there’s no getting wetter

Some speak of the need for long hours of meditation to access Spirit. My limited experience differs.

When I stop and rest in the here and now, practice Self-Inquiry in that moment, and access that thing called Sat-Chit-Ananda or Being, Consciousness, Bliss, it doesn’t matter if I’m there an hour or a minute. When you get wet, there’s no getting wetter. Provided you breathe.

Now I’m not saying that if I were to renunciate and become a monk and meditate for extended periods or say the rest of this life, that I wouldn’t transform, say, to keep the metaphor, into a blissful angelfish, but as a functionary in the dream, time is not of the essence.

Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind on this.

Taos Meditation: Frank Waters on Ramana

Here I stand, sniffing the early morning breeze and spying out the vast landscape like an old coyote, as if to assure myself I am in the center flow of its invisible, magnetic currents. To the sun, and to the two oppositely polarized peaks, El Cuchillo and the Sacred Mountain, I offer my morning prayers. Then, letting the bright warming rays of the sun engulf me, I give myself up to a thoughtless silence.

One, I suppose, could call it meditation. I don’t, for I’m not sure how one is supposed to meditate. Once, I attended an hour’s talk on meditation given by a noted esotericist from England. He carefully explained the best hours of the day to observe it; how to choose a corner of the room; what kind of a religious painting or photograph to hang on the wall with a burning candle beneath it; the choice of the proper incense to burn; the posture to assume. By then his hour was up. I left the hall, thinking of a question that Dr. Evans-Wentz once had asked Sri Ramana Maharshi, the famous sage of India.

“Is it helpful to sit on a tiger’s skin?” he asked. “Should one sit in the lotus position, or may the legs be kept straight? What posture is best?”

“All of this is unnecessary,” the Maharshi answered. “Let the mind assume the right posture. That is all.”

It is enough for me, as a prelude to a busy day, to attain for a moment at sunrise a measure of unbroken silence, of profound stillness within.

~Frank Waters from ‘Mountain Dialogues’