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INTRODUCTION
northern California. I can look back now—as if with a “Buddha half-smile”— on the assorted wrong turns I made: my getting off at the commuter train station before the one I needed; to be followed by my catching a bus to narrow the distance between myself and the aptly named Mercy Center, where Father Bede was scheduled to speak.
I saw on the last leg of the journey how foolishly weighed down I was with an overfull backpack, even as I went up the notoriously steep hills of a San Francisco Bay area town. Truly, it is that much harder to reach for the heights when you're overloaded with stuff. Still rather amazingly, I did make it up that hill to where Bede was speaking that night. And, despite my doubting that I would ever get there, I was right on time to hear him as well.
What I took back down the mountain with me that late summer night in 1992 is the darshan of holiness, a glimpse of compassion and loving-kindness-or what Buddhists call metta--of Father Bede. He had found the treasure of meditation. He was eager to share it with everyone he could. Bede recounted his personal experience of being sustained in that nurturing, loving embrace of the Divine Mother, in the aftermath of his nearly fatal stroke a few years earlier. The account of his spiritual epiphany was made all the more poignant, given that he again took ill upon his return to the ashram in India. He died there the next year, 1993.
In the spirit of Bede Griffiths and all the great meditation masters past, present, and future, this book is an offering, a marker, a signpost on the way. We live in terribly wonderful times. There is really no need to wish we could have lived in the time of Jesus or Buddha, or some other great master. Not when, right now—and even as I write this—such accessible, open, and friendly master teachers are at hand to set us on the right and appropriate meditation wisdom path.
The time is now. Like meditation itself, this book of wisdom conversations aspires to be the spiritual traveler's boon companion for the open road.
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