Meditation

The word Mediation appears in the title of a number of C. S. Lewis's essays: Meditation in a Toolshed # GITD, Meditation on the Third Commandment # GITD,

…can meditation be combined with emptying of the bowels? What a saving of time, specially for a constipated man like you. //Collected Letters//, to Arthur Greeves, 3 October 1929

To day has been a day of howling wind and low, fast-driving clouds, but no rain. On my afternoon walk my `NO THINKING' period was rather more successful than usual. I find as I go on that one becomes more conscious of ones thought by trying to stop. After shoving out the obvious loud thought, one listens to the whispered thought underneath. When one has checked that, I suppose there will be another layer under-neath! Perhaps it is thought all the way down. Anyway, it is not a bad thing to get even this far: to step out of the thinking and listen to it going on. Perhaps it will teach you to control it better when you step back into the stream. //Collected Letters//, to Arthur Greeves, 13 January 1930

During my afternoon `meditation’, - which I at least //attempt// quite regularly now - I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. Sitting by, watching the rising thoughts to break their necks as they pop up, one learns to know the sort of thoughts that do come. And, will you believe it, one out of every three is a thought of self-admiration: when everything else fails, having had its neck bro-ken, up comes the thought `What an admirable fellow I am to have broken their necks!' I catch myself posturing before the mirror, so to speak, all day long. I pretend I am carefully thinking out what to say to the next pupil (for //his// good, of course) and then suddenly realise I am really thinking how frightfully clever I'm going to be and how he will admire me. I pretend I am remembering an evening of good fellowship in a really friendly and charitable spirit - and all the time I'm really remembering how good a fellow I am and how well I talked. And then when you force yourself to stop it, you admire yourself for doing //that.// Its like fighting the hydra (you remember, when you cut off one head another grew). There seems to be no end to it. Depth under depth of self-love and self admiration. //Collected Letters//, to Arthur Greeves, 30 January 1930

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship. //Membership//, paragraph 2

We are never //merely// in a state of mind. The prayer and the meditation made in howling wind or quiet sunshine, in morning alacrity or evening resignation, in youth or age, good health or ill, may be equally, but are differently, blessed. //Miracles//, chapter 16, 3rd paragraph from the end