. Creation would arise more directly out of resonance and likeness. Thus the question that came - but how would we make a living? - was answered, good will provide goods.

By last night, the phrase "love as currency" began to makes sense to me, but I'll have to let those thoughts incubate until I have more time to write.

Love and Money

For several nights now I've been taking part in the New Reality Transmission, a worldwide event in which thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe millions of people are meditating on a world built on love for eleven minutes, at 11:11 (EST), for eleven days, beginning, of course, on 11/11. This is the first of several blogs reflecting on my experience.

Each evening I settle into a quiet place where I can sit comfortably with my back straight - or, as Ganesh Baba would say, my antenna aligned. As I get settled I wiggle a little to loosen up, and exhale rapidly a number of times to clear my lungs, sometimes using my arms like chicken wings to help pump out the air. Then, relaxing more and more deeply, I take about ten of the longest, slowest breaths I am capable of taking, the out-breath roughly twice as long as the in-breath.

I use mantras with my breath practice. Ever since I learned it from Baba, a simple OM on the in-breath, OM on the out-breath, has been the core of my practice. Sometimes I sing the word to myself as I breath, going up and down the scale, or to some melody, but more often I just listen to my inner sound.

The syllable OM represents the primal vibration, the sound of the Big Bang behind space and time. Our ears cannot possibly hear it - but our bodies do sing, some more loudly, some very softly. The body's song is not respected in today's world; we call it "tinnitus." I've always thought of the rushing sound in my head as my personal OM and I find listening to it immensely peaceful. I revert to OMing in one form or another between periods of trying a series of other mantras that have come to me from here and there over the years.

Currently, I am using abundance on the in-breath, surrender on the out-breath. I don't use the word, I feel the idea; it's vibrational.

Eventually, I begin the slow, rhythmic breathing that I try to maintain through rest of the meditation, and I think about a new world built on love, a world where the currency is love instead of money.

Each evening the thoughts that come to me when I set that particular stage are becoming clearer. I've been taking a few notes after each meditation. Over the next few days, I'll try to find the time to put some of those understandings here too.