SEVENTY MEDITATIONS
FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION
After years of meditating with various groups, I collected a number of self-written meditations. I noticed that many people needed such inviting words and images to open their own silence as windows to their inner world. So I decided to bundle the meditations, usable for both groups as well as for each individual.
The book became a success, so that it has now come to a second edition.
This clearly shows that more and more people are starting to understand the language of their inner self, beyond thinking, and that more and more people feel the need to find their own strength in silence.
Why are words needed to enter the silence? Surely the silence speaks for itself? Surely the silence is not helped by words or phrases?
That would certainly be the case if we were already aware of a natural inner silence in our daily life. But people are full of surface noise inside, full of clutter and concoctions, full of restless fragments of sentences, words, images, emotions and associative thoughts. One will never be able to hear the silence like this. That is why we are so restless and often dissatisfied with ourselves. That is why we crave to expose our true nature under the busy inner dialogues. We intuitively feel that deep inside a real spirit power is hidden. How do we reach it?
Silence is a layer of depth that wants to be addressed in a very subtle way, as an archaeologist who, with the most delicate of instruments, carefully uncovers his deeply hidden treasure. Words and physical images help us to enter in the silent free dimension, where thought is no longer lord and master.
But once the silence is reached, words are no longer necessary. For example, Leo Vromans writes in his poem god and goddess: “It is a beautiful poem, if one thinks away the words.” But the poem must first to be read.
It should be clear that this booklet is not intended to explain meditation as a technique or as a scientific phenomenon. In that sense, enough has already been written about meditation.
This booklet is very corporeal because it wants to touch the innermost and intimate part of us directly.
Each meditation is a completed unit and stands on his own. When you read a text again, it always touches you as new because the words are connected with an unspeakable eternity. And a vivid sense of eternity is always new. Therefore, read the meditations with the heart and let them absorb into your body.
Ultimately, all meditations lead you to the one: the true nature of the empty self is the source of life. Real happiness is finally found.
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1.THE WAY
Who actually am I?
A person feels the need to ask that question when an essential dissatisfaction begins to awaken in him. An upset that comes from the feeling: Is this all there is? Is this what I am? Am I determined only by my thoughts, my images, my feelings, my appearance, my circumstances, my material possessions and my expectations
Or could there be another area lying fallow within me? Could there be something hidden in me that has not yet been discovered?
The person who asks himself this question does not realize that his body and mind have been yearning for something that deeply demands his attention for years. He does not know that his soul is out in the cold. He does notice that he is dead tired.
What to do?
The only advisable thing to do is to sit still and just listen to the tired body. Just sit and listen. Feel how the brain is busy. Listening how it hums in the ears. Feeling how the heart is beating; the hands and arms are restless inside, the belly is hard, the shoulders tense and the legs hunted. Just listen, feel and perceive. By being aware of our tense fatigue, our body starts to respond silently. It starts to soften, gradually soften. Very slowly the busy game of unrest disappears.
The shoulders drop. The baggage of worries just rolls off. We are giving ourselves more and more free rein.
That is the moment the heart has been waiting for. It may also soften now. Life can finally flow through it. Our legs and arms are now becoming liquid like rivers. Rest slowly melts the whole body. Timelessness loosens us from time, and the present appears. The present is an infinite landscape in which we disappear like a tiny dot in a vast universe. We hear nothing as silence in our body. How remarkable, but that feels like coming home. Coming home to a quiet no man’s land. Never before has anything felt so secure and safe.
That is the way.
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- THE DIVINE BREATHING MACHINE
Above all, let us not think complicated thoughts. Above all, let us not believe that life is difficult or particularly complicated.
For everything is done for us. We don’t have to do anything ourselves. We don’t even have to take care of our own breath. Simply because we are being breathed at any moment by the primal movement of a divine machine to which we are connected. The breath does not come from our own movement. No, we áre moved. All we have to do is passively allow the breath to flow in and out. Feeling softly, we undergo the receiving and letting go… receiving and letting go. We may, no we can do nothing but give ourselves away to this super-powerful autonomous breath movement every time.
When we take the time to watch our breathing movement, we gradually calm down. We even notice that at the end, the exhalation falls completely silent for a moment. We sway very slightly like a bubble on the sea of infinity. Disappearing a little more and more, always a little more…
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- THE CROOKED BATTERY
A battery placed skewed in a device will not be able to provide much energy.
