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. Who Am I, Truly?
A person feels the need to ask that question
when a deep restlessness begins to awaken within.
A disquiet that arises from the sense:
Is this all there is?
Is this who I am?
Am I defined only by my thoughts,
my images, my appearance,
my circumstances, my possessions,
and the web of my expectations?
Or is there still a field lying fallow within me?
Something hidden, yet undiscovered?
The one who poses this question does not realize
that body and mind have long been yearning
for something that silently demands their care.
He does not know that his soul stands out in the cold.
He only knows that he is utterly tired.
What to do?
The only wise thing is to sit in stillness,
and listen—to the weary body.
Just sit, and listen.
Feel the mind racing.
Hear the humming in the ears.
Feel the pulse of the heart,
the restlessness in hands and arms,
the hardness in the belly,
the tension in the shoulders,
the chase in the legs.
Simply listen, feel, observe.
As we become aware of our weary tension,
the body begins to respond—softly, quietly.
It grows tender, gradually tender.
Slowly, the restless play subsides.
The shoulders sink.
The burdens of worry roll away.
We give ourselves the freedom to grow soft.
That is the moment the heart has been waiting for.
It too begins to soften.
Life awakens through the heart within us.
Our arms and legs grow fluid as rivers.
Rest slowly melts the whole body.
Timelessness loosens us from time,
and the present moment appears—
a vast landscape without end,
in which we fade,
a single point in the great universe.
We hear nothing.
Nothing but the silence within.
And strangely enough—it feels like coming home.
Coming home to no man’s land.
Never before has it felt so safe,
so deeply sheltered.
That is the way.
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2. DIVINE BREATHING MACHINE
Let us not entangle the mind in intricate thoughts.
Let us not imagine that life is hard, or hopelessly complex.
Because everything is already done for us.
We have no need to strive,
no duty even to sustain our own breath.
Simply because we are, at every moment, breathed
by the primordial motion of a divine machine
to which our being is forever bound.
The breath is not born out of our own moving—
it is we who are being moved.
It is we, who are passively carried
by the incoming and the departing tide of air.
Softly we receive, softly we release…
receive and release…
We may—no, we can—do nothing
but offer ourselves, again and again,
to that vast, sovereign pulse of respiration.
And when we dare to gaze upon it—
our breathing—
peace begins its slow descent.
At the far shore of every exhalation
all motion falls still.
We drift, a fragile bubble of air,
upon the sea of the infinite,
slowly dissolving —
a little more,
and a little more…
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3. THE CROOKED BATTERY
A battery placed askew inside a device will yield but little power.
So it is, alas, with the energy of humankind.
A person lives with a restless, leaping mind—
a flea that forever springs
from place to place,
never finding rest.
Through this skittish unrest
we hang, half crooked, within our own bodies.
Thus the current of life—the subtle electromagnetic field—
can scarcely feed through the nerves,
and our inner transformers, the chakras,
struggle to harmonize for lack of vital flow.
In short: our field of energy is a battery
that makes no contact with its points of charge.
Without descending calm into the body,
we cannot be joined to our inner source of power.
That is why we are so restless, so weary,
so easily irritated—
for we are, quite literally, ungrounded.
Yet calmness of mind leads us into deeper waters.
As we soften and grow still,
we are plugged once more into the earth‑forces
that feed our foundational energy.
We let all words and thoughts melt away from the head,
and descend into the vastness of the body.
When we have sunk fully
to the floor of our being—
into our flesh, into our belly, into our legs—
we have arrived in the grounding power of the earth itself.
The Word has become flesh.
We fall silent,
and feel the energetic intelligence
of our entire embodied self awaken,
charging us from crown to sole.
Only then can all within the body
move in concert with the boundless cosmic mind.
The mortal form in which we dwell
transforms, deep within,
into a spirit‑body of flowing cosmos—
so calm,
so tender,
so silent,
so whole.
