The Seed

Santa Monica Pier

Santa Monica Pier

Nature's infinite organizing power


Potential.

It's a loaded word, and an even more loaded concept. It implies that the slice of time we are living in is somehow unsatisfactory. That in some future time, we will become real, more real than now. Nature has no such concept. From the point of view of our creator, all things exist in a continuum. The seed has all the information locked inside it to become a tree and bear apples. It only has to be in the correct environment for an infinitely complex exchange of energy and transformation to occur.

When we learn to meditate in this tradition, we are given a mantra, a sound. It is referred to as a bija mantra. Bija means seed in Sanskrit. Like the apple seed, the bija mantra unfolds in the correct environment, and transforms miraculously. The only incorrect environment for this seed is one in which it is not used.

Nature only knows how to evolve. When we stop bullying nature to do our childish bidding, it reveals its deepest beautiful secrets to us. When we encounter nature on its own terms, we have no conception of how wondrous a world we are about to experience.

For this reason, we do not "corral" our experience in meditation to be this, that, or any other thing that the ego might expect. We innocently repeat the mantra and observe. The openness that is required for this process is something we may have rarely experienced.

Meditation is one case in which the rewards surpass the investment.

“Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.” 
Second Nature: A Gardener's Education by Michael Pollan