Unfortunately this is also the case with the energy of man. A human being lives with a restless bouncy spirit like that of a flea that constantly jumps away from one spot to another. Nowhere does he find peace. Because of this bouncy turmoil, man hangs half skewed in his body. As a result the electromagnetic field receives little or no nourishment through the nerves, so our transformers, the chakras, cannot work together properly due to insufficient power flow. In short, our energy field is a battery that does not make contact with its energy points.
Thus, without indwelling peace in our bodies, we cannot be connected to our inner power source. That’s why we are so restless, tired or annoyed. We’re literally not grounded.
Calmness of mind takes us into deeper waters. As we become calmer and softer, we become connected to the earth forces that provide our basic energy. We let all the words and thoughts melt out of our heads and descend into the depths of our bodies.
When we have sunk completely to the bottom of our body in our flesh, in our belly and in our legs, we have entered our grounding power. “The word has become flesh.”We remain silent and we feel that the energetic intelligence of our entire ‘fleshly’ body is aroused and can recharge itself from head to toe. Only then can everything in the body cooperate with the infinite cosmic intelligence. The temporary body in which we live transforms deep inside into a cosmic flowing spirit body. So quiet, so gentle, so still…. and so perfect.
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- SPOTLESS SPIRIT
Be faithfulness to it.
Sitting at rest and meditating, a depth foundation within ourselves comes to light. The deepest moving source of light we can feel. You could call it the holy spirit, an unfathomable spiritual force that gives us the true joy of life.
This holy spirit – which dwells in every human being eternally without man even realizing it – lies beyond all words and thoughts. Yet inwardly we always can feel it. The holy spirit is a quietly acting bubble spirit, like the ‘sprite’ of spring water feels sparkling on the tongue.
Just listen and feel inside:
The tingling in our feet and fingers are the tingling of the silent holy spirit… within us.
The gentle buzzing in our heads are those of the silent holy spirit…within us.
The beating of the heart is the heartbeat of the holy spirit …within us.
The flow of the blood is the fine spiritual flow of the holy spirit…within us.
The flow of the breath is the breath of the holy spirit…through us.
But it is not only a living spirit that dwells in us. It is also a renewing spirit. It is a spirit that, when we pay silent attention to it, it does restorative work for us. If we let go our ‘I’, the holy spirit starts to flow. Work is now being done that has been stuck for years and has now given time to be cleaned up and disposed of.
Let the body then in silence be deeply cleaned and purified in revision. Joy will appear by itself. All we have to do is listen silently inside and feel how spotless and empty everything becomes
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- THE GRAPE AND THE MOTHER VINE
Man comes from the seed of a deep primal thought. We can never know what this primal thought exactly is. We can however experience and feel that there is a desire underlying it.
Compare it to the little grape hanging from a bunch. The grape wants to be in touch with the mother vine – as a baby – from out of the desire to become a mature large grape. He opens his stalks and his channels as wide as possible so that the juices of his primal mother can run through him. He cannot do otherwise. It is his absolute will to become an optimal grape. He obeys, because otherwise his juiciness would dry up and his channels would clog and harden. That is the law of every being , to bring to life optimally his deepest being.
That absolute law and that absolute desire are also hidden in man. When we are in meditation, automatically we make a transition from the smallest of the little grape to the infinite greatness of the mother vine. It is following the path from longing to softening, from time-bound to timeless, from multiplicity to unity, from turmoil to motionlessness, from crowdy to stillness, from surface to depth, from matter to sinking into an ocean of infinity. That brings us back to real life.
And when we feel the heart beating softly, we know that we are connecting to the almighty world heart of the primal mother. All the gates are wide open and we get drunk with the wine into which we are flowing.
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- THE POWERHOUSE OF THE BIG NOTHINGNESS
When we have ever experienced the inner immutability – in silence, in deep peace with ourselves – only then do we understand what changeability or mutability is. When our thoughts gradually lost their power when we became immutable, than we know on the opposite how it feels to be fully controlled by the thoughts in a changeable mind.
But how can our cosmic consciousness awaken if we have never learned to stop and silence anything? How do we begin? How do we do that?
To still the mutability – time, our restless urges, our noisy thoughts – we don’t just stop the head. No, we still the whole body. Never meditate with the head alone. Meditate with the whole body.
