The work comes to the artist and says, "Here I am, serve me." The artist must be obedient to the work.
The work comes to the artist and says, "Here I am, serve me." The artist must be obedient to the work.
Most of us put a great deal of times into work, not only because we have to work so many hours to make a living, but because work is central to the soul's OPUS. We are crafting ourselves -- individuating. Work is fundamental to the OPUS because the whole point of life is the fabrication of the soul.
Watching these people and the way they interacted with each other, I could not help but be impressed. But there was another feeling, difficult to define. Was I possibly jealous of this Quechua family? There was no denying that I who had never known poverty or hunger felt, if not jealous, at least envy for their ability to enjoy so completely each other, their work, the meager food and homes they shared, and all that was around them. I had learned that Andean Indians often talk to nature. It is not uncommon to hear a man or woman murmur words of greeting to a bird, flower, or cloud. Such things are a part of their lives and the source of immense pleasure. Was it possible that these people knew something I did not understand? Could I learn from the Quechua what my own culture and background had failed to teach?
The idea of worship in work was at once a doctrine and a daily discipline. The ideal was variously expressed that secular achievements should be as "free from error" as conduct, that manual labor was a type of religious ritual, that godliness should illuminate life at every point.
Infinite silence is the mind of God. It is a mind that can create anything out of the field of pure potentiality. Infinite silence contains infinite dynamism. Practice silence and you will acquire silent knowledge. In this silent knowledge is a computing system that is far more precise and far more accurate and far more powerful than anything that is contained in the boundaries of rational thought.
May we learn to unite the stress of our labors and the re-creation of our leisure into a kind of restful sacred work!
ORGANIC is a word I'll stick by. It means the work is an extension of your blood and body; it has the rhythm of nature. This is something artists don't talk about much and it's not even well understood: the fact that there exists a state of feeling and that when you reach it, when you hit it, you can't go wrong.
If, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready
and we ripple with life through the days.
Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling,
or a man, a stool,
if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding,
good is the stool,
content is the woman, with fresh life rippling in to her,
content is the man.
A vision without a task
might be a mirage
A task without a vision
can be drudgery
But a vision with a task
brings hope to the world.
I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
If our lives are too busy, even though it is what we see as worthwhile work, it is simply an excuse, an escape from God. God, and many of us spend a lifetime avoiding it. We need time that is set apart just to get to know God. ... It is time in silence for listening. And eventually it becomes a time when we are continually aware of God's presence. As the clutter is moved out of lives, we gradually begin to realize that there is no longer a separation between the sacred and profane, for all is holy, all is sacred. Work no longer an escape, since all is filled with God's presence.
I slept and dreamt that life was joy
I woke and saw that life was service
I acted and behold! Service was joy.
The experience of transcendence occurs within the nature of things -- our nature. A small mustard-seed grows into a tree big enough for birds to come and roost in its branches. To try to make it grow faster or slower would be absurd and counterproductive. It is the same when we experience the growth of Divine Love in our hearts as we let the husk of the ego drop away and like seed we die to self that we may fulfill the destiny that is our true meaning, that the potential of life within us may come to fruition.
The soul of each one of us has its destination, and that is the Divine Heart. What is true of each of us is true of all the world. Walt Whitman in his strong, urgent way cries: "One thought ever at the fore, that in the Divine Ship, the world breasting time and space, all peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are bound to the same destination." Some such thought as this is surely necessary for the bare subsistence of a soul, for our souls cannot live without the sense of destination.
Sometimes in your life you will go on a journey. It will be the longest journey you have ever taken. It is the journey to find yourself.
The journey itself is home.
I can feel at the very centre of my being the spark which connects one to the ultimate mystery, the mystery which no one will ever unfold on this side of the grave. All one can do in this life is to embark on that journey to the centre, where the immanent God dwells, and fight to continue that journey no matter how many obstacles are thrust in one's path. I know that in order to serve the mysterious transcendent God to the best of my ability I must continually work to align myself with the immanent God, the God within; I must continually strive to release the blueprint of my personality and become the individual God created me to be.
