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the moment one is simply choicelessly aware of the duality of existence -- that moment is the moment of transcendence. One attains in that moment, one comes home.
Anand means bliss, geoffrey means God's peace. Your full name will mean God's blissful peace. Two things to be understood... One: peace is always from God; it is not something man-made. We cannot create it; we can only receive it. So one has to learn how to receive. One has to learn how to be open. One has to become a welcome to existence and to all that existence implies. There are tremendous beauties all around but we are closed. The benediction is constantly showering on us but we are unaware of it.
God's peace is always waiting for us but we go on ignoring it; we have other things to do. We have too much occupation. The world is too much with us and we are too much with the world. We don't give God a chance. Even in sleep we go on dreaming and thinking and planning. Only for a few moments in the night when dreaming stops does God's peace descend on us. It is those few moments which rejuvenate us, which refresh us, which make us alive again. In the morning we feel something lingering, something like a fragrance. It is not very visible, you cannot catch hold of it, but if you have slept a good night's sleep, a dreamless sleep, then in the morning you have the feeling that you have been somewhere, to some deeper realm of your being, that you have not been your ordinary mind; that you had slipped down into some depth, and that your energies are reoriented; that your roots are watered, that you are again full of zest and full of energy; that you are again ready to live, to love, to be.
But even those few moments are disappearing from the modern mind. Hence meditation has become an absolute necessity. It was not so in the past; people could have afforded not to meditate. But now it is not a luxury, it is a necessity -- far more important than bread and butter.
Jesus' statement, that man cannot live by bread alone, is only half. The other half is: man needs meditation to be really alive. Meditation is food for the soul, because in meditation God's peace descends in you, surrounds
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