MEDITATION: FINDING YOUR WAY BACK HOME

My first experience with meditation was taking up the practice of TM (Transcendental Meditation) while I was a seminary student in Chicago in the late 70's. My grandmother had sent me some extra money to purchase a typewriter to help me with my school assignments, but instead I used in to pay for the TM class. I can't tell you why I came to that decision other than an intuitive sense that there was something very important going on in the discipline of meditation. At the time I had just been introduced to the now well known book, The Cloud of Unknowing by a Franciscan friend, but no real Christian alternative to TM existed at that time.
So that was my practice for many years. As a result of a trip to the then Soviet Union to study the Christian Orthodox Church I picked up the use of the Jesus Prayer in what would now be termed a form of active prayer as opposed to contemplative meditation. It was many years later while browsing in my favorite bookstore that I chanced across a set of cassette tapes on contemplative prayer by Father Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk of St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, CO. For me it was truly an experience of "coming home". Christianity is the wisdom tradition I come from and here was a method of meditation brought back to life from The Cloud of Unknowing mentioned above that resonated with the symbols and myths I was so familiar with. So that began a new practice, commonly referred to as Centering Prayer that I have used now for many years. Each of the world's wisdom traditions offer a bounty of alternatives if Centering Prayer does not suit your particular tastes and I affirm them all. This just happens to be the one I decided to adopt for the long walk ahead.
Let me end with some words of Ken Wilber from The Simple Feeling of Being. "This is the beginning of transcendence, of finding your way back home. You realize that you are one with the fabric of the universe, eternally. Your fear of death begins to subside, and you actually begin to feel, in a concrete and palpable way, the open and transparent nature for your own being. Feelings of gratitude and devotion arise in you-devotion to Spirit, in the form of the Christ, or Buddha, or Krishna; or devotion to your actual spiritual master; even devotion in general, and certainly devotion to all other sentient beings. The bodhisattva vow, in whatever form, arises from the depths of your being, and in a very powerful way. You realize you simply have to do whatever you can to help all sentient beings, and for the reason, as Schopenhauer said, that you realize that we all share the same non dual Self or Spirit or Absolute. All of this starts to become obvious-as obvious as rain on the roof. It is real and it is concrete."