Balance

"To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious."

-- Samuel Butler

Spirit requires a balance of female and male energy, yin and yang, receptiveness and expression. Are you sensitive to intuition and inner guidance? Are you able to act on the guidance you receive? Seek to find a balance in being and doing in all areas of your life.

"The balanced energy is the birthing energy. I used to say that the birthing energy was all feminine -- it’s not. You have to push and you have to be. It’s such a potent example of the dance of the feminine and masculine together, the dance that is the creative energy of life!"

-- Joyce Irvine

Peace

Let yourself relax into this moment.
Let yourself be held without any need to hold yourself up.
Let yourself meet the unknown.
It's OK. It's a place we don't have to know with our mind.

What if there were angels all around you
and you just couldn't see them?
What if there was a love so vast that you
could never be apart from it?
What if it was impossible for you to go
anywhere that this love could not find you?

You are entering the Beauty not far from your heart.
It's a place that embraces you as you are.
I trust that you will be met by a welcoming Presence
that knows you, and that meets you with a deeper love
than you have ever imagined in this world.
May you know, without any doubt
the precious gift that you are.
And may you be welcomed by a Presence so loving
that all fear subsides.

-Michael Stillwater

Go to the Desert

If the prophets did so, and if Jesus did so, we too must go out into the desert from time to time.

It is not a question of transporting oneself there physically. For many of us that could be a luxury. Rather, it implies creating a desert space in one's own life. And to create a desert means to seek solitude, to withdraw from men and things, one of the undisputed principles of mental health.

To create a desert means learning to be self-sufficient, learning to remain undisturbed with one's own thoughts, one's own prayer, one's own destiny.
It means shutting oneself up in one's room, remaining alone in an empty church, setting up a small oratory for oneself in an attic or at the end of a passage in which to localize one's personal contact with God, to draw breath, to recover one's inner peace. It means occasionally devoting a whole day to prayer, it means going off into the loneliness of the mountains, or getting up alone in the night to pray.

When all is said and done, creating a desert means nothing more than obeying God. Because there is a commandment -- arguably the most forgotten of all, especially by the "committed," by militants, by priests -- and even bishops -- which requires us to interupt our work, to put aside our daily tasks and seek the refreshing stillness of contemplation.

—Carlo Carretto, from In Search of the Beyond

Surrender

In separation from God you have become arrogant; pay heed before His scourge strikes you down. Do not exult because of your good fortune. Over and again God admonishes you with the examples of the transgressors before you. If you really want to enjoy the limitless bounty of Allah, surrender yourselves before His will and endure all afflictions with fortitude.

-Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jillani

The Practice of the Virtues

It is easy to separate out the practice of the virtues from contemplative prayer and assign them to two different categories: one the dimension of morality and the other that of spirituality. They are, however, not separate at all. Though they exist in different domains and along different axes, they are to be held together in each individual at the level of the heart for they depend upon one another. The great sacred traditions assert that the virtues, along the horizontal axis, are the means of knowledge, and as such they are declared to be "knowledge" because they are conducive to acquiring a vision of transcendent reality. Opposed to this are such opposites as pride, hypocrisy, cruelty, impatience, insincerity and the like. These are defined as "ignorance" and they blind the soul to Light and veil the Truth. Pride, for example, is not simply immoral, it is a spiritual dysfunction that affects the soul. The virtue of humility, on the other hand, is not exhausted as a pure moral category, it has above all a truly spiritual function--it prefigures the extinction of the "small self" and the realization of the greater Self, that manner of being that conforms with the highest Truth. Here, in space-time, we are asked to integrate these two as a living reality within ourselves.

First Cause?

What is the cause of the cosmos? Is it Brahman?
From where do we come? By what live?
Where shall we find peace at last?

What power governs the duality
Of pleasure and pain by which we are driven?

Time, nature, necessity, accident,
Elements, energy, intelligence--
None of these can be the First Cause.
They are effects, whose only purpose is
To help the self rise above pleasure and pain.

-Shvetashvatara Upanishad

Living in the Now

"Time is not a line, but a series of now points."

