I watched silently as raindrops danced across the pond’s surface. In that moment of quiet tranquillity, I was transported to an inner world of peaceful reflection and contemplation.
The rain reminds me how quickly life changes. Blink, and the fresh face of youth, with all its hopes and aspirations, is gone. Those in their fifties and beyond know this only too well. We look in the mirror and find a face we don’t recognise.
Life is fleeting, passing, transient. Everything changes. Nothing remains the same. Yet amid all these changes, one thing remains changeless: a permanent presence that never leaves us.
That Presence is the core of our being. It is the ultimate Truth, found only in the stillness of the moment we keep missing.
The Present
The present is that impossible moment between the past and the future. Most of us miss it because we’re stuck in our rambling minds, either worrying about what happened yesterday or anxious about what might happen tomorrow.
The present always seems masked by the mind’s longing for some imaginary point in the future, as if the future promises more happiness than anything can offer now. Or we relive the past as if it matters more than what’s happening now.
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One Faculty Keeps the Mind Focused
In today’s world of endless notifications, scrolling and constant news, the mind is pulled in a thousand different directions. The only thing that keeps the mind focused and present is our faculty of reason, discernment, and discrimination: the intellect.
Without the intellect, the mind takes over our personality and causes problem after problem after problem: worry, anxiety, fear, stress, addiction, divorce and depression. These stem from an overactive mind and a serious lack of intellect.
For generations, the intellect has been ignored while the world chases information and intelligence. Today we have more information at our fingertips than any generation in history, yet we are no wiser.
Through sheer neglect, the intellect, the seat of high-level thinking and values, has fallen asleep. Now it’s time to wake it up and start using it. If we don’t, the writing is on the wall.
Waking the intellect requires high-level knowledge and contemplation.
What is Contemplation?
Till next time, Be Well, Meredith ∞ The Elder Sage
there is too much certainty in the title. There are far too many reasons why meditation might not work for someone, including simple misunderstanding of what meditation is and what it is not. you couldn't possibly know without what is not working for a person without actually listening to that person first