As we go on into whatever it is our practice is opening into, it seems to me to become apparent that the underlying or enclosing ground of being, isness, is neither a metaphysical abstraction nor a psychological apprehension, but a reality so profound that to think of it as a thing, or condition, is to miss the mark. This is why I keep on coming back to the word God, not as a trademark owned by one or another institution, but as the only way to speak of something more real than the earth beneath my feet, more alive by far than I am myself.

Now of course I’m aware that “God” comes with a vast deal of emotional and conceptual baggage for most of us, and for some of us that baggage may be a dead weight. For me, though, not having been brought up as a child to the profession of any formal religion, it is a treasury of bright images, a boundless resource for understanding where I may find myself.

Laurence Freeman writes, “By beginning [a settled practice] we learn pretty quickly that we meditate as disciples, not as entrepreneurs.” That is indeed how it feels to me; it is too easy, perhaps, to make our practice itself, or its imagined “goal” into the centre of this life, rather than following the light to which it tends.

Freeman again:

What happens is that a whole set of forces, inter-connected in the unity of our spirit, is released in our centre and radiates outwards to our lives. But it is not even this that is the fundamental goal. It isn’t this we are asking about when we say, ‘When will it happen?’ All these real and necessary dimensions, all these inter-dependent forces are signs and symbols of one unified force, the one unified reality. This is the power of the reality of the Spirit of God who dwells in our heart, in the final depth of our spirit, the Spirit of all creation which is also the ultimate goal and meaning of our life… Because we then know that ‘it’ is the Spirit which is both the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega. It is the beginning and the end of our meditation, of the whole journey of our meditation taken from the day we begin until the last day of our life.