Through quite simple techniques, meditation helps us to shift the seat of our consciousness - from the head to the heart. Meditation is therefore the gateway to a more centred, more heart-felt, more holistic way of life.

Our heads, which see and deal with everything dualistically, function almost entirely on behalf of our ego-selves and are, thus, constantly seeking ways to avoid or overcome our anxieties, animosities, discontents and confusions. In cultivating the heart, our deeper mind, we achieve a greater degree of concentration, clarity, and emotional stability; qualities that allow us to deal with life’s difficulties more skillfully. With practice, we gradually begin to develop much more positive, wholesome ways of being and, becoming ever more securely anchored in the heart, our life takes on new, creative and far more satisfying forms.

Before we can see the world with an open, loving heart we have first to learn the art of ‘inward seeing’. For most of us learning this art is not merely a prelude to something else, something more important or real, but a serious life-long quest in its own right. To be meaningful, this quest has to become a discipline, or as the ancients would have it: philosophy (the love of wisdom) has to become a way of life. This way traditionally, in east and west, follows certain quite distinct patterns or procedures.

In the west these procedures are, initially at least, concerned with meditation, a way of using texts and images that allows us, among other things: a) to centre our concentration; b) to listen to what the text is saying to us personally; c) to examine our lives in the light of what the text says, and d) to reflect on whatever changes to our lives this ‘inner seeing’ seems to be asking us to make. This classical meditative practice was developed within the great spiritual schools of the ancient world and continued within the Christian tradition as lectio divina.

What is time? A great healer or a great mystery? Something that ‘waits for no man’ or moves with the tides? Time, it seems, can be virtually all things to all men, but we shall be looking to it simply as our teacher.

In the guise of the seasons, for instance, time is not only a vague backdrop to our lives but a mirror in which our own spiraling cycles of growth and decay are displayed as part of a much greater pattern, embodying themes that are eternal.

We humans, it seems, never feel truly at home, suffering as we do from an acute sense of alienation and nostalgia for some, apparently lost, state of innocent wholeness. This theme of essential ‘loneliness’ stretches back to the beginnings of our Common Era where it was addressed by Christianity and Gnosticism alike. The problem, however, is much more fundamental and is an inevitable consequence, it seems, of our human mode of consciousness. Its resolution, according to tradition, is to be found only in ‘the Beyond’, in a transcendent realm that we have somehow lost.

However, many mystics, together with poets of the Romantic school, offer another solution. For them the promised Kingdom – the Beyond - is all around us, discernable in the depths of everything, animate and inanimate. Because we cannot discern these depths we suffer and our suffering will persist until we learn to cultivate another, more holistic, mode of vision.

We have just celebrated, close on the heels of Christmas, the Epiphany. These two great Christian feasts are often seen as aspects of a single event – the birth and manifestation of the Word of God in the most vulnerable of human forms. Such an event, however, is by no means unique to Christianity. The divine has often revealed itself in human form and epiphanies, or Hierophanies as the religious historian Mircea Eliade calls them, are found throughout history performing a vital role in every religion and civilization.

Eliade takes the term hierophany (or showing forth of the holy) in its widest sense ‘as anything which manifests the sacred’. So ephiphany can, and has, manifest as stone, tree, animal, spirit, mountain or divine child. There is for Eliade no hierarchy here: to presuppose ‘an evolution in the religious phenomenon, from the simple to the complex is a mere hypothesis and cannot be proved’. In any case, he says ‘we have yet to meet anywhere a simple religion consisting of the most elementary hierophanies’. That may well be true, and if it is then Zen, for instance, cannot be called a religion. In Zen, ‘the divine’ is fully manifest, for example, in the tip of a blade of grass or even a soiled toilet brush!