Methods for meditation abound. In Anticipations, his second volume of poems, Dr. Kenneth Mills gave a technique for meditating:
Take a place in a room where you are comfortable, sit up straight, hold your head high.
Open your eyes, look straight before you, and see a symbol, a wonder, and fly.
Close your eyes, see the symbol so glowing, catch your breath, and see the fact
That if you take one breath and count it, give one out as the evidence of your act.
Take another breath and give it a number, and give it out bearing the grace
That comes when you entertain a Royal Visitor, Who comes from the Holy Place.
Be prepared to receive the Messenger bearing the Holy Gown Divine;
You call it the Holy Breath, but equate it with the life of those who are in earth’s bind.
Count each breath as you take it in; count to ten as you go in and rejoice,
And as you take each count, know you give one, and you say it is exhaled on the breath. Your choice
Is given on the breath so equated; it is taken to every corner of the land,
And you know that in the power so equated, you find the Royal Visitor and the command.
You count up to ten and call it one set, and then you count a minimum of five,
So that if you numbered them all in a sequence, you would see fifty abide.
So, begin by counting the numbers from one to ten as you go,
And never lose track of one visit; if you do, that is your woe.
You must go back to the beginning and start over, and you may say, “Oh, this is awful. I’m going to pass out!”
And when you do, say within yourself, “Here I am, Father; give me another breath as a grace.”
And you catch the Breath of Omnipotence, and you start at one again,
And perhaps this time you will get through your five sets of ten, and you’ll say, “Oh, I have ten minutes more to spend.”
You haven’t. What you found was the fulfillment only of exercise; now comes the point you must hold:
That is the pool of expectancy, which comes to one of the fold,
And it is into this pool that you must dive in your knowingness, and come to in the knowable fact
That in experiencing the rapture of the depths of Being, you can carry what has been given as an inspired, revelatory fact.
That’s meditation.
In reviewing his own experience of meditation, Dr. Mills stated in his memoirs, The Candy Maker’s Son: “The doors started to open, and new vistas were perceived that have continually marked my experience. The first was the realization of the pronounced difference between meditation and the ordinary state. It was so obvious. The demand for me appeared as the necessity to make the experience in meditation continuous. I knew it should be the same experience whether my eyes were opened or closed or I was sitting in a chair or giving a piano lesson. The state of meditation should be a constant. Eventually this did become my experience and allowed me to find the practicality of that state in every moment.”
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