These modern times require a new religiousness.

The time of retiring into the forest has passed and the time has come to bring stillness into the urban jungle.

It is essential meditation be at the heart of our cities. For the time of divisions is over. Divisions between the secular and religious, nature and the city, inner and outer.

We cannot separate differing dimensions of life – they all must exist together as different facets of the diamond. And as our lives become ever more frenetic it is all the more important that the dimension of silence, stillness, and meditation be underlying our activity.

The Metropolis & Meditation

Cities are the beating hearts of humanity. They are centres where culture is born, where ideas begin, where the creators are creating. What has its source in the cities flows out to every other part of the land. Without the presence of meditation our cities will be islands of insanity and mass produce madness which seeps out to the rest of the Earth.

Our cities are our future. With the growing population of the earth, and the opportunities available to one living in a city – in the near future nearly everyone on earth will be living in a city. And many will live in a gigantic metropolis like New York, London, Tokyo, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, and Seoul among many other mega-cities.

Where people are living with the dimension of meditation; which is silence, awareness, stillness, peace, and wholeness – it is from that state of consciousness that they create beautiful buildings and environments, that they live in tolerance and compassion, and that they care for the earth. For our cities and our species to survive we must consciously evolve and evolve in consciousness.

Meditation will be the fragrance of our cities and metropolises when a certain number of people establish in themselves the inner dimension of awareness and presence. This is an individual happening, not a collective one.

We must find stillness within this frenetic modern life. Just as the wheel is motion incarnate yet has a center unmoving point. We must live within the spinning wheel yet remain still and aware inside. We must be totally in this world, yet not totally of it.

Where can God be found?

No longer do you need to go to the monastery, temple, desert, forest, mountains, or cave.
But you can bring your meditation to the city – which is a jungle. Which is another kind of desert and a different kind of forest.

Of what value does your silence have in the Himalayas? Any fool can be quiet and calm there.
But in the metropolis you are tested everyday to go unconscious, to hide away, to lose yourself in the crowd.

And it is infinitely more valuable to be a light of presence in the city. In the forest, all the plants and animals are already silent and peaceful, they are at rest in their being.
But in the city your meditation is that much more precious and contagious…

In the old days, when you wanted to find God you went deep into the desert, the forest, or the monastery. But god is not found there or anywhere else but here and now.

A Revolution of Consciousness

The city is in many ways the heart of the insanity of the human mind.  With it’s divorce from nature, it’s frenetic madness of activity and doing, with it’s time-centric consciousness,  with our city centers being dominated by financial powers, among other things.

But they are also the places where growth and healing must and will flower.  Where artists, poets, scientists, creators and discoverers who are creating and living in the world out of their meditation will flourish and bring in a new consciousness.  An awakened vitality and intelligence which will give birth to a new heaven and a new earth.

Today needs a new religiousness.
We must bring our silence to the city.
We must live our meditation in the metropolis.