It is the desert's spaciousness and timelessness which make it so different from all other places and so attractive to those seeking a suitable environment to practise meditation. There is no hurry and no worry among its dwellers. Here is the place where people can most quickly shed superficial baggage and find the essentials of being. Among the Oriental mystics especially, it is regarded as expansive to the mind and therefore helpful to meditate gazing before an expanse of water or of desert. Alone in the immensity of a desert, the sensitive mind easily yet indescribably feels itself taken out of time, brought into the eternal Now. The stillness of desert life and the openness of the landscape contribute towards a gradual and natural stilling of the thoughts. Or perhaps it is because the procession of events is stilled here that the procession of thoughts about them is also stilled. Here the human intruder begins to comprehend, intuitively rather than intellectually, what eternal life means, what inner peace means. Here amid sunshine and silence, petty feelings, negative thoughts, animal desires begin to lose their hold and their vitality. The mystic and the ascetic have since the earliest times been associated with the desert. Its own austere face, its harsh, rocky, sparse, cactus-grown wastes, its rough, arid, comfortless, jumbled surface fit it well with the rigid ideals of these human types. Moses at Sinai, Jesus in Syria, Muhammed in Arabia, Saint Simeon in Egypt--all felt, knew, and tapped the desert's silent power for their own and for humanity's profit.
-- Notebooks Category 4: Elementary Meditation > Chapter 2 : Place and Condition > # 116
