Listening

Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything. He felt that he had now completely learned the art of listening. He had often heard all this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. He could no longer distinguish the different voices — the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and the groan of the dying. They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life. When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om — perfection.

“Do you hear?” asked Vasudeva’s glance once again.

Vasudeva’s smile was radiant; it hovered brightly in all the wrinkles of his old face, as the Om hovered over all the voices of the river. His smile was radiant as he looked at his friend, and now the same smile appeared on Siddhartha’s face. His wound was healing, his pain was dispersing; his Self had merged into unity.

From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer confronted with conflict of desires, who had found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of all things.

— Herman Hesse from Siddhartha

Knowing God

The mind's highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind's highest virtue is to know God.

- Spinoza

Living in the Now

Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts: in full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowledge of God

The ultimate result of your knowledge of God should be the conviction that of His real essence you are completely ignorant.

- Bahya

Perfection

The spiritual perfection of man consists in his becoming an intelligent being--one who knows all that he is capable of learning.

- Maimonides

Unity

The moon is one, but on agitated water it produces many reflections. Similarly ultimate reality is one, yet it appears to be many in a mind agitated by thoughts.

-Maharamayana

Our Work

One could make the case that our basic work here on earth is to become carriers and conduits of an other-worldly power and ingredient necessary for the free-flow of the life-blood of the world. We might be tempted to dismiss this idea as too prosaic when we hear that this essential element is "grace," but we would be wrong. Grace is the dynamic energy of divine loving-kindness as an unconditional and eternal acceptance directed toward the fundamental core of our being. That core is God-given, and to acknowledge it and respect it, and stand with it, is something which liberates us. This relationship, of course, is already ours (and all humanity's), but our human need is that we experience it directly and demonstrate it in the way we are with others.

In every human being there are blockages of self-doubt and self-judgment clogging the circulatory systems of the soul which in the end bring dis-ease. In our work with others we can extend unconditional love, grace, and loving-kindness not only toward the whole range of human experience that an individual has known, but more specifically, we can honor the divine core of that person. When we connect with the basic goodness implanted in a human soul, this begins to penetrate the clouds of self-doubt and self-judgment so that an individual's life-energy begins to flow again. In the power of that element a person feels fundamentally known, understood, accepted.

We are here to forge such alliances with the foundations of the human soul in ourselves and in others. This is our primary work, which, as John Welwood has said in Toward A Psychology of Awakening, allows an individual to meet and go through whatever they are experiencing, as difficult and as horrifying as that might be.