Spirituality is an inner fire, a mystical sustenance that feeds our souls. The mystical journey drives us into ourselves to a sacred flame at our center.
It is because of our wounds, our pain and our sadness, that we turn from the outer world and trace the thread of our own darkness back to its source. It leads us through the barriers of pain to the place of our own healing. But in the very process of making this journey the light of consciousness which we carry with us transforms our darkness. The individual who arrives at the source is very different from the person who set out upon the quest. During the course of this journey we have to accept and integrate what we find within us -- our pain and our anger and all the many forms our darkness has taken. ... We will have to accept ourselves as we really are. This then will be the chalice into which the Divine Wine can be poured.
We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles, but the grace to transform them.
This is a difficult but amazing journey, this life we are leading through these years of change. Let us hold firmly a vision of peace (inner and outer) for all the world, health and happiness for all creatures and the Earth itself, and a more vital spiritual consciousness for everyone. Our thoughts have power. May we help think into existence the universal flowering of spirituality!
I have come to know simple truths that before were so disguised by my complexity. I have come to know the inner vision that sees with so much clarity. I've come to know me, the gentleness of my spirit, as it may express through love and tenderness. I've come to know power in a way that is personal and creative. My personal power of choice. I've come to know love; love of self and others is the same. I've come to know the oneness of all who walk the planet in an attempt to journey home.
Journeying more deeply into our deepest center and into the world around us pushes us into seeing more deeply into all of life. Not only are we forced to deal with the illusions of our false selves, but also of society. ... The one who begins to live deeply as a contemplative begins to see things as they really are. We are called to deal with the illusions of ourselves, so we can enter into a loving dialogue with the world. We are called to EMBRACE the world as we journey deeper and deeper into ourselves and God. We turn with a singleness of vision, to see God in each new situation, in every person, and every experience -- seeing all those things in a truer perspective.
As each piece of the journey is discovered, honored and treated as holy, then we are able to remember ourselves and recollect the shattered spirit and lives into a new spiritual body. When we reunite ourselves with nature and its manifestations, when we come to reconcile the resonances of the divine world around us with the divine world within us, then healing begins.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
It is right it should be so;
We are made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.
With each step we arrive.
Ultimately, the journey of the human path is an individual effort; no one can do it for us. However, we are not entirely alone on this journey. Love and grace serve as guides to lead the way -- when we choose to listen.
The spiritual journey is one of continually falling on your face, getting up, brushing yourself off, looking sheepishly at God, and taking another step.
We are not humans on a spiritual path. Rather we are spirits on a human path.
Like laughter, music can help put us into NOW like nothing else can. And it can ennoble and lift up the NOW to where it belongs -- to the sublime. The beat, the rhythm, the measured time that is transparent in every fine musical work speaks to the subconscious rhythm of our very souls. Music as a part of a prayer-walking experience can hold wonders for us ... and these wonders just ARE.
Music is a part of life, not separate from it; and life itself is musical with its rhythms, variations of themes, episodes, fugues, counterpoints, consonances and dissonances, cadences, silences, and tonalities. When we listen to music, we are contemplating the very structures and colors that make up our own lives. The music we play mirrors the music we live.
One day when Francis was walking in the woods, he was so filled with delight at the beauty of the world that he wished to express his gratitude with music. He had no violin, so he picked up two sticks and began to play. Birds sang and animals came out and danced. Far-fetched, you say? Perhaps only those who believe that animals dance can hear the violin music of two twigs.
We live in a world of sound
We are sound
We are singers,
born into this world to sing our song
The old language speaks with purity
through the songs of our feelings
Resonating from the core
to fill the vastness of our being.
