The Oneness of each to all through God is real, objective, existential. It is an eternal relationship which is shared in by every stick and stone and bird and beast and saint and sinner of the universe. On all, the wooing love of God falls urgently, persuadingly.
Creation separates the many from the One.
Spiritual evolution reunites the many with the One.
O, Blessed Peacemaker
You make your Home in our hearts
as Loving Companion Presence.
With unreserved, radical trust,
our path is made sure.
Bonded in Love, we become empowered
to serve with mercy and justice:
One with You…
One with All.
Blessed are You, O Life of our lives.
The thoughts of the earth are my thoughts.
The voice of the earth is my voice.
All that belongs to the earth belongs to me.
All that surrounds the earth surrounds me.
It is lovely indeed, it is lovely indeed.
The Spirit in all
when all become One,
Peace reigning on earth.
May we all attend to reuniting our heads, hearts, and hands, taking time to be receptive, suspending judgment, and awaiting patiently for insights that arise, unbidden. May we practice being still and really listening – to ourselves, to each other, and to the gentle whispers of the living intelligences of the natural world.
If we can do that, we will build a contagious energy that will ultimately lead to real healing and restoration – the restoration of our wholeness, as a global community – of our deep and fundamental interdependence and Oneness with each other, other species and the whole interwoven web of creation.
I long for the day when the statement,
"Our God is love, our race is human,
and our religion is Oneness,"
is more than the musings of my mind,
but is the creed of the heart of the human family.
It may seem difficult to believe that a simple culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness and Oneness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.
When all things return to the One, even gold loses its value.
But when the One returns to all things, even the pebbles sparkle.
. . And everything comes to One
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.
The word integrity has two meanings. The first is "honesty. "We have to be honest in facing our limitations, in facing the sheer complexity of the world, honest in facing criticism even of things which are deeply precious to us. Integrity also means wholeness, Oneness, the desire for a single vision, the refusal to split our minds into separate compartments where incompatible ideas are not allowed to come into contact. An undivided mind looks in the end for an undivided truth, a Oneness at the heart of things. The whole quest for integrity presupposes that in the end we are all encountering a single reality and a single truth.
The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. And only those who listen can speak authentically.
A listening heart is always open, sensitive to the joy and pain of others, offering a space within itself for the other to enter. It gives each person what is so badly needed – an affirmation of their place in this world.
If we think we hear,
we no longer listen.
If we think we see,
we no longer look.
If we think we know,
we no longer search.
Twenty-five years of listening to stories of pain in individuals' lives have taught me many important lessons. Perhaps the most important is the art of listening. If I reduce the pain I hear to a static moment or try to freeze it with my understanding, then I interrupt a process which always has a deeper meaning embedded within it. Pain is a messenger, a strange winged visitor that asks us to pay attention and listen beyond our usual preoccupations and concerns.
Listen to old stones for information about survival. What a seashell has to say will surprise you. So, too, will words written on the wind. Listening to silence is hardest of all. You want to fill it up with conversation ... distractions ... noise. Resist the impulse. In silence, you can dream great dreams. You can discover your own music. Listening means hearing the voice within you. It never fails to tell you the truth, even if you don't want to hear it.
Listening is a lost art that can be gracefully recovered
in silence and solitude.
With a quiet mind, a heart still and silent,
You will see the infinity of God
And the finity of self.
Humility will embrace you,
and you will fade into
that which is all that is.
Your words will be few; the silence great.
There is room then for
listening.
Ecclesiastes 5:12
We say we aren't listening to ourselves in the name of consideration for others. But this is a false premise because we can't really listen to others until we learn to listen, exquisitely listen, and TO ABIDE by our own heart.
Listening has to do with awareness. Hearing is easy; listening is difficult. Few of us recognize that listening is an ability and not an instinct. As such, it is an act that has to be learned. To listen is to be sensitive to reality. Good listeners live in the moment and pay attention to what is going on in the here-and-now ... a listening that is beyond words.
You, neighbor God, when I disturb with heavy raps
your quiet during a lonely night,
it is because I rarely hear You breathe,
though know: You're in your room alone.
And while in need, there's no one there to bring
your groping hand a drink. But I
am listening. Just give me a sign.
I am close by.
If we really want to pray, we must first learn to listen,
for in the silence of the heart, God speaks.
Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the Unseen singing softly to itself and you.
Those who are learned love to talk about what they know; and as they know much, they talk much. Yet to hear God, they must LISTEN. The learned often make a storage room of their mind, where so much is stored that there is no room left for God to enter and dwell in it ... The learned like to argue for the sake of arguing. It becomes a game, and in the end they love the argument and miss the opportunity to hear God.
Most people need to know that they have been heard. Listen to their body, their eyes, to the colors they are wearing. If you really want to hear someone, open your heart and listen to their soul.
As a young man just 25 years old, the reality that my father was dying gave me the strength to find silence again. I spent uncounted afternoons by his side talking and listening to pure sound, not noise. He told me to be my own man. He helped me recognize the noise so I could stop listening to it. His dying pushed it away and created a space where silence could bloom and thrive. And in that silence, perhaps for the first time since I was five, I heard the voice of my spirit. It told me what I value. It showed me my weaknesses, illuminated my strengths, and gave me the clarity to decide for myself how I ought to live.