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4. PURE SPIRIT
Trust it.
By sitting in stillness, in quiet meditation,
a deep foundation within ourselves comes to light —
the deepest moving source of illumination we can feel.
You might call it the Holy Spirit:
an unfathomable current of grace
that bestows upon us true joy in living.
This holy spirit — dwelling eternally in every human being,
though seldom known —
lies beyond all words, beyond all thought.
And yet, inwardly, we can always feel it.
The Holy Spirit is a quiet, effervescent presence,
a bubbling essence,
like the brightness of spring water — the sprite —
sparkling upon the tongue.
Listen, and feel within:
The tingling in our feet and fingers
is the tingling of the quiet Holy Spirit in us.
The soft humming in our head
is the whisper of the Holy Spirit in us.
The beating of the heart
is the heartbeat of the Holy Spirit in us.
The flowing of the blood
is the fine, spiritual current of the Holy Spirit in us.
And every breath that streams through the body
is the breath of the Holy Spirit — through us.
It is not merely a living spirit abiding in us;
it is a renewing one —
a spirit that, when we meet it with silent attention,
sets to work upon our healing.
When we let go of the self,
the Spirit begins to flow.
Work long imprisoned is now set free,
given time to be cleansed, released,
carried away.
Let the body rest in quiet revision,
purified, refined —
until joy arises of itself.
We need only listen inwardly,
and feel how pure,
how immaculate,
how empty everything becomes.
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5. THE GRAPE AND THE MOTHER VINE
Human beings are born of the seed of a primal thought.
What that original thought truly is,
we can never know.
Yet we can feel — and sense —
that a longing lies at its root.
Imagine the tiny grape upon its cluster.
The little grape longs to remain connected
to the mother vine,
out of the desire to become whole,
to ripen into fullness.
It opens its slender stem and tender channels wide,
so the lifeblood of its ancient mother
may flow freely through it.
It cannot do otherwise —
it is its absolute will
to become the most perfect grape it can be.
It obeys, for without this obedience
its juices would dry,
its passageways clog and harden.
Such is the law of every creature:
to bring its deepest essence fully to life.
This same absolute law, this same absolute longing,
lives hidden within humankind.
In meditation we cross — almost effortlessly —
from the smallness of the grape
to the infinite vastness of the mother vine.
We follow the path of the longing:
from tension to gentleness,
from the temporal to the timeless,
from multitude to unity,
from restlessness to stillness,
from ceaseless doing to quiet being,
from the surface into the depth,
from agitation into the sinking ocean of infinity.
There, true life returns to us.
And when we feel the heart beating softly,
we know we are connected at last
to the almighty world‑heart of the Mother.
Every gate stands open,
and we are made drunk
on the wine into which we dissolve.
6. THE POWER PLANT OF THE GREAT NOTHING
Only when we have once tasted
the changeless stillness within —
that deep quiet peace with ourselves —
do we begin to understand
what change truly is.
Only when thought slowly loses its dominion
do we know how fully we were ruled by thought.
But how can cosmic awareness awaken in us
if we have never learned to become still?
How do we begin?
What must we do?
To still changeability —
time, our restless urgings, our noisy thoughts —
we must still not only the head,
but the whole body.
Never meditate with the mind.
Meditate with the entire body.
Enter inwardly into the sacred space of the body,
and fill that stillness into every corner, every crevice.
Hear how silent it is.
Feel how infinitely wide it is.
All that once mattered begins to vanish.
The only movement remaining is the breath —
the soft tide flowing in and out
through our quiet sanctuary.
Gradually even the breath
loses its movement,
as everything becomes wider
and stiller.
We need do nothing.
The Great Nothing takes over everything —
the silent Great Nothing
that is All we need.
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7. WHERE KNOWLEDGE IS HIDDEN
A person may have read many wise books in a lifetime,
followed profound courses in awareness,
accumulated noble knowledge —
and yet…
Why does one not befriend oneself?
