Four Paths of Meditation Practice

 Now is the Time

Now is the time to know 
That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider 
A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand 
That all your ideas of right and wrong 
Were just a child’s training wheels 
To be laid aside 
When you can finally live 
With veracity 
And love. . .

My dear, please tell me, 
Why do you still 
Throw sticks at your heart 
And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside 
That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know 
That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time 
For you to compute the impossibility 
That there is anything 
But Grace.

Now is the season to know 
That everything you do 
Is sacred."

Hafiz 'The Gift' translated & interpreted by Daniel Ladinsky

 

     It can be almost impossible to have any sense of where we come from, who / what we really are. Usually we only get brief, vague, glimpses, intuitions, insights. But these nudges are recurrent, and our openness, readiness, preparedness to receive them fluctuates. At some point, some of us are drawn to open up & assent to this whispering call, to at long last say, 'Yes!' 

    There have always been those among us - shamans, wisdom keepers, prophets, mystics, saints, and countless unheralded - who remember their True Nature more clearly than most, and live as well as they can, in sync with that insight: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=perennial+philosophy

 
    There are fundamental challenges hearing / reading about our True Nature, especially for those with minimal direct experience of it. Language itself is dualistic - it comes from & reinforces a perspective of each of us being separate entities in a harsh, competitive relationship to people, animals, Nature, life itself.

    Those who've had profound direct experiences of ultimate reality, have the ability to experience how everyone & everything is one, profoundly interconnected, expression of timeless, intelligent Love. 

 

    One of these evolved folks is the Zen teacher & poet, Henry Shukman. A few words he says about his latest book, "Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening" 2025:

     “What I’ve come to feel in the world of meditation, and what my book is really about, is that there are different paths. They’re all closely related, but they have slightly different purposes. They’re not all one and the same.

    So there’s a whole world of practice around mindfulness, which is basically therapeutic, healing. It’s about taming our anxieties, de-stressing, and getting our nervous systems in better shape, more balanced, more subtle, responsive and well-toned, rather than jammed into an accelerated position all the time, stressed-out. So that’s great.

    There’s a whole world also of discovering deeper connectedness, and discovering that underneath our surface life of name & gain and trying to get things, or what Wordsworth called, ‘Getting & Spending,’ beneath that surface life that we’re all so engaged in, there’s a kind of deeper life where we contact something some call the soul, like a deeper level of our personalities, a sort of truer, somehow more authentic self, that has very different concerns. It’s much more concerned with beauty, with spiritual things, and with deeper connection with others. Sometimes it feels connected to forces in Nature, and Nature itself. So to uncover that more connected part of ourselves is a whole other kind of practice. Mindfulness and meditation can help with it, but it’s a slightly different target zone from foundational mindfulness.

    And then there’s the whole world of flow states and absorption practices and what we call Samadhi in Buddhism. This deep absorption, beautiful states of mind that we can cultivate in our mediation, which are wonderful. That’s another world of practice.

    And then the fourth one, I say is Awakening, which is also not like any of the others. Yes, closely related, but it’s a sudden, dramatic shift from one way of seeing, where I am me, which basically I am in those first three kinds of practice. I remain me. I don’t have to suddenly discover I’ve never been here the way I thought. I can work with who I feel I am in mindfulness. Likewise in the deeper connectedness, I’m still a person. There’s no doubt about it. But I am feeling myself in a very different way, but it’s still kind of me. And likewise in cultivation of flow, my sense of self may get quieter, but I haven’t radically discovered that I’ve never been a self the way I thought. 
    In Awakening, we do discover that. Suddenly, we see that what we have taken ourselves to be, has just been a figment of our imagination. And somehow, what’s really been going on is something – well we can get it on different levels really, different depths. There’s no time, there’s no space, there’s no separation. It’s just one unfolding happening now. Just like this. And that’s what we are.” 
    Henry Shukman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ6uKrhAc_s

 

Insight Meditation Society (IMS), Barre, MA