Saturday 23 September 2017

making a meditator out of Grandpa!

Here he is!
He is the best meditator in our house but you might not have picked him out for a meditator from his background: a good old English country background with dogs and guns and fishing rods, cricket-watching, rugby-loving, Church going sort of person, no sign of new-age thinking there and yet something must have stirred in him to take steps to become a meditator.  What I admire about his meditation is that he doesn't meditate because he needs it, he doesn't do it to relieve stress or bring down his blood pressure, he does it because he says it is a most reasonable thing to do and it accords with his philosophy studies.  He says it brings him into line with all the great teachers, helps him to understand his own Christian background  but also explains the same truth lying in all the great teachings.  I think it gives him a flexibility, a way of reading life which marks him out in my mind from other Grandpas from similar backgrounds.  He doesn't wear his wisdom in any sort of ostentatious way, in fact you wouldn't know what hidden depths there were if you just watched him going about his life, log chopping, rubbish burning, telly watching and maybe shouting at drivers (who can't hear him!).  It would only be when you asked him a question about something important in your life that the wisdom which is in there makes itself known in a most reasonable way, somehow the meditation taps him into some universal store of knowledge. Maybe there is a hidden meditator in your Grandpa?  If so, and if it would help him deal with the arrival of old age, the tiresomeness of losing the facility he had in his younger years with a degree of equanimity, then don't be afraid to introduce him to a good meditator somewhere.

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