Here.Now.One: From the Doing to the Being to the Knowing of Islamic Meditation
Meditation is the very nature of essential Being. Meditation is our presence with God, and God’s Presence with us. As God’s Presence with us, God ‘Meditates’ our being. As our presence with God, we meditate to rediscover our simple being in God. In this latter sense of being present for God, meditation is also a process of discovering what we really are as a presence with God. This process of discovery or recovery is realized by way of vigilantly fixing our attention on our aware being, and then relaxing this attention through surrendering ourselves to the Ground of all Being that is God’s Presence. It is in this sense that Meditation is simultaneously Divine and human. It is the essence of all spiritual practice.
In actuality, meditation is simply our being, or our consciously knowing our being and willfully being our knowing. In paradox, through the 'doing' of meditation, we realize the experience of already being 'here'. In the 'being' as meditation, we awaken to the experience of always being 'now'. In the ‘now’ of meditation, we are open to clear seeing or knowing. As the 'knowing' of meditation, we discover in our immediate experience ourselves as wholly (or holy) present as an integrated 'oneness'. In this sense, meditation is our true and sacred self-aware presence, as the here, the now, and the one of your direct experience.
As a process, meditation allows us to discover that which has always been the center of our consciousness, or the aware background of our experience. This sense of presence or aware-being is discovered again and again, until we are utterly convinced that we are always “Here”, as this heart or background, and never scattered in the foreground or mind of our experience. It is in this manner that we may come to see more clearly through meditation and its spiritual supports, that there has always only been this ground of being as our real self. Amidst a presumably active or frustrated foreground, we search as it were, for the essence of our gathered, recollected and spiritual Self, but in the wrong direction—outward as opposed to inward. This inward background is our actual and immediate presence, and this process to return to and rediscover this background is meditation.
Finally, as this inwardness (or this inward facing-ness), when we inquire into who is the meditator and what we are meditating upon, the doing of meditation begins to stop or disappears, and the being of meditation abides as discovery, unveiling, even deepening . We find through meditation that this sense of being "Here" is our real divinely intended-nature (Fitra) [Qur'an 30:30]. To be our fitra is already to be our perfect presence with God and God’s Subtle Presence with us in the “Now” of Eternity. As meditation, we come to see that the Heart of meditation is already and always God’s Inquiry and Mention (Dhikr), “Am I not your Lord?” (Alastu bi rabbikum)[Qur'an 7:172], and our discovery as a response, “Verily we bear Witness'' (Bala Shahidna). What we bear witness to, is the true “I” or “I Am” as the mirror to the “Am I not your Lord”, within. This “I Am-ness” is already and always Meditation. Being present as Meditation, here and now, we find and know that we are already “One” as God’s Presence in the world.
Here. Now. One.
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