Father Bede Griffiths » “They think only monks and nuns have it”

I might have said “meditation is a way to use your senses to develop awareness, and eventually see your sensations as empty,” rather than “meditation is the way in which you get beyond your senses.”  But good stuff, all in all:

I start from meditation.  To me meditation is the way in which you get beyond your senses, and then beyond your mind, and then you begin to experience something of this transcendent reality.  As that experience grows, it begins to affect your whole attitude to other people and to the world around you.  Meditation is the secret.  it’s only there that you can practice going beyond your senses, beyond your thoughts and feelings, and experience the divine.  it you experience this reality in yourself it begins to spread through the world around you, through people and through everything…The greatest danger is to seek and experience of God, which means you’re seeking God’s reflection in yourself- in your feelings and your thoughts; and you think you’ve found God but God’s evaded you.  You’ve got to go beyond yourself each time.  That is where many people living a practical life, who are very unselfish, very dedicated, probably experience God deeply without knowing it or seeing it.  Because they go out of themselves and in the world around, them, in the people they are serving they encounter this absolute, this One, though they may not name it explicitly that way.  I believe that religious experience is far more common than people imagine it… They think only monks and nuns have it, but I think everybody is open to it in some way and most people get glimpses of it.”

— Father Bede Griffiths