Your being is like the water in the wine. Just as wine is water mixed with the taste of grapes, so your self is pure being mixed with the qualities of experience. To discern pure being behind all experience is the essence of meditation; to remain as that in the midst of experience is the practice of the presence of God.
What is the very first thing you know about yourself? You know that ‘I am’. To what experience do the words ‘I am’ refer? They refer to the experience of being. You are always experiencing your being, though in most cases your being is so mixed up with the content of experience that you lose touch with it, forgetting or overlooking it.
Whatever you are drinking, tea, coffee, milk, wine, orange juice, you are drinking water, but you may not realise it, because the water is mixed with various flavours. Your being is like the water in the wine. You are always tasting it, always knowing it, but you may not know it because your being is mixed with the flavours of experience, sorrow, agitation, excitement, loneliness and so on.
Like water, your being has no taste. It does not share the qualities of experience and yet it makes them possible. Your being is colourless, transparent, empty, silent. It lies in the background of all experience, it pervades all experience, it saturates all experience. And yet you overlook it because the various tastes of experience are so enthralling.
And with this overlooking of your essential nature of being, you lose touch with its innate peace. You then embark on a great search for peace in the world, either in the conventional objects of experience, objects, substances, activities, relationships, or in a religious or spiritual tradition, teachers, teachings, methods, practices, states of mind.
What you are searching for is your self, your being. Your being is not something mysterious, hidden or buried beneath experience; it is the most obvious, intimate, familiar aspect of your experience, if it can be called an experience.
This understanding is concealed in common parlance: ‘I am reading an article’, ‘I am meditating’, ‘I am having a shower’, ‘I am answering an email’, ‘I am talking to a friend’, ‘I am sad’, ‘I am excited’, ‘I am lonely’ and so on. Always ‘I am’, qualified by some temporary experience. All that is required is to discern the ‘I am’ amidst the colourful, changing content of experience, and to be that knowingly.
Meditation or prayer is to abide as that, both during periods of the day when you abide in being, as being, formally, with your eyes closed in periods of meditation or prayer, and remaining in being, as being, throughout your day.
Separating pure being from the content of experience is like separating the water from the wine. As the water loses the qualities it borrowed from the grapes, so, in meditation or prayer, as you separate your being from the content of experience, your being loses the qualities it borrowed from experience and stands revealed as pure being, the clear water of being. Having no qualities, it has no limits; having no limits, it is infinite; and being infinite, it is God’s being, the only being there is.
This is what it means to pray without ceasing: to remain in being, as being, both in periods of formal meditation or prayer, and in the midst of your everyday life. This is the practice of the presence of God, remaining as infinite being in the midst of experience. It is not only the pinnacle of self-knowledge, it is also the ultimate devotion, the ultimate surrender.
Wow! How beautifully you express and describe in your extended metaphor of water the nature of being. Thank you 🙏
Thank you