There’s a wonderful story about Milarepa, the Tibetan Buddhist saint who as a young man went out into the world to experience life and returned home to find his house filled with demons. He was angry and afraid at first and wanted to fight them or flee. Instead, he did the unexpected.
First he took a deep breath and bowed. Half of the demons disappeared. Then he opened his heart and mind, expanded his field of awareness and out of his mouth came a song that sent away all but one of the demons. The last demon, snarling fiercely, opened his mouth to consume Milarepa, but Milarepa placed his head in the demon’s mouth. The demon disappeared.
What’s wonderful about this story is the way Milarepa dispelled the demons. He “inspired” himself with a deep, calming breath and expanded into the higher perspectives of peaceful non-resistance.
We can do the same. If we are quiet and wait patiently, magnificent insights will come to us too. We have only to expand our view, as ancient people did in watching the constellations move around the nighttime sky. One day, someone built a wheel and civilization moved forward.
How do we move into the higher mind, which sees farther and more truly than our ordinary eyes?
Here's how it works for me. When I take a deep breath, widen my awareness and wait patiently, my still, small voice beckons me into the peaceful serenity of my heart. I am drawn by these joyful feelings into a luminous field of love behind my closed eyes, and I sit silently, gratefully, in these currents of energy until Earth meets Heaven in me.
In this stillness of being, I seek not to know why there was an earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean. I open my heart and envision light illuminating that part of the world, calming and purifying earth, sea and sky. In being a channel of blessings, I too am healed.
Some people consider meditative prayer to be wishful thinking, yet it is the single most effective way to bring about healing and peace. More than anything else, the love and light flowing from us will bring each suffering person the understanding, peace and healing so badly needed and propel us all into the age of enlightenment wheeling toward us now.
The amazing research of Dr. Masaru Emoto on water crystals perfectly illustrates the ability of loving prayer to transmute diseased water into molecular patterns of exquisite beauty and harmony. Meditation has the same alchemical effect, according to 600 studies cited by physicist John Hagelin. These studies show that the peaceful energies pulsing outward during meditation build a global brain wave coherence that reduces aggression and heals the quantum field of consciousness.
So why are our lessons still so painful? My still, small voice explains that pain, suffering and loss are in no way part of the natural order. Rather, our resistance to the love flowing through all things creates an energetic snarl of pain and loss.
Today, the tsunami is teaching us how to release our resistance. As we open our hearts and minds to the victims of this disaster, our empathy moves us into the quantum field of love, where we become one humanity.
This is the path of oneness taken by all the great mystics and why the Hindu swami Muktananda said, “Earth, moon, stars and sun revolve inside me.” Rumi, the Sufi poet of Islam, urged us to immerse ourselves in the glittering cosmic sea of spirit until our toes begin to say Allah.
The Hebrew prophet Elijah found oneness and divine guidance in the still, small voice within and so did the Christian prophet Jesus. In “The Life of St. Issa,” an ancient manuscript translated by a traveler in a Tibetan monastery in the 1880s, Jesus points us to the voice of the heart and God's infinite healing and peace.
The universal laws of love will protect us if we live in harmony with our planet and keep our eyes on the big picture: a wheel inside a wheel turning us inward to an enlightened new age where we are one people, one mind, one soul dispelling its demons and coming to know Itself.
Judith Pennington is a writer, singer and coast-to-coast teacher of meditation and the evolution of human consciousness. She is the author of a ground-breaking book, The Voice of the Soul, about her extraordinary journey into inspired writing, the guiding wisdom of her soul and the science of spirituality. Visit her primary website, www.eaglelife.com, to check for a workshop near you, sign up for her free e-newsletter, "The Still, Small Voice," and read complementary articles in her paid-for e-magazine, OneWorld Spirit, devoted to art, beauty, truth, spiritual politics and global peace.
