We are daily, hourly, even moment by moment bombarded with stimulation to the brain. I think part of the peace and joy that comes with wilderness camping, hiking, or just sitting by a pond is that for a few moments, we get to "turn off" the visual, auditory, and other stimulation coming from our electronic and 21st-Century devices -- and we "tune in" instead to sights and sounds of peace. For our mental and spiritual health, we need to stand back on a regular basis from the whirl of temporary events and observe the bigger picture of how things work.
When St. Teresa instructed her nuns on the art of meditation, she said this: "I do not require of you to form great and curious considerations in your understanding. I require of you no more than to look." As Moses stood at the Red Sea with the Egyptian army at his back, his instructions from God were You have only to be still and know that I am God. That "being still" and "just looking" is the entrance to the gift of meditation.
"Looking" is not the same as "seeing." We "see" with the part of the brain that responds to visual stimulation (the visual cortex). The cerebellum is that part of the brain that is aware of all the external stimuli that surrounds us. We need that information for survival -- but not every particle of information is useful at any given time. For example, if we are sitting in a room, we are somehow aware of all the visual cues around us, whether people are moving about, whether they are speaking, what the temperature in the room is at the moment, etc. If we are trying to pay attention to something we are reading or that someone is saying to us, the frontal lobe works to screen out the information we are aware of but don't need at the moment.
The frontal lobe is the executive center of the brain. It has the "Power" to ignore information coming from the cerebellum, or the power to choose which information it will pay attention to. When we first begin to meditate, we need to train the executive center of the brain to screen out information we don't want -- we need to train it to simply "look," as Teresa taught her sisters. What we "look at" may be an object, a situation that intrigues or annoys us, or an idea that interests us. We don't need to form a brilliant conclusion or have some sort of revelation about the object we are considering; we simply need to "look" at it, to observe it carefully until our consciousness has been lifted to a longer, slower rhythm.
At first, we are not yet adjusted to this new rhythm of thought. We become impatient and restless -- but if we stay with it for 10 minutes, on a daily basis, we discover that we have entered on a fresh plane of perception, that our relationship with things has been altered. Like Moses standing on the shore of the Red Sea, we might lift our rod over the sea, but what we know deep down is that we don't have to "do" or "achieve" our deliverance. We see beyond the superficial; we know that God is in charge, and that He will deliver us according to ways that we cannot even dream or imagine.
As we continue to meditate on a daily basis, to train our frontal lobes to "look" instead of responding to the constant stream of stimulation around us, we begin to surrender to a new and deeper world within us. We begin to see unsuspected beauty, meaning, and power as the spiritual world intersects our physical world. A perpetual growth of understanding keeps pace with the increase of attention which we bring to bear on our world, our environment, our lives.
As our meditation becomes deeper, it defends us against the perpetual assaults of the outer world. We "see" Pharaoh's army on the attack, but we "know" not only that we have no defense in ourselves, but that God is our shelter and our shield. As Psalm 57:2 says, "I will hide under the shelter of His wings until the disaster has passed me by." We set a ring of silence between ourselves and disaster, and within that circle, we are free from fear and anxiety! If God be for us, who can be against?
The world of appearance no longer controls or possesses us; we have entered into another world of peace, of confidence, of really seeing "how things work." We may not be able to remain in this world as long as we wish, any more than a toddler is able to remain walking after his first tentative steps. He sits down again and resorts to the convenient and comfortable crawl as his means of locomotion -- but the promise of future development is there. Surely it is worth a few minutes a day to train our frontal lobes to "look" and to see into a world that promises not to make us walk, but to fly.
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