The archer strengthens the bow arm, grips the leather, nocks an arrow, and bends the sinew to the corner of the mouth. Breath enters as the bow is drawn, breath is stilled as the arrow is poised for flight, and all is released together. Release.

And the arrow, willed to its destination strikes home.

Meditation is the arrow on the string, and the fingers which hold it; it is the arrow in flight, and the fingers which let it go; and it is the arrow arriving at the heart of the archer.

A song was running through my head all day today, a thread of sound sewn from the inside out, arriving at the inner ear audibly enough that I began to sing along… and so the music, which had already been part of the world, returned to it. What we take into us, changes us. What we allow into ourselves physically alters us, affects the way in which we think, the ways we feel and automatically interpret events, and therefore the ways in which we respond. Every sound takes root in the inner ear, and every smell takes root at the base of that sense. Everything we see is imprinted upon the inner eye, and is remembered in that vast – infinitely vast – record which is our conscious and subconscious mind. Everything we touch is recorded in the memory of a nerve, in the flow along an energetic channel. 

The Indian master Osho spent most of his life seeking an unshakeable truth, in every conceivable branch and nationality of psychology or science of philosophy, following the traces of a Path walked and illuminated by spiritual teachers throughout history, following their practices with his own practice, taking their experiences and making his own experience. His methods were nonconforming at best and, following the tendencies of the 70s and 80s, subversive at worst, simultaneously earning him praise as an enlightened teacher and derision as a dangerous lunatic, the perspective depending to some extent on how dogmatically the person making the evaluation clung to ideas which he or she had never challenged.

Silence is usually understood to be something negative, something empty, an absence of sound, of noises. This misunderstanding is prevalent because very few people have ever experienced silence. 

All that they have experienced in the name of silence is noiselessness. But silence is a totally different phenomenon. It is utterly positive. It is existential, it is not empty. It is overflowing with a music that you have never heard before, with a fragrance that is unfamiliar to you, with a light that can only be seen by the inner eyes. 

As there is a category of facts to which our senses are our best available but very imperfect guides, as there is a category of truths which we seek by the keen but still imperfect light of our reason, so according to the mystic, there is a category of more subtle truths, which surpass the reach both of the senses and the reason, but which can be ascertained by an inner direct knowledge and direct experience. These truths are supersensuous, but not the less real for that: they have immense results upon the consciousness changing its substance and movement, bringing especially deep peace and abiding joy, a great light of vision and knowledge, a possibility of overcoming the lower animal nature [within us], and vistas of a spiritual self-development which without them do not exist.

The pattern for everything in life exists – within everything that exists. The strength of modern scientific process which seeks to name all things, giving them genus, order and phylum, or physical properties which can be described by the arc of an equation, carries its own limitations: by disconnecting one object from another, we gain control over it, we see ourselves acting upon a unique object – for the sake of argument, oil – while conveniently blinding ourselves to the fact that everything – everything! – is interconnected, socially, politically, and physically. Burning a gallon of oil here moves a dollar from my hand to the hands of another… and another and another. Those dollars transform the face of a desert, into a garden of wealth and into a cataclysm of civil war. A gallon of oil is a gallon’s worth of smoke, is a gallon’s worth of warming and greenhouse gases. A gallon of oil today is one gallon less oil tomorrow, and the day after and the day after, so the colorful streamers of automobiles heading home from work, rivers of aluminum and combustion in white and red, which repeat themselves in every city of the nation, in every city of the globe, from here to London to Moscow to Beijing to Kuala Lumpur to Solo to La Paz to Iringa… sooner or later the current of every single river on the planet ceases to move.

A repeated word or phrase, spoken aloud or under one’s breath, is a mantra – the thought and sounds made again and again, until the sound itself empties of sound, and the sense becomes empty of sense. The boundaries of the word are broken, and the meaning of it, revealed deep within the sound and beneath your making of the sound, is infused into you.

Flowery words for saying, in the pragmatic language of Science, that through a repetition of sounds and thoughts, you create new neural pathways, create a physical memory in your nervous and endocrine systems, into which the body may relax: sanctuary. 

Just as you move into the body with awareness to free yourself from it – to no longer identify so completely with the physical body that your Self is veiled – just so with awareness you can lean into your thoughts, become intimate with the ways in which your mind works. Seeing your thoughts arise and pass away, you recognize how nebulous they are, how much a product of your own ego and your desires, and with a little practice you free yourself from them as well. The object of your attention becomes not the resolution of some perceived problem, nor planning some future which may not occur – you don’t give your attention to the results of some thought process – but watch the process of thinking itself.

A common misperception of meditative practice is that its goal is one of disowning the body. That becoming pure consciousness – of finding this “I” which is beyond the body – is a renunciation of the physical and the sensory.

The deepest and broadest result of meditation is in fact the opposite. For the years you have been granted in this life, yours is a physical existence – you, like the metaphor of Jesus, are a child of god, are the Divine manifest in this miracle of a living, pulsing body. You, like the metaphor of Shiva and Shakti, are part of the Creator extended into this living miracle Creation. If you haven’t watched or (as a woman) been active in the birthing of a child, you might mistake life as something other than miraculous. You might get caught up in the quotidian, in the net of the daily, and forget… but grant the possibility that this dance of energy is not simply toil, and you’ll remember that stepping to the music is a joy not easily to be discarded.

The practices of meditation and asana, and even the practices of work and community with which I have been involved, have all been driven together in the force of this travel. As I understood it would be, at a knowing, if not thinking, level. It has not been a pilgrimage to empty tombs – a “temple-tour”, where the religion changes, and the architecture, but what is seen is a building, and what is felt is felt only with the eyes – but an internal pilgrimage, one that has been supported by the philosophies and energies of this ancient yet modern country and its people.