I believe the noise of our world is killing people, stifling spirits, and limiting the potential of humanity ... I believe there is a person inside all of us that needs to be heard.
Love in action is the answer to every problem in our lives and in this world. Love in action is the force that helped us make it to this place, and it's the truth that will set us free.
There is a love that is at the core of creation, a love that is born of oneness and carries the sacred interrelationship of all life. This love is alive within the hearts of those who love the Source of all life; its music is the song of the soul and the hidden purpose of creation. There is a wonder in this love, as well as a terror and beauty. Its wonder and terror come from its unconstricted nature, its limitless freedom; its beauty is a reflection of the face of God.
Nor can that endure
Which has not its foundations upon love,
For love alone diminishes not, but shines with its own light,
Makes an end of discord, softens the fires of hate,
Restores peace in the world,
Brings together the sundered, redresses wrong,
Aids all and injures none.
And who so invokes its aid will find peace and safety,
And have no fear of future ill.
"What is love, my friends?" he asked, opening his arms as though he wished to embrace us. "What is love? It is not simply compassion, not simply kindness. In compassion there are two: the one who suffers and the one who feels compassion. In kindness there are two: the one who gives and the one who receives. But in love there is only one; the two join, unite, become inseparable. The I and the you vanish. To love means to lose oneself in the beloved. "
Each individual who conquers the panic of their nightmare, who faces up to the terror of evil, and thereby discovers a goodness which heals and cannot be destroyed, brings fresh love into the world. The deepening of their capacity for love will first heal their own wound, and then go further, extending its gentle influence upon family, friends, and out to the world.
Be silent.
Be still.
Your God only wants to
Look upon you
With love.
Quiet. Still be.
Let your God ... Love you.
We are made for loving. If we don't love,
we will be like plants without water.
Listen, my heart: love God ceaselessly
As the fish loveth water:
The deeper the water
The happier and more tranquil the fish.
God alone knoweth the suffering
Of fish separated from the waters.
I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day,
with the consequence
of love.
The state of love communion is simply the state of joining within with one another, heart to heart.It is an experience of the other as myself. When I meet you in my own heart, there is nowhere else I have to go. As long as we both remain in our hearts, our joining continues. When we move out of our hearts, we simply move away. And coming together does not mean reaching out after you, but reaching within myself to find the place where we are connected.
She loved Botswana, which was good place, and she loved those with whom she lived and worked. She had so much love to give – she had always felt that – and now there was someone to whom she could give this love, and that, she knew was good; for that is what redeems us, that is what makes our pain and sorrow bearable – this giving of love to others, this sharing of the heart.
We are placed on this earth for a little space of
time to learn to bear the beams of Love.
Each person who enters our life, every experience we have, is a teacher. Some things we learn amaze us, some trouble us. Everyone we have loved has become a part of us ... And no relationship created in love can ever die.
Blessing offers us a personal consciousness-raising practice, a spiritual adventure bringing sensitivity and gratitude into the foreground of our lives. While we all have moments when a blessing rises spontaneously to our lips, the path of blessing can become a way of life. Through the practice of blessing we develop an ever-deepening receptivity to the abundant love and joy flowing through creation. We learn to accept that love, absorb it into our souls, and offer it back to the Source with joy. In this way we come to feel the Presence of God move within us and through us.
Stillness is tranquility of the inner life, the quiet at the depths of its hidden stream. Stillness is a collected, total presence, a being all there, receptive, alert, ready.
Stillness is not a technique, but rather a lifestyle which arises from a personal commitment to take up citizenship in the internal world and a willingness to pay attention to the age-old question, "Who am I?" The best tool we have to begin this inward journey is the breath. As we begin to reclaim our birthright of a deep, smooth, even, diaphragmatic breath, the physical feeling of stillness begins to touch both the body and mind. The more we embrace a lifestyle of stillness, the less time we spend being tossed by the wind.
To concentrate without effort,
to transform work into play,
I must be still and hold
a zone of Silence in my soul.
The silence of the storm dominated everything. There are no words to describe a quiet so potent. I knew the snow was echoing a stillness that exists, hidden, in everything. I do not understand how I suddenly knew this, but the knowledge filled me. I saw that this stillness generates all life. And sitting there in the snow, I wept at the profound sound and power of that silence. It was hard to witness its beauty, knowing I'd lived many years never suspecting it was there.
To return back into ourselves, there are three things needed, for which you don't require a computer, television or radio: the first is a bit of stillness. Nothing can happen without a certain stillness. We also need silence. There is nothing so vocal and articulate as silence; all good language, all great words, are born of it. And the third thing we need is solitude. We need to acknowledge that solitude is an invitation to the soul to come alive. Solitude is utterly luminous if we lose our fears and begin to enter it more deeply.
In stillness we add a grace and a benediction to our lives. For a short period, through a daily practice, we choose to create an interval where we are in communication with Spirit. In this holy stillness we find the deep peace we most need and want in our lives. To be still with the attention in the heart ... all other things are beside the point.