 Dear Friends,
When I was about 13, I read an article in the Sunday paper about how to meditate. That year, the Beatles had been learning to meditate with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, so such exotic pursuits (well they were, then!) were all the rage. The newspaper said that what you had to do was choose a subject – such as love, or freedom – and train your mind to think only of that for a certain period of time. You did this by making your mind return to the chosen subject whenever it wandered off, taking no notice of extraneous thoughts. I think the metaphor was used of petals on a flower, each one joined to the centre. In the same way, all your thoughts should connect with the centre – your chosen subject.
Not long after, I read a book called Meditation by Mouni Sadhu, in which I learned that the technique I had discovered in the newspaper could better be described as concentration, rather than meditation, and that developing the ability to concentrate in this way was essential if you wanted to achieve positive results with meditation.
Mouni Sadhu introduced me to another intriguing idea as well. He pointed out how rare it is for human beings to think an original thought. He said, if we watch our thoughts, we’ll notice that almost all of them are just repetitions, or ‘clichés’, as he called them. He said that our minds – far from being the deep wellsprings of original thought we would like to imagine they are – are more like record players, just playing the same old song over and over again. So I got to work observing my thoughts and had to admit Mouni Sadhu was absolutely right! Not a happy state of affairs – or at least, not for me.
So you can see how these two ideas made a deep and life-changing impression on me. In fact, they formed the basis of a lifelong practice. On journeys, out walking, preparing a meal, waking up in the night, indeed any time my mind had a few kilobytes spare, I’d turn my thoughts to some deliberately chosen subject, coming back to it again and again until I’d got beyond all the clichés and into the realm where inspiration was possible. I found that, eventually, if you kept at it, the ‘back of your mind’ would take up the subject as well, so that even when you were focusing on something else, the back of your mind would still be chugging away, looking for answers, receiving inspirations. And I found, usefully, that this would continue even when I was asleep, so that I could often receive wonderful insights immediately on waking, or through the symbolism of dreams.
Last month, Geoff and I did this exercise with each of Gill Edwards’ Ten Invitations, which she describes in her new book, Life is a Gift. We chose this text not because the ideas in it were new, nor even because they were beautiful (which indeed they are!). We chose it because we knew that, once we’d got past the ‘Oh yes, I know that,’ and other clichéd thoughts, which tend to be the first ones to arise when anyone sees something that seems familiar, we would discover something new. And what a richness of insight came up then! You see, it’s always worth getting past our first thoughts about anything because, though our ‘I know that’ thoughts may be true to some extent, they also close our minds, don’t they? And then, how are we to grow? And how are we to see what’s really in front of us?
So this month, we thought you might like to try this exercise too, perhaps with some of Richard Bach’s amazingly pithy sayings from the Messiah’s Handbook. So below you’ll find Ten Reminders for the Advanced Soul.
The first of these reminders, I think, expresses in a few brief words the whole purpose of human life: ‘Remember that this world is not reality. It’s a playground of appearances on which you practise overcoming seems-to-be with your knowing of what is.’ You could meditate on that for a hundred years and still find more meaning in it.... if you looked.
I leave it with you.
With much love, Ann, Geoff and the Cygnus Team
Ten Reminders for the Advanced Soul
Richard Bach
1. Remember that this world is not reality. It’s a playground of appearances on which you practise overcoming seems-to-be with your knowing of what is.
2. A lifetime is your chance to express the IS in the most adventurous creative way you can imagine.
3. The IS is Life, Love, the Magnificent IT at the centre of your being. The IS does not recognize the limitations of spacetime, nor does it recognize your sorrows, fears, or beliefs. It does not see you as an upright biped on the surface of a third planet from a little sun at the edge of a small galaxy of an insignificant universe sandwiched for a moment between multiple trillions of other universes. It sees you reflecting Itself, and allows you the absolute freedom to do anything you wish, except to die.
4. Who you are is someone who asked to be dropped off on earth so you could do something remarkable, something that matters to you, which you could not do anywhere, anywhen else.
5. You are free to create and honour whatever past you choose, to heal and transform your present.
6. You do not create your own reality. You create your own appearances. Big difference!
7. If one inspired innocent loving soaring dreamer believes in a universe of joy and light and perfect being, and if she’s wrong and dies, it’s not the dreamer who’s been foolish, but the universe.
8. If God looked directly into your eyes and said, ‘I command that you be happy in the world as long as you live,’ what would you do?
9. You’ve all learned something that someone somewhere needs to remember. How will you let them know?
10. Your oneness in love is reality, and mirages cannot change reality. Don’t forget. No matter what seems to be.
From Messiah’s Handbook © 2004 by Richard Bach, originally published in the USA by Hampton Roads, this edition published by Cygnus Books, exclusively for Cygnus members.
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