Meditation

[The question that follows was presented to me yesterday via email. I thought a good way to respond was to share this brief excerpt from the revised introduction to my forthcoming book, The Awakened Soul. JDB]

Question: I’m a little confused about the whole idea of meditation. What’s your take on it?

The practice of meditation—periods of deliberate spiritual receptivity—is the narrow gate (Matt. 7:13-14) by which you enter the domain of your fully developed soul. If you are meditating yet failing to experience your spiritual essence, you are not meditating, you are thinking. Meditation is the act of opening your intuitive portal, a faculty specifically designed to tap the domain of the soul.

Becoming successful at meditation does not require years of training, for there is actually very little to learn. Meditation is a receptive state that opens your awareness to the natural influence of your soul’s radiance, a practice of internal reflection to be treated, not as spiritual development, but rather as a spiritual homecoming.

You already know how to receive spiritual light from your own inner source, as you’ve been doing so all along. The inspiration you think you receive from books and teachers is actually a confirmation of what you already know to be true. Those passages you highlight with a yellow marker represent your gospel embodied in the words of another. If you didn’t already have the eyes to see and the ears to hear it, these soul-stirring ideas would pass unnoticed. It is not something new in you that is being stimulated. Rather it is something that has been with you always. You are responding from your soul, this authentic core that has become lost in the plethora of confused crosscurrents generated by your body-based identity.