The Meditation

You can do this sitting or standing. Eyes open or closed. In noise or in quiet, in a cold room or a warm one. None of it matters, and I want you to hear how strange that is, because everything you have read about meditation has told you the opposite. I have crossed staring out a window with my eyes wide open.

What matters is what you do with your mind, and it moves in three turns.

The first turn is to leave this world behind. Whatever brought you here, set it down on the floor. Your sickness. Your debt. The love you are starving for, the fear, the craving, the pain. Set all of it down. This is the hardest part, and it will feel wrong, because these are the very things you came to fix. But what you hold while you cross is a heading, and a mind still closed around its trouble either stays here or is carried into the trouble's own country. You cannot serve two kingdoms. You are not here to gain anything, or lose anything, or win. You are here to make contact, and nothing besides. Whatever you set down, you may pick it back up when you return. You will not want to.

You cannot serve two kingdoms.

The second turn is desire. Let it rise, and let it speak, plainly, in whatever words are yours. Mine are these. I want to see beyond this world. This is not the real one. I desire the truth. I desire to see further. I desire to know. Say it until you mean it all the way down.

The third turn is to let the desire become thought. Begin to believe you are crossing. Believe you are leaving this world. Believe you are about to see more than it. Then stop pushing, and let the believing come over you on its own, the way sleep comes when you stop chasing it. Some times nothing happens. That is fine. Some times the room gives way.

If it does not happen, the answer is not a cleverer technique. The answer is to want it more. You have to become obsessed, and obsession has three plain marks. It is the thing your day is made of. You want it past anything else you want. It crowds your other thoughts until there is little room left for them. The desire is the ticket. The belief arrives the moment the desire is finally strong enough to carry it.

But hear the difference in what I am asking you to be filled with. The obsession is with the crossing, never with the things you set down on the floor. From the inside they can feel alike, and they are not alike. Cross while your mind is still closed around a trouble and the trouble can meet you on the other side, grown into a whole world of itself. I have done it. Some of those crossings are only gray and dull. Some are the kind you spend wanting out. The first turn is not a nicety before the real work. It is the rudder, and it decides where you arrive.

Once you have crossed even once, returning is simple. You sit, and you dwell on a single piece of what you saw the last time, any small piece of it, and it draws you back across. There is no ceiling on how deep or how bright you let it become. The excitement of it alone is past anything this world has ever handed you.

And here is the quiet thing you will notice, afterward. The troubles you set down on the floor begin to lose their weight. You allow them to, and the crossing answers them. The whole of it is there, waiting, and it really is as simple as that.