Responsible work is an embodiment of love, and love is the only discipline that will serve in shaping the personality, the only discipline that makes the mind whole and constant for a lifetime of effort. There hovers about a true vocation that paradox of all significant self-knowledge -- our capacity to find ourselves by losing ourselves. We lose ourselves in our love of the task before us and, in that moment, we learn an identity that lives both within and beyond us.
Nicholas of Cusa described human creativity as a participation in the act of God creating the cosmos. God creates the cosmos, we create the microcosmos, the "human world". As we do our daily work, make our homes and marriages, raise our children, and fabricate a culture, we are all being creative... The ultimate work is an engagement with soul, responding to the demands of fate and tending the details of life as it presents itself. We may get to a point where our external labors and the OPUS of the soul are one and the same, inseparable. Then the satisfactions of our work will be deep and long lasting, undone neither by failures nor by flashes of success.
Act without doing,
work without effort.
Think of the small as large
and the few as many.
Confront the difficult
while it is still easy;
accomplish the great task
by a series of small acts.
The master never reaches for the great
thus she achieves greatness.
When she runs into a difficulty,
she stops and gives herself to it.
She doesn't cling to her own comfort;
thus problems are no problem for her.
Contemplation is an excellent practice for integrating our meditations into everyday life... Simply reading one line of something inspirational each morning can provide excellent material for contemplation if we design a practice that helps to encourage contemplative moments throughout the day... For people in a busy, active environment, it is perhaps the most accessible spiritual practice. A few moments of contemplation can be accomplished even in the middle of a business meeting. This experience is not like a passing daydream, but affects the quality of life, deepening our spiritual connections, drawing us into reflection and constant realization of the soul's quest to be at one with its divine source at all times and in all places.
Contemplation is not something that is done alongside or before and after our everyday action. It's the doing itself that is contemplation because you yourself are so united with God that you are simply living the divine life; you are God living and doing you in the world. You are God's manifestation ... a movement of consciousness from God, with God, in God, as God, out in the world, a movement in which the divine conscious and my conscious, flowing together, stream out in love and in creative, healing, beautifying energy to create the world and to make it ever better.
A story of three brick masons illustrates the great difference our attitude toward our work makes:
The first person, when asked what he was building, replied gruffly, without even looking up, "I'm laying bricks."
The second person answered, "I'm building a wall."
But the third person said enthusiastically and with obvious pride and wonder, "I'm building a cathedral."
TO WORK IS TO PRAY
The work you do out of love without a thought of reward is the work of God.
A job is what we do for money;
Work is what we do for love.
May the stars carry your sadness away,
May the flowers fill your heart with beauty,
May hope forever wipe away your tears,
And, above all, may silence make you strong.
I gazed across the swamp, its beauty overwhelming. I prayed for guidance, then slipped deep into the realm of silence, still not sure as to where I was going or what I was searching for. It did not take too long to reach deep into the quietude of the sacred silence, and in a flash of clarity all body and mind were gone. I emerged into the dazzling brilliance of the swamp in full light. In my imagination the swamp took on a new feel, a feel that reached into the consciousness of my very soul, purifying and healing. All around me was the flow of life ... green carpets of moss, tranquil pools full of frogs and fish, choruses and movements of all manner of birds, other animals dancing to the rhythm of the Earth, and a sense of beauty the like of which I had never experienced before.
I am the breeze that nourishes all things green
I encourage blossoms to flourish with
ripening fruits ...
I am the yearning for good.
Speak to me of serenity, of treasures yet to be found, of peace that flows like a river. Tell me of tranquil places that no hand has marred, no storm has scarred. Give me visions of standing in sunlight or the feeling of spring mist against my cheek as I live and move and breathe. Show me paths that wind through wild lilies and beds of buttercups. Sing me songs like the mingled voices of wrens and meadowlarks, the lowing of gentle cows, the soft mother-call of a mare to her colt. Lead me past a glass-smooth pond where frogs croak of coming-out parties, their graduation from frisky tadpoles to squat green frogs. Find me a place in the sunlight to sit and think and listen to the sweet inner voice that says so quietly, "Peace, be still."
