readoldthings

 Today, a brief passage from the medieval Taoist meditation manual, The Secret of the Golden Flower. I'm using Thomas Cleary's translation; Wilhelm's translation is not as good, but it is in the public domain and can be read here.

Chapter 8, Verse 27:

This is a simple idea, but, to my mind, it is extremely important. In fact, I sometimes think of it is as the key to all spiritual practice. 

Why?

Well, consider what our unknown author is saying. It is a universal experience of everyone who begins meditation that thoughts arise on their own. If you watch them long enough, you notice that you have no control over them, and that their causes have as much to do with the time of day, the contents of your stomach, how much coffee you've had (or failed to have), and the last thing you saw on television as anything else. And yet, before we discover this through the process of meditation, we live our lives identifying with our thoughts and-- what is even worse-- acting on them.

It is only once we still our mind that we can begin to choose our actions, without having our thoughts choose them for us.

When St. Thomas Aquinas sought to prove the existence of God, he made use of the idea of the "unmoved mover." The argument goes something like this: Everything that is currently in motion (or in existence) was put into motion (or existence) by something else. But that chain of one thing causing another can't go on to infinity, otherwise nothing would ever have begun. Something must exist which is not in motion and is not caused by anything else, but is capable of causing things and putting other things into motion. That something must be able to choose to cause motion, or else it is also simply a random movement, and we're no closer to the beginning than before. Therefore, God exists, as the unmoved something that causes other things to be.

Meditate every day, by a method that works for you. Keep going even when it becomes difficult, as it will, because the payoff is worth it. To become able to choose our own actions, rather than having them chosen for us by the random workings of our minds, is to begin to attain likeness to God.