Spirituality involves more than meditation. Meditation is a base, a way to quiet the mind from all of the distractions in life, and bring it into silence. It is one thing to bring the mind into silence, to withdraw your attention from all of the distractions of daily life and practice the discipline of focusing your attention upon the great. But, what is the great? What is Parama Purusha? When you attempt to focus your attention on that divinity, it evades your constructs; it evades your understanding. So, it is hard to focus on; it is a little fuzzy. So you say a Mantra, you do a visualization, you just think about quieting the mind, but is that Parama Purusha?

When you meditate, removing the distractions of the mind and focusing your attention on the great, you enter into the unknown; you enter into something you cannot quantify, you cannot contain, you cannot process in the way you process other things in your life. The normal habit of the mind is to focus the attention on something, then quantify it, qualify it, define it, and contain an understanding of it. But when you meditate upon the divine, upon the supreme entity, there is no way to quantify and qualify.

So the mind is uncertain. And in that uncertainty the mind wants to skid back to thoughts that are contained. And so, different levels of thinking occur again, and again the attention is returned to the supreme, or at least to a Mantra, to quiet the thoughts, or a visualization to quiet the thoughts. But again, when the mind tries to concentrate attention upon the supreme within the context of meditation, it’s unfocused, unclear. And that is because it is in its fullness not a construct the mind can understand. And to be known, it must be known in being, in consciousness, in awakening, not merely as a construct the mind understands, can define, can relate to.

So as you deepen in your meditation, you move beyond the ideas, beliefs, and constructs that you have established about the nature of Parama Purusha, the supreme entity, and you begin to move into feelings, into awareness. And, as you deepen, something opens up, something that you cannot remember entirely afterwards. You simply remember the idea of it; but that which opens up is not merely an idea. It is being. It is love. So, love is not something that can merely be talked about. You can talk about love, but the idea of love does not contain love. Love must be felt. Love must be known on a different level than ideas. It’s known in a heart; it’s known in being; it’s known in feeling. But that divinity is not merely a feeling, and when you feel that good feeling you find Parama Purusha—no, no, no. All feelings are contained within that divinity, as all forms are contained within that divinity.

So Parama Purusha is not merely a feeling, as all things are contained within that one. But the nature of the one is stillness, is love, is truth, known with the feelings, known with essential being, with consciousness, conscious awareness. But because the experience cannot be entirely defined by the mind, the experience of the infinite is the experience of the infinite; the mind is finite. So the mind only remembers the idea of the experience.

So, when you meditate, if you surrender all of your ideas, beliefs, all of your mental function, all of your identity of self to the supreme, then you go beyond the mind, you go beyond the thoughts, you go beyond your constructs and ideas, and in that direct experience, you know the touch of the infinite—sometimes only for the shortest moment, sometimes for a long time, but it doesn’t really matter, because when you touch that, there is no time, there is no space, there is no self and other. It always has been, always will be, and always is now. Now is eternal.

The mind records: It was only a moment of my meditation. Or: It was my whole meditation. The experience is beyond the mind, and whether the mind knows it as a moment or an hour, it happens eternally. For there is no time in the infinite, no place, nowhere you can travel to find that, and no self. One eternal, infinite whole always is.

I have said that spirituality is more than meditation. In the silence of sitting, you touch that which is eternal, but then you return to the mind and the body, and all the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of human life. There comes an influence from that brilliant sun of divinity, and that influence is the wave of spiritual life.

​You begin to be attuned to other living beings, to feel the pain, the joy, the sorrow that is all around you, as well as all the brightness of life and the vibrancy of life. And as you have more and more exposure to that infinite divinity, that infinite one, you begin to realize that there is nothing outside of that one, and that all of the mind, the body, the experiences of life, all the people you meet, all the things you do, occur within the one. That, while appearing to be many, the eternal is singular; while appearing to be mind, that beingness, that truth we often call love, permeates.

There is nothing outside of this eternal essence, and when your experience moves from meditation into your body and your mind, and your perceptions of experiences in the world, then you begin to see the truth that lies within the dream, the reality of love. When you love people—children, partners, friends, parents—when you love, whom do you love? When the knowledge of the eternal beingness settles deeply within you, the realization comes that all those whom you love and whom you have passion for are the one eternal being, taking form after form after form.

Life in this world is essentially suffering. All those you love, all the powers of your body and mind are only temporary; they come, they exist for a time, and then they go away. As you age, the number of losses of loved ones grows, and the pain of loss is a part of life, is it not? For everyone you have loved dearly and still love, who is not in your life, there is a loss. For those moments that you have attachment to that are gone, there is a loss. So loss, and love, passion, expression, they are both part of human life, and everything you achieve, everything that you love is temporal in form, but in nature eternal.

In the depths of meditation, you learn the nature of the eternal. Your heart softens. You surrender and melt into that infinity. But it is only when you take that knowledge and apply it, when you begin to, your life begins to be permeated by it and you are saturated in surrender to it, that you begin to see that all that you have attached yourself to, all that you have loved is the one, essential self, is the beloved of your heart, taken form. But that beloved never leaves you. It goes from form to form to form, for it shines through many forms. Those with whom you have the most resonance, you bond, but it is to the eternal one, and that one will always be there when there is deep enough surrender. Then the realization comes that the love of your life appears in countless forms and will never leave you.

When this realization becomes truly deep, then all fear flies from you, for there is no death; there is no loss. All is one; all is one. This is the true depth of spiritual understanding, the way of spirit and spirituality. It is not only meditation, but it is your entire life. It is the way to freedom, the way to love that does not end in pain. It is not to stop loving or attaching yourself to loved ones, it is to love more deeply and more fully, beyond the confines of form. That is the way of spirit.