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From Intellect to Intuition - Chapter Four - The Objectives in Meditation
This real Self is God - God the triumphant, God the Creator, God the Savior of man. It is, in the words of St. Paul, "Christ in us, the hope of glory." This becomes a fact in our consciousness and not simply a much hoped for theory. [74] Meditation causes our beliefs to change into ascertained facts, and our theories into proven experience. The statement of St. Paul's remains only a concept and a possibility until, through meditation, the Christ life is evoked and becomes the dominating factor in daily life. We speak of ourselves as divine and as sons of God. We know of those who have demonstrated their divinity to the world, and who stand in the forefront of human achievement, testifying to faculties beyond our scope of accomplishment. We are conscious, within ourselves, of strivings which drive us on towards knowledge, and of interior promptings, which have forced humanity up the ladder of evolution to its present status of what we call educated human beings. A divine urge has driven us forward from the stage of the cave-dweller to our modern civilized condition. Above all, we are aware of those who possess, or claim to possess, a vision of heavenly things which we long to share, and who testify to a direct way into the center of divine Reality which they ask us also to follow. We are told that it is possible to have direct experience, and the keynote of our modern times can be summed up in the words "From authority to experience." How can we know? How have this direct experience, free from the intrusion of any intermediary? The answer comes that there is a method which has been followed by countless thousands and a scientific process which has been formulated and followed by thinkers of all periods, and by means of which they become knowers. [75] The educational process has perhaps done its main work in preparing the mind to undertake the work of meditation. It has taught us that we possess such an apparatus and has presented to us some of its ways of use. The psychologists have told us much about our mental reactions, and our instinctual habits. Now man must possess himself consciously of his instrument and pass out of the initial stages of the educational process into that classroom and interior laboratory where it is possible to ascertain God for himself as the objective of all education. Who was it said that the world is not a prison house but a spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered children are trying to spell God? The mind sends us hither and thither in the work of spelling out truth until the day dawns when, exhausted, we retire within ourselves and meditate and then find God. As Dr. Overstreet says: "All our enduring quest then gets its explanation and its significance. It is the God operative within ourselves. As, then, we discover the more enduring values, or as we create them, we enact God in our own lives." - Overstreet, H.A., The Enduring Quest, page 265. Again, we might define meditation as the method whereby a man reaches the glory of the unveiled self by the process of rejecting form after form. Education is not only purveyed in our schools and universities. The greatest school of all is life experience itself, and the lessons we learn are those we bring upon ourselves by identifying ourselves with a succession of forms - forms of pleasure, forms of those [76]we love, forms of desire, forms of knowledge - the list is endless! For what are forms but those substitutes which we create and then set in front of ourselves as objects of worship, or those ideas about happiness and truth which others have created and after which we endlessly run, only to find them fade away into mist before our tired eyes. We seek satisfaction in phenomena of all kinds, only to find them turn to dust and ashes, until we reach that something - intangible yet infinitely real - which gave being to them all. He who sees all forms as symbols of reality is well on the way to touching the unveiled Self. But it takes a mental apprehension and a guided intuition to do this. Did Sir James Jeans have a glimpse of this when he said: "Phenomena come to us disguised in their frameworks of time and space; they are messages in cipher of which we shall not understand the ultimate significance until we have discovered how to decode them out of their space-time wrappings." - Jeans, Sir James, The Universe Around Us, page 339.
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