Monday, November 29, 2010

Not Knowing

not knowing what her heart felt,
she dumped her beliefs all over the floor.
before she could sort thru them,
the strong ones leaped right back
into her hands.

~terri st. cloud

Saturday, November 20, 2010

The Importance on Not Knowing

"You are one. You are pure awareness. The world is not real. It is cold and lifeless. Nor is ignorance real. So what can you wish to know?"

~Ashtavakra Gita


"Wisdom comes out in the village of infinite nothingness; spirituality is found in the realm of unfathomability."

~Fa-Yen

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Make holy what we do

"It is not what we do that makes us holy,
but we ought to make holy what we do."
--Meister Eckhart

Monday, November 15, 2010

The Sense of Union

In introducing a section of his translation of Rumi's poetry, Colman Barks makes the case that the reason we feel the sense of separation from God so poignantly is because we have already known union with God elsewhere, before we came into time. We have this sense of inner longing and pain that Rumi breathed through his reed-flute song in the opening verse of the massive volume of poetry known as the Mathnawi, because we carry within us the after-taste of divine union. Earlier, in the last century, Karl Barth noted that we suffer because we bear within ourselves an invisible world, finding that this unobservable inner world is met by the tangible, outer world with its dislocations and jostling fragments, which, though it feels powerful, is somehow “foreign” and strangely menacing, even hostile, at times (especially as it is expressed in its human articulation). Because of the “aftertaste” of union, everything else is pale (and even painful) by comparison. There is awakened in us, perhaps only as a fleeting realization, that the outer world cannot give us what we are really looking for or need. Only a strengthening inner world, opening to the Infinite, will suffice.

Useful Analogy

"The Vedas compare creation to a spider's web that the spider creates and then lies within. God is both the container of the universe and what is contained in it."

~Ramakrishna

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

He is nearer...than our awareness

Lift up your heart to Him, sometimes even at your meals,
and when you are in company; the least little remembrance
will always be acceptable to Him. You need not cry very
loud; he is nearer to us than we are aware of.
... Brother Lawrence (c.1605-1691),
"The Practice of the Presence of God"

Friday, November 05, 2010

Ultimate Reality or Relative Absolute?

This description from Aurobindo seems to have elements of both:

"The one original transcendent Shakti, the Mother, stands above all the worlds and bears in her eternal consciousness the Supreme Divine. Alone, she harbors the absolute Power and the ineffable Presence; containing or calling the Truths that have to be manifested, she brings them down from the Mystery in which they were hidden into the light of her infinite consciousness and gives them a form of force in her omnipotent power and her boundless life and a body in the universe."

~Sri Aurobindo

He who made us what we are

When my body is pained, it is not wrong to wish for relief. When overtaken by sickness, it is not wrong to send for the physician. You may call this selfishness, which He who made us what we are,
and who gave us these instincts, expects us to act upon; and in acting on which, we may count upon his blessing, not his rebuke. It is not wrong to dread hell, to desire heaven, to flee from
torments, to long for blessedness, to shun condemnation, and to desire pardon.
- Horatius Bonar

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Spiritual practice

"The highest form of spiritual practice, for those of us who aspire to create Heaven on Earth, is our relationship with one another. That means being willing to sacrifice anything and everything so that the intersubjective world of our shared culture becomes the stage on which the spiritual reality of who we really are, beyond our separate egos, come to the fore. Think about it: if Spirit always comes before self, then the self that we are will always manifest as Spirit first. What could be more important than this if we want to change our world?

~Andrew Cohen

Perspective

"Human fallibility being what it is, victory and truth do not always go together. Therefore, if you have to always win, you can't always be true."

~Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

The challenge of the saints

"The challenge of the saints of the twenty-first century is to
begin again to comprehend the sacred in the ten thousand things of
our world; to reverence what we have come to view as ordinary and
devoid of spirit."
-- Edward Hays in "Secular Sanctity"

Monday, November 01, 2010

An internal vision of divine goodness

"For centuries the church has confronted the human community with role models of
greatness. We call them saints when what we really often mean to say is 'icon,'
'star,' 'hero,' ones so possessed by an internal vision of divine goodness that they
give us a glimpse of the face of God in the center of the human. They give us a taste
of the possibilities of greatness in ourselves."
-- Joan D. Chittister, in "A Passion for Life"