MEDITATION: "Riding the Great River"

It’s important for me, each day, to carefully think about where power comes from, because power is at the heart of life. Everyone wants power of one sort or another – power to defeat problems, power to rise in a profession, power to buy what we want, power to stay healthy. If I asked 100 people what they were seeking in life, their answers, I’ll bet, would all condense down to “power”. If we feel powerful, life feels good. Today at school, I know exactly where power comes from and how to tap into it. There will be 300 people at school – students, teachers, administrators, and various others – and all of them will be thinking at all times, and that will be the source of all power today. If you calculate that 300 people will be creating thoughts each moment for seven hours , that adds up to approximately 7, 500, 000 thoughts – each of them powerful enough to produce innumerable changes in the thinkers’ lives. It’s like an astonishing “thought machine” will be at work today, endlessly creating thoughts, which then create others, which in turn create others. In fact, it’s virtually impossible to calculate the effect these powerful thoughts have, since each thought in one person influences the thoughts in other people in subtle, immeasurable ways. All 300 of us will be riding on an endless river of thoughts today, going who knows where. We may pretend that power lies in money or friendships or physical health, but the truth is that it only exists inside each new-born thought. Today at school, I want to feel the vast river of thinking that will ceaselessly carry me, and all of us, along.