God's creation is to be experienced in the rhythm of our lives, which I see as: exoteric -- the mechanical, habitual body needs (human-made time); mesoteric -- that which we do with intention, awareness ... the pressure is gone, we slow down; and esoteric -- here we meet God, experience the gift and beauty of life with gratitude. Such moments are filled with awe and silence, without limit or measure ... all pressure, tension, worry, and unnessary suffering is gone. What a rich moment is God's Moment, what a rich time is God's time.
In THE SNOW LEOPARD, Peter Matthiesen describes his son, Alex:
In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for near an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying, birdsong and sweet smell of privet and rose. The child was not observing; he was at rest in the very center of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginnings, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through.
There is no art to wandering. If I have a destination, a plan -- and objective -- I've lost the ability to find serendipity... I search for the Holy Grail of particularity and miss the chalice freely offered, filled full and overwhelming.
So much of life we all pass by
With heedless ear and careless eye.
Bent with our cares, we plod along,
Blind to the beauty, deaf to the song.
But moments there are when we pause to rest
And turn our eyes from the goal's far crest.
We become aware of the wayside flowers,
And sense God's hand in this world of ours.
The sun flecks gold through the sheltering trees,
And we shoulder our burdens with twice the ease.
Peace and contentment and a world that sings
The moment of true awareness brings.
The more sensitive we are to the interdependence of things, the more we see how the quality of our own lives affects not only the people we actually meet but also all beings... In this mysterious universe of subtle and vast interconnections, each one of our actions is as delicate and far-reaching as the butterfly flapping its wings. And the freer we are from greed, hatred and ignorance, the more our lives will be for the benefit of all. Reflecting on that fact can infuse our meditation practice and our lives with spaciousness and love as we travel this ancient and contemporary path.
The rock strengthens me.
The river rushing through me
Cleanses
Insists
That I keep moving toward
A distant light
A quiet place
Where I can be
Continuous
And in rhythm with
The song of summer
That you have given me.
If we are going to care for the soul, and if we know that the soul is nurtured by beauty, then we will have to understand beauty more deeply and give it a more relevant place in life.
I woke up from a dream several years ago and wrote the words, "God is a singing sound in the heart of silence." ... Silence is not an absence. It is a presence. Listen to the bird. Its sound comes from and returns to silence. Trees are surrounded by silence. They grow from silence. All things in nature are children of silence... At the core of my being there is an open road, and three words to guide me, TRUSTING/BREATHING/ATTENDING. Trusting that the universe is a friendly place. Breathing from the deepest part of myself. Attending to the process of becoming. These three guiding words of wisdom call me to travel the open road. To attend, breathe and trust in the heart of silence. To listen for the singing sound of God.
When I sing I feel ecstatic, as if in communion with God. Maybe, when I sing, that's when I feel and experience it most in my life -- that lack of separation from God... I think that a song, if you allow it into your heart, can remind you that you are whole, that you are not just a fragment, but everything. If people sing, if they let themselves really sing, they can feel that inside... No matter who you are, if you sing from deep within you, transformation happens. A song, whether you are singing or listening, can let your heart open to the spiritual world.
Music is always in the air, particularly at night, for nature (being born of it) is necessarily more sensitive at night to the beautiful.
Late that afternoon I listened to Thomas Tallis's SPEM IN ALIUM, a motet written in the 16th century for forty voice, forty separate parts... I was sitting in my chair looking at Ma's photograph as I listened. At once, as the music began, the photograph started to emit great waves of Light. The Light possessed my mind and body, and I heard the music not without me but within my heart.
Her voice: In my stillness all the voices of the world rise in ecstasy. In my silence all the voices of the world are reconciled.
Each voice in the sublime motet sang in perfectly lucid ecstatic harmony with every other voice, forming endlessly changing transforming masses of illumined ripe sound.
In the new creation souls will sing together like this.