-- Taisen Deshimaru

We understand time as a continuum. Our memories link the moments of the past and our imaginations draw on the patterns of our memories to project the future.
If we leave the movies of the mind behind, time can only be experienced now -- moment by precious moment. Open in awareness to what is happening right now. Appreciate all that is. Immerse yourself in the joy and wonder of every now and life will be a gift.

"The responsibility for both present and future is in our own hands. If we live right today, then tomorrow has to be right."

-- Eknath Easwaran

God is Everywhere

Whatever takes form is false.
Only the formless endures.
When you understand
The truth of this teaching,
You will not be born again.
For God is infinite,
Within the body and without,
Like a mirror,
And the image in a mirror.
As the air is everywhere,
Flowing around a pot
And filling it,
So God is everywhere,
Filling all things
And flowing through them forever.

-Ashtavakra Gita

Armageddon and Holy War

Early Christianity and the teachings of Yeshua were born out of the prophetic tradition of visionary seeing and the ascent mysticism of Jewish apocalypticism. These early Jewish traditions remain strange and often unavailable to us. The typical way of interpreting them is to literalize the images and statements of Yeshua about them, putting them in a literal or historical context that we can then reify into a theological system. Fundamentalist Christianity has done this over and over again, and made, therefore, the average non-fundamentalist student of Scripture wary of the apocalyptic texts.

It is perhaps time, at this moment in history, to reexamine these texts and this tradition and reposition them in relationship to the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven beyond space and time to which Yeshua always referred. For example, rather than making Armageddon a future event in one of the valleys of Northern Israel, we might begin to see this as a symbol of a much more intense “holy war” taking place at this very moment within the spiritual body of humanity. Although the battle of Armageddon may be spoken of as an external event in the Book of Revelation, its true position, may be the great conflict that is currently being experienced internally and spiritually within individuals and within the collective body of spiritual humanity, which only becomes externalized when it is not inwardly resolved. What we are entering in history, therefore, may be in fact an acceleration of this form of consciousness that will naturally result in greater external conflicts than we have ever known before.

The Prophet Within

Sever the chains of the ego. Set yourself free and witness the bright essence of your inner being. Discover within your heart the wisdom of a prophet without books, without teachers, and without prudence.

-Rumi

Growing from adversity

"Yet it is so basic in us to feel that things should go well for us, and that if we start to feel depressed, lonely, or inadequate, there's been some kind of mistake or we've lost it. In reality, when you feel depressed, lonely, betrayed or any unwanted feelings, this is an important moment on the spiritual path. This is where real transformation can take place.

As long as we're caught up in always looking for certainty and happiness, rather than honoring the taste and smell and quality of exactly what is happening, as long as we're always running away from discomfort, we're going to be caught in a cycle of unhappiness and disappointment, and we will feel weaker and weaker. This way of seeing helps us to develop inner strength.

And what's especially encouraging is the view that inner strength is available to us at just the moment when we think we've hit bottom, when things are at their worst. Instead of asking ourselves, "How can I find security and happiness?", we could ask ourselves "Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine, without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache of loss or disgrace--disappointment in all its many forms--and let it open me?" This is the trick.

Pema Chodron

Meditation

You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait,
be quiet, still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked,
it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

—Franz Kafka

Always Question

Don't cling to your own understanding. Even if you do understand something, you should ask yourself if there might be something you have not fully resolved, or if there may be some higher meaning yet.

-Dogen

First

Love yourself and be awake-
Today, tomorrow, always.
First establish yourself in the way,
Then teach others,
And so defeat sorrow.
To straighten the crooked
You must first do a harder thing-
Straighten yourself.
You are your only master.
Who else?
Subdue yourself,
And discover your master.

-from the Dhammapada

Gide

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.


What seems different in yourself; that's the rare thing you possess. The one thing that gives each of us our worth, and that's just what we try to suppress. And we claim to love life.

..André Gide

The Gift

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind
is a faithful servant. We have created a society that
honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

-- Albert Einstein

“Everything is made of light; everything is alive. The Great Mystery of life has little to do with intelligence. The universe is not an intellectual process. The intellect is helpful; but our hearts are the wiser part of ourselves.”

-- Mellen-Thomas Benedict