In London's Greenwich Park, close to the Observatory, there is a white line drawn on the ground indicating the meridian.  We can easily stand with one foot in the eastern and one foot in the western hemisphere.  The art of meditative awareness is to stand with one foot in both the situations outlined earlier.  Paradoxically it is possible to be fully established in stillness and at the same time fully involved in action.  This may sound impossible, but meditation knows it to be so through direct experience.  The list below is not exhaustive, but a consideration of the above, with some practical experiments, may help us to understand and appreciate meditation.

Being/Becoming
Christ/Jesus
Silence/Sound
Stillness/Movement
Clear light/Colours
The silver screen/Moving pictures
Timeless eternity/Past and future


In the west the predominant religion of Christianity shows Jesus as the person who knew within himself or realised the Universal Being, thus being fully man and fully God.  St. Paul states that we have all "sinned and so fall short of the glory of God".  To sin means to miss the mark; to lose the living connection to our essential source; to lose meditative awareness and become totally involved in our personal and petty limitations so that our lives become "a tale told by an idiot (meaning private person in Greek) full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

It may be useful here to consider a series of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, a painter whose every brushstroke indicates meditative awareness and who, significantly, often inserts his self-portrait into the midst of the apparent chaos of his imagery, witnessing the scene from within with a detached compassion.

In Christ Mocked (National Gallery, London) Bosch shows the figure of Jesus surrounded by four types of humanity - the priest/pendant, the warrior, the merchant and the peasant labourer (a remarkable parallel to the four broad castes of the Indian system).  Each looks directly at him, each has direct contact, each is antagonistic.

In Ecce Homo (Escorial, Madrid) the same four types are in evidence, more grossly caricatured, but they are no longer in direct contact, no longer in touch - even their gaze is no longer direct.  We are approaching what Shakespeare so masterfully describes as "Man, proud man, most ignorant of that his most assured - his glassy essence."

Finally, in the magnificent Ascent to Calvary (Ghent) the figure of Jesus in placed right in the centre of the picture.  Substantial and earthy yet very still and conveying meditative awareness, he is surrounded by a surging sea of caricatures of every type of human folly and ignorance all apparently oblivious of the silent presence in their midst.  Even Saint Veronica is shown simpering devoutly at the image of Jesus imprinted on her handkerchief in complete ignorance of the living presence of Christ right beside her.  (Imagine what courage it required to paint this in the times of religious sensitivity and intolerance through which Bosch lived.)

Reflection on this series of three pictures seems to indicate how we lose our "birthright" of peaceful, joyful, meditative awareness - hence the need for meditation and the growing interest in meditation as the pace of life quickens.

Back