Why no friendship with the body in which one dwells?
With the ankles, the throat, the belly,
the eyes, the jaws?
O, humanity’s bookshelves overflow,
for we cherish our knowledge;
our opinions are clever, persuasive;
our vision of life impressive;
our days appear generous and well‑intentioned.
And still — why no friendship with oneself?
With the body that carries a tight heart
and a racing pulse?
With the weary legs,
the arms through which no current flows,
the shoulders drawn up,
the back sealed off from the belly?
They are side matters to us.
The body is merely an instrument,
a servant of our striving —
to improve the world
by clever words, wise thought, noble acts.
And at night, when we return home,
we are tired —
tired of all that thinking,
all that reasoning,
that busy governing of our little world.
We withdraw behind the screen,
the newspaper,
the glass of wine —
just to feel nothing for a while.
Why, then, no friendship with the body?
With the heart so tightly bound?
With the heavy legs, the blocked arms,
the rigid shoulders, the throat that holds its cry silent?
Simply because we do not know how.
We have forgotten how to feel ourselves.
We have lost contact with the body —
with ourselves.
The world inside the body
is a blind spot —
strangely so,
for it is the closest world of all.
It is precisely because it lies so near
that we cannot feel it.
That nearness is what we must learn to approach —
to make our dwelling within the body.
Otherwise we remain surface‑dwellers,
missing the secret of life itself,
even as we read endlessly of spirituality,
nutrition, movement, yoga, meditation.
Only when the head and the heart
grow soft together
can life be understood from within.
Then — and only then —
is a corner of the veil lifted
from what we call love.
That is the only knowledge that matters.
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8. OUR DIVINE TELESCOPE
Our senses are our receivers of the world —
seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting —
they are meant to catch every signal
the world offers.
They stand like telescopes,
always open, always turned outward.
And yet, we do something strange
with these wondrous instruments.
We confuse them.
Whatever our senses perceive,
the I immediately lays claim to.
I see that lovely vase —
oh, how I should like to have it.
At once the I compares, desires, reacts.
Old memories stir,
sadness rises, jealousy awakens,
irritation, excitement, indignation, fear.
Our emotions are tied directly
to the thoughts of I.
Like horses run wild,
we flare with passion
when someone looks at us with disdain,
or turns away in neglect.
We take it personally —
believing there is an I
that has been slighted or ignored.
Thus we no longer see neutrally;
between what we perceive and what we are
stands the screen of the I —
a veil of thoughts and images.
The Indian divine song, the Bhagavad Gita,
speaks of this illusion of the five senses.
It teaches how the addictive stream of I
and its endless reactions
to what the senses perceive
can be broken.
The key lies in witnessing
our poisoned emotions,
feeling the sting of their venom in the body,
and breathing through the pain with the heart.
In that calm acceptance
we dissolve the old identification.
The frustrating screen falls away.
Then not only the outer gateway is cleared,
but the inner one too.
Within ourselves, the senses
can now hear the divine song,
and behold the divine presence directly.
9. WANT NOTHING
Meditation, as we know by now,
is done not with the head alone,
but with the whole body.
Without body‑awareness,
there can be no quiet mind.
Yet that quietness must not be sought
by will or wish.
We find peace only when
every desire for peace is surrendered —
when we cease striving,
cease wanting to achieve.
Instead of struggling to find calm,
we grant the entire body a holiday.
We give every cell permission
to rest — effortlessly.
This leads to a state of freedom
in which all unrest
is perfectly accepted.
As each muscle, each fiber softens,
the inner war dissolves.
Debate is no longer needed;
opposites vanish.
In observing ourselves
with a silent mind,
the fighting, seeking I
leaves the battlefield.
The body becomes a single space of peace —
a vast, open stillness
into which freedom can flow.
No one can explain this;
no one can truly understand —
and that is precisely the point.
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