Then go inside the sacred space of the body and involve that silent space in all nooks and crannies. Hear how traquiet it is there. Feel how infinitely wide. Everything disappears that seemed so important before. The only thing that moves is the breath. All we need to do is listen to the breath. The breath is the only movement that gently flows in and out through our silent sanctuary.
Gradually even the breath loses almost his movements as everything becomes wider and quieter. We do not have to do anything. The big silent Nothingness takes it all over.
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- WHERE IS KNOWLEDGE HIDDEN?
Many wise books a person may have read in the course of his life. Many profound courses and consciousness trainings a person may have taken. A lot of high level knowledge a person can have acquired. An yet… he skips the most important thing, the wisest.
Why doesn’t man make friends with himself? Why doesn’t he make friends with the body in which he lives? With his ankles, with his throat, with his belly, with his eyes and jaws? Instead with all that books?
O, man’s bookshelves are full of books, for he cherishes knowledge; his opinions are clever and persuasive; with his vision of life he can look impressive good; his daily life looks charitable, and he is friend with many.
Still why doesn’t he make friends with himself? With his tense heart and his rushed wrist? With his arms in which the flow is held back? Why does he walk with shoulders raised and not feel his legs connected to his belly and his back?
They are side issues of him. His body is the commitment to a hard-working well-meaning life. His body is completely secondary to the goal he is striving for: to improve the world by saying wise things and by doing noble deeds.
And in the night when he gets home he is tired. Of all that thinking, of all that reasoning and talking, of all that pressure being occupied, of all that world governing. He can’t go anymore. He crawls behind the tv with a glass of wine or beer to feel nothing for a while.
Why doesn’t he make friends with his body now? With his heart? He doesn’t know how to do that. He lost all the contact with his body and with himself.
The world within our bodies is a blind spot for us. How strange and hilarious for a thing so close to us!
We have never become familiar with that ‘so close’. That is a new path that we must learn to take: learning to live in our bodies. Otherwise we remain outside-people who just miss the secret of life. |
Even though we still read a lot about spirituality, the right nutrition, the power of exercise and know everything about yoga and meditation. Only when we can soften the head and the heart and the muscles we can understand life from within. Only then a tip of the veil will lifted from what we call love. That is the only knowledge that matters.
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- OUR DIVINE TELESCOPE
Our senses are our world receivers. Seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling and tasting are meant to catch the world with all its signals. Like telescopes, they are always open and facing the outside world.
Yet we do something strange with these wonderful sensory capabilities. We confuse them. We start, in everything we perceive with our senses, to let our “I” interfere with it. So that the “I” immediately appropriates everything it sees or hears. “I see a beautiful vase. How I would like to have it myself!” When the “I” sees or hears something it immediately starts comparing and wanting something with it. Either painful memories come up, or we get wistful, sad, jealous, irritated, excited or anxious. Our emotions are directly connected to our thoughts of the “I”. Like runaway horses we can suddenly react fiercely and emotionally when someone looks at us with contempt or ignores us. We relate it on ourselves, thinking there is an “I” that is being scorned or ignored. Observing something neutrally is no longer possible for us. Between what we perceive and ourselves is an “I”-screen of images and thoughts.
The Indian divine song, the Bhagavad Gita, deals with the illusion of our five senses. This greatest song of the sages describes how the addictive “I” flow and the reaction of the “I” to everything through the senses can be interrupted.
It is important to behold our poisoned emotions, to become aware of them. When we can feel the deep poison sting in our body, we then breathe through these painful emotions via the heart. By doing so we accept the pain in peace and tolerance. Thus we step out of our old identification role with the “I” and have removed the frustrating screen.
As a result, not only the access to the outside, but also the access to the inside is freed. Within ourselves, the senses can hear the divine song and directly perceive the divine presence.
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- DON’T WANT TO FIND ANYTHING
Meditating, as we know by now, we do not only with our head but with our whole body. Without body awareness, there is no peace in our mind.
But we should not seek that peace willy-nilly. We can only find peace by letting go of any desire for peace. By giving up our fighting and wanting to achieve anything. Instead of forcing us to seek peace, we simply release our entire body. We offer every cell a vacation, effortless.
This leads to a liberated state in which all restlessness is completely accepted. By softening every muscle, every fiber, the inner war disappears.
By observing ourselves in this way with a silent mind, the ‘fighting and searching “I” leaves the battlefield. The body now becomes one peaceful void, one open space in which freedom can flow in.
No one understands that, no one can explain it. And that is the point.
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