I heard spiral after spiral of ascending glorious sound rise calmly, with a passion at once detached and supremely intense, from its bed of Silence, rise, commingle in bliss, and finally culminate in the vast prolonged cry of Light on Light at the end of the work, a cry that does not end but seems to reverberate throughout the cosmos forever.
Dr. Eaglefield Hull describes Scriabin's attitude to music: His first symphony is a "Hymn to Art" and joins hands with Beethoven's Ninth. His third, the "Divine Poem", expresses the spirit's liberation from its earthly trammels and the consequent free expression of purified personality; while his "Poem of Ecstasy" voices the highest of all joys -- that of creative work. He held that in the artists' incessant creative activity, the constant progression towards the ideal, the spirit alone truly lives.
My musical productions came into existence through understanding and pain. Those which pain has brought forth seem to please the world most ... (out of pain comes new birth ... new life).
Within this life we live and have our being; this is the power, the wisdom and the love in which we are encompassed. And yet bodily we remain in shadow because we are clothed in the darkness of the earth. But no one need ever remain a prisoner; it only requires the will to aspire and so to know the wisdom of the divine -- and the prisoner is free! And so we ascend in spirit, and being raised, we then step forth into a life heavenly in its beauty and are encompassed by a heavenly concourse... We may become conscious of music -- delicate, gentle, sweet music beyond all description -- which may swell in grand crescendo to embrace the great universal music of all creation. And we know that we are part of this grand orchestra.
Mystics and contemplatives offer a perspective on resurrection that seems to mirror their own experiences of illumination and unity. They tell us that perhaps regeneration is effected through a profound state of self-reflection, possible only to those who have become transparent to transcendence and are coded by that experience with a quality of eternity that does not, cannot, die with death. This implies that a new order has been created within spirit, within nature, within the soul, within the meaning and matter of history. Here we move out beyond miracle into the heart of mystery, and consciousness grows into the capacity for co-creation with God. The world turns a corner, and true partnership between divine and human realms becomes possible.
To become proficient in the discipline of contemplation, we must be willing to live in the midst of paradox. For we can only know the Mystery by letting go of knowing, and by putting aside our reason, our thinking, our too quick words. We must sit still, doing nothing at all. We must wait, allowing things to reveal themselves to us, and seek by allowing ourselves to be sought. In contemplation we must take Thou in by allowing ourselves to be taken in. By doing these things, we will gradually become "modern" contemplatives and find ourselves living at the still point of the turning world.
What is offered to the seeker of today is the same as it was before. The same luminous inner light, the same fathomless tranquility, that same drink which deeply quenches, that explosive, boundless love from the source of Love beyond, that same handhold with hundreds of thousands of messengers of light, that same blessed transmission being extended from the unfailing generosity of God. The ante remains as it has always been: the surrender of everything entirely, including one's very self. What is at stake, however, is greater than ever before. If you have understood this invitation my friends, if your heart has heard the calling of a traveler just like you, then take heed now and make haste as the saints have urged.
Wherever the Word is to be heard, it must occur in the stillness and in silence... There we can hear it and understand it correctly, in that state of unknowing. Where we know nothing, it becomes apparent and reveals Itself... People should be as free of their own knowledge as when they were not yet, letting God accomplish what God wills ... standing empty.
I wanted it. Desired it greatly. Yearned for its coming. But when it did come, I fought, resisted, ran, hid away. I said, "Go home!" I didn't know the fire of God could be more than a gentle glow or a cozy consolation. I didn't know it could come in as a blaze ... a wildfire uncontrolled, searing my soul, chasing my old ways, smoking them out. Only when I stopped running, gave up the chase, surrendered, did I know the fire's flaming as consolation and joy. Only then could I welcome the One whose fire I had long sought.
If you would know deeper dimensions of yourself and the Divine, my friend, befriend the Silence.
I have a feeling that my boat has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing. And nothing happens! Nothing ...
Silence ... Waves ...
Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
The Great Mystery will draw closer and begin to reveal some of her secrets in silence. We hope, in the emptying that silence is, to discover a way of being present to what happens and to what is. To be totally open to apprehend the full impact of each moment and each encounter, the heart must be set free from all prejudices, pre-conceptions and expectations. The silence at the center of our reflections here is for emptying and for letting go of the images and knowledge that obscure the vision of our hearts and our ability to truly hear.
Conversation is the ultimate experience of being in love. It involves self-surrender to the heart of mystery, to an uncomprehended "Who", given in a mystical way. The shift in our attention from all finite loves and hates, whether interpersonal, familial or philanthropic to concern for the Transcendent Other, available in the unmediated experience of love and awe, occurs first in that incarnate meaning that we are. We discover by God's gracious love, we are a meaningful word already spoken, a beloved whose very being is the expression of God's turning toward us. In essence, our conversion toward God is the created effect of divine love. We could not pray if God was not already invested in our hearts and mind.
The heart knows what the tongue
will never utter
and what the ears can never hear.
Place your MIND before the mirror of eternity!
Place your SOUL in the brilliance of glory!
Place your HEART in the figure of the divine substance!
And transform your entire being in the image of the Godhead Itself through contemplation.
Only by learning silence, solitude, and emptying can you find the place where the roots of all living things are tied together.
God is the friend of silence. See how nature -- trees, flowers, grass -- grow in silence; see the stars, the moon, the sun, how they move in silence... The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us. All our words will be useless unless they come from within.
My first remembered experience of the numinous occurred when I was barely three... The sun was shining, and as I walked along the dusty lane I became acutely aware of the things around me. I noticed a group of dandelions on my left at the base of a stone wall. Most of them were in full bloom, their golden heads irradiated by the sun, and suddenly I was overcome by an extraordinary feeling of wonder and joy. It was as if I was part of the flowers, and stones and dusty earth. I could feel the dandelions pulsating in the sunlight, and a timeless unity with all life.
Many of us need the wilderness as a place to listen to the quiet, to feel at home with ancient rhythms that are absent in city life, to know the pulse of a river, the riffle of the wind, the rataplan of rain on the slickrock.
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, intelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen.
We can only start to grow in being when we take time to be still, even if it is only a few minutes each day, and open ourselves to God, like a flower opening its pedals to the sun, and receiving the strengthening rays of light. With continual practice, we can actually know that the spirit of Divine Love -- the Love of the omniscient creator of the entire universe -- is in us. ... Being still and experiencing the presence of God is the most important thing we can possibly do; for in this state of passivity we receive directive and strength for the day's action.
Spirit that hears each one of us,
hears all that is --
Listens, listens, hears us out --
inspire us now!
Our own pulse beats in every
stranger's throat.
And also within the flowered ground
beneath our feet.
We can hear it in water, in wood, and
even in stone.
We are earth of this earth, and
we are bone of this bone.
This is a prayer I sing, for we
have forgotten this and so
the earth is perishing.
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the "Universe", a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
There are three walls that divide us from one another and from the realization of Unity for which we yearn... These are the walls of envy, resentment and pride... Everything is reaching towards the light, and just as the trees and the beautiful flowers seek out the light, so does Beauty herself seek out the light within us. As long as Beauty is covered by these walls, She cannot be one with the Light who created Her in the first place... When you can watch and observe and be honest about the sense of separation that we all feel, you will come closer to the walls. And then, gently, you can reach out to each stone and brick that needs to be removed ... stones and bricks that can be washed and transformed in love.
George Leonard in THE SILENT PULSE shares the sense of unity and harmony with the planet that a young man of seventeen experienced:
"Even though physically separate, I knew a tree, grains of sand, sea, flying birds. Everything was God, holy; as God is total, so the driftwood branch was holy. This must be the stuff religion is made of. Never before or after have I felt so alive."
Spirituality is that quality of being that expresses the bonding of all living and non-living things into an evolutionary unity.
The wisdom of the peoples of elder cultures can make an important contribution to the post-modern world, one that we must begin to accept as the crisis of self, society and the environment deepens. This wisdom cannot be told, but it is to be found by each of us in the direct experience of silence, stillness, solitude, simplicity, ceremony and vision.