On matters that concern meditation, practice or thinking, my touchstone for many years has been a 17th century church cleric, Thomas Traherne. In the most simple, elegant language, he writes:

     What is more easy and sweet than meditation? Yet in this hath God commended His Love, that by meditation it is enjoyed. As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well. The easiness of thinking we received from God, the difficulty of thinking well proceeded from ourselves. Yet in truth, it is far more easy to think well than ill, because good thoughts be sweet and delightful: Evil thoughts are full of discontent and trouble. So that an evil habit and custom have made it difficult to think well, not Nature. For by nature nothing is so difficult as to think amiss.
        Centuries (I 8)

That paragraph is profound. If you’re uncomfortable with the term “God” replace it with “nature” or “evolution” or “Gaia,” but it seems to me that there has to be a fundamental agreement that human consciousness grows, lives, exists on this planet, and we are among its vehicles or vessels. Pick your own metaphor. As sentient beings, we find ourselves living in an environment that seems designed to stimulate and challenge our endowments. As we encounter each change, we learn or we perish. This would appear to be a law of nature, but don’t call it ‘tough love.’ An oxymoron as much as ‘military intelligence.’ I digress from the point: That we exist at all is a miracle beyond comprehension.

If ‘God’s Love’ bothers you, how about the ‘glory of creation’ or the ‘wonders of nature?’ The words matter not at all, but the feeling, the enjoyment, is what matters. That feeling is a real possibility, and meditation is the practice by which we come to appreciate it. Thus, daily practice affords us the opportunity to feel that sense of wonder, that opening of the heart. It’s not a guarantee, but without the effort, the commitment, to turn within each day, what chance is there that we’ll recognize what we’ve been given, receive that understanding of what this life is, really?

 I think Traherne is also right about our natural propensity to think well. Human intelligence is clearly one of the planet’s most astonishing developments, and our accomplishments in the sciences, the arts, and exploring our environment are amazing, beautiful, wonderful. Our intelligence has also produced the most unimaginable horrors and desecrations of life. And neither tendency looks to stop its trajectory into the future any time soon. Traherne belongs to the human chorus of saints and sages who remind us that we are part of the creation, we are agents of the divine, if we so choose. That’s our default setting.

But we sometimes choose not to be. We have learned ‘evil habit(s) and custom(s)’ and become lazy, indifferent, indulgent. Thus we come to ‘think amiss’ as a matter of course, mistaking ‘yours’ for ‘mine’ and ‘theirs’ for ‘ours.’ Rather that think for ourselves, we defer to others whose thinking may be even more deranged than our own! It shouldn’t be a surprise to find that a large number of us don’t like to think, since the results of such mental strife will likely be emotionally painful, if it’s done honestly. So, there needs to be a supportive and nurturing environment for people who are being challenged to (re)learn to think well. As we were as children, curious, hungry to know, eager to try. Until our natural love of learning was stunted and warped by those ‘evil habits and customs’ peculiar to our culture.

Like most glosses, this one expands a simple, beautiful passage with several dry paragraphs intended to affirm what some wise one said in another age. Please pardon the excess, but savor the essence. It’s timeless.