Meditation Can Help Restore The Wonder
By Barbara Mayer
(August 3, 2014)
Since religion is such a key concept in today’s world, perhaps it will serve to look at its sources from as far back in ancient times as our cosmic clock will allow. While the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity take up so much attention — even now as violence rages in the Mideast – all religions have touched many, often for eons of time. Yet, while many people today are walking away from religion, the energies of past eras of worship remain in our cellular memory. They also remain in the rock and the soil, the water and the air of this planet herself.
The thought occurs that while many people are now leaving or not even considering religion, it is the various religions of what they have become in today’s world that people are really leaving. Is it possible, however, that they are not really leaving the reason for religion in the first place, but instead are longing to return to the beginnings of what actually made religion a part of our human race to enlightenment?
Before the busy, self-declared important human mind invented religion, deeply mysterious yet beautifully obvious truths of our planet already existed. Our ancestors simply looked to the sky, to the sun and the moon, to the earth and the stars of mystery beyond. They learned to love the differences of light from solar to lunar. They discovered the consuming purification of fire and let their imaginations dance among the stars. They took delight in naming the figures in constellations they saw, giving them characteristics and energies from our own little planet viewing platform of the cosmos.
From all the universes containing what today’s astrophysicists call dark matter, our ancestors learned to see through the darkness to the many truths all of creation holds. They considered source. They considered the balanced duality of female and male. They sat in primitive sacred circles around ritual fires, and loved the mystery within every thing. From that dark matter of night and its poignant possibilities, they bowed in respect to what is – and wondered through the mystery to what might possibly become. In what we derisively now call the early primitive mind, they actually held the extreme treasure of being able not to think too much.
When the human mind got much busier, it invented many things, including the limiting and separating walls of religions – perhaps now to the burden of overload.
A thought.
Maybe – just maybe — through committing to a practice of meditation — the silence found after settling the monkey mind of “civilization” — we can again tap the sense of wonder and mystery our so-called progress has all but destroyed.
Could this be the time – as we tiptoe through the beginning stages of the Age of Aquarius and the Shift in rising consciousness — that we return to our roots and to the peaceful harmony this planet and we deserve?
Let’s find time to sit and be silent – so we can discover the balance again. Let us meet once more in The Stillness our ancestors left as their legacy. It was in The Stillness that they learned to be part of all Creation Itself. It is in The Stillness now we can also discover our own true identity.
“In The Stillness, you will know.”
Barbara Mayer is a poet, author and interfaith/interspiritual minister who lives, writes and shares the Spirit in Sedona, Arizona.
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2 Comments
To continue to ascribe things difficult of comprehension to supernatural causes is thing less than a lazy and convenient way of avoiding all forms of intellectual hard work. Luck is merely a term coined to cover the inexplicable in any age of human existence; it designates those phenomena which men are unable or unwilling to penetrate. Chance is a word which signifies that man is too ignorant or too indolent to determine causes. Men regard a natural occurrence as an accident or as bad luck only when they are destitute of curiosity and imagination, when the races lack initiative and adventure. Exploration of the phenomena of life sooner or later destroys man’s belief in chance, luck, and so-called accidents, substituting therefor a universe of law and order wherein all effects are preceded by definite causes. Thus is the fear of existence replaced by the joy of living.
It seems that there may be two themes that run through this Sedona Soul. One being reflection on the importance of worship in the times before time, before written words replaced unwritten communication. Writings convey, but they also restrict, our thoughts and expressions.
In the time before time, peoples viewed themselves and all that was around them as one with, and part of, the whole. Honoring (worshipping) the various entities that are.
In the human desire to belong to, and be with, the universe – names and / or symbols were given to these subjects.
From the Druids, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Native Americans – respect and honor were given to powers beyond human control. Most often these humans worked in concert with the universe, much as the non-humans (flora and fauna) that share this wondrous world of ours. Balancing wants with needs, and destroying neither, our “primitive” forbearers had to live as if saving this earth for their children was more important than destruction. Worship takes many forms, wanton destruction is not one of them.
The other theme may be the need and joy of simply being. Of simply the quietness of the soul. Mediation or reflection or simply turning off the TV and computer and listening to ….. the sound of silence, to the silence of the Red Rocks. A visitor from The Valley Of The Sun remarked how quiet, how peaceful, how restful and soul-healing our bit of paradise is. How the absence of noise was so refreshing. Listen, you may hear yourself inhaling the peace of nature’s wonder. – Mike
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
…be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars;
Therefore, be at peace with God ( The Source, The Mystery ), whatever you conceive
Him/Her/It to be. ….. in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.
Desiderata : Max Ehrmann, 1927