The Golden Rule is often said to encapsulate the essence of all religious teachings: “Love God with all your strength and love your neighbor as yourself” [1]. Within this rule, “love” signifies an act of intelligence grounded in true faith (Iman), an act of will to align with the truth of that faith, and an act of the heart to fully assimilate that truth. In this profound sense, love demands the complete participation of one’s being: intelligence, will, and heart alike.
What, then, is its connection to meditation? The answer depends entirely on how meditation is defined. If understood broadly as “the act or process of spending time in quiet thought” [2], then meditation bears no direct relation to the Golden Rule. However, the link becomes profoundly intimate when meditation is viewed from the traditionalist perspective as “contact between intelligence and Truth.” To grasp this meaning more fully, consider the following excerpt from a leading figure in this school of thought:
“Another mode of orison is meditation; contact between man and God here becomes contact between intelligence and Truth, or relative truths contemplated in the Absolute. … Meditation acts on the one hand upon the intelligence, in which it ‘awakens’ certain consubstantial ‘memories,’ and on the other hand upon the subconscious imagination, which ends up incorporating into itself the truth meditated upon, resulting in a fundamental and quasi-organic persuasion” [3].
From this passage, it is evident that meditation carries a vast and profound significance—far broader and deeper than standard dictionary definitions suggest. In other words, the common understanding of meditation has been degraded, stripped of the elements that evoke the divine. This degradation, as the traditionalists argue, applies to many key terms in religious metaphysics, including “intellect” [4].
What, then, is the role of meditation? From the traditionalist viewpoint, its primary function is to “open the soul”:
“The role of meditation is thus to open the soul, first to the grace that draws it away from the world, second to what brings it nearer to God, and third to what reintegrates it into God, if one may speak in this way; however, reintegration may be only a fixation in a given ‘beatific vision,’ that is, a still indirect participation in divine Beauty.”
If meditation pertains to Truth and the intelligence, then concentration pertains to the Way and the will. While meditation and concentration represent the respective “practices” of intelligence and will, what practice does prayer (Salat) embody? It can be seen as the practice of the heart or the soul. Together, meditation, concentration, and Salat vividly illuminate the spiritual life and its primary modes. Regarding Salat, the following reflection from Schuon merits deep contemplation:
“Prayer—in the widest sense—triumphs over four accidents of our existence: the world, life, the body, the soul; we might also say: space, time, matter, desire. It is situated like a shelter, like an islet. In it alone are we perfectly ourselves, because it puts us in the presence of God. It is like a diamond, which nothing can tarnish and nothing can resist [5]”.
Endnotes:
[1] In the Islamic context, this Golden Rule is formulated as the principle of maintaining the vertical bond with the Absolute (hablun min Allah) and the horizontal bond with fellow humans (hablun min al-nas). Degradation befalls anyone who neglects these two essential connections. Wa Allāhu a’lam.
[2] Merriam-Webster’s Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary.
[3] Frithjof Schuon, Prayer Fashions Man, “Modes of Prayer” (2005, p. 59).
[4] According to Merriam-Webster, intellect is “the ability to think in a logical way.” For traditionalists, its meaning is far broader: “at once a mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light” (See Valodia in Glossary of Terms Used by Frithjof Schuon, undated). [5] Frithjof Schuon, Prayer Fashions Man, “The Servant and Union” (2005, p. 182).