The world of violins and flutes, of horns and cellos, of fugues, scherzos and gavottes, obeyed laws which were so clear that all music seemed to speak of God. My body was not listening, it was praying. My spirit no longer had bounds, and if tears came to my eyes, I did not feel them running down because they were outside me. I wept with gratitude every time the orchestra began to sing. A world of sounds for a blind man, what sudden grace! The inner world made concrete.
In the next stage of our collective evolution it is the hearts of individuals that will hold the cosmic note of the planet. This note can be recognized as a song being born within the hearts of seekers. It is a quality of joy that is being infused into the world. It is the heartbeat of the world and needs to be heard in our cities and towns.
One night we visited camp for devotional songs. One man would start the first line of the song, his companions joining in. Then the women would begin, huddling together under their dark wool, keening their lungs out... It was as if they took a spiritual bath in the music, their troubles washed away with songs as old as the subcontinent. How comforting it must be to pass through life's storms always with the support of the group infusing every action and every thought with one voice extending down through the generations, saying,
"It is all right. We are all here. There is no such thing as alone."
Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.
The universe is a perfect, pulsating, rhythmic mechanism that sings the music of the spheres.
I remember as a boy standing at the side of a gorge watching the swift, shallow water and a girl standing in it up to her knees. Everything was settled and at peace in the sunlight. As I watched the hills began to sing -- I could hear them as an indistinct choir. Then they began to shimmer and dance. It seemed clear that we were linked -- hills and humans -- in a deep, objective way. And this connection made life true, and my usual fears irrelevant.
I know that we hear God in the silence. And for this reason, it is crucial to avail ourselves of silence. For there is a sound in silence that is the voice of God. There is that divine whisper.
Driving home on a rainy day, Lorna was rear-ended by a truck just before the woman playing Rosina in Act I of the Barber of Seville was to sing. The impact was sudden and stunning. "But even as I entered a world of shock and pain, I found a world of bliss and order. I listened to the aria and fifteen minutes of the opera as firemen tried to free me from the wreckage of my car." Though told she had been unconscious until she was in the ambulance, she remembered listening to Rosina's voice throughout the ordeal. "My spirit stayed with my body. The music kept me alive. I was able to listen and stay conscious, alert, and at peace with the music. ... From the beginning of that aria, I knew I had to finish the opera of my life."
Music is, and always will be, a method used by beings to bring about a unity between different vibrations, causing a harmonious note to the ear. In mystical fashion, one endeavors to achieve the same result with our intermingling vibrations of polarity. The thread, which binds in harmony, is the "music of the spheres." Its song plays continuously, but our ears cannot hear, unless our soul is tuned in.
Essentially neuter, silence, like light or love, requires a medium to give it meaning, takes on the color of its host, adapts easily to our fears and needs. Quite apart from whether we seek or shun it, silences orchestrate the music of our days... If it's true that all symphonies end in silence, it's equally true that they begin there as well. Silence, after all, both buries and births us, and just as life without the counterweight of mortality would mean nothing, so silence alone, by offering itself as the eternal Other, makes music possible.
There is always music amongst the trees in the garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it.
FAITH is the touching of a mystery. It is to perceive another dimension to absolutely every thing in the world. In faith, the mysterious meaning of life comes through ... To speak in the simplest possible terms: faith sees, knows, senses the presence of God in the world.
Abandonment to the will of God is a life-long discipline that is rooted and grows in humility, prayer, listening, and pondering, as well as an agreement to be close kin to the foolish, unseen, and disenfranchised... It provides life at a satisfying gallop, fast and fulfilling, characterized by contentment and high-spirited courage, and it is an unmistakable sign of great faith.
If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you're causing terrible damage.
If you've opened your loving to God's love,
you're helping people you don't know
and have never seen.
God's call is mysterious: it comes in the darkness of faith. It is so fine, so subtle, that it is only with the deepest silence within us that we can hear it. And yet nothing is so decisive and overpowering for a person on this earth, nothing surer or stronger. This call is uninterrupted: God is always calling us! But there are distinctive moments in this call, moments which leave a permanent mark on us -- moments which we never forget.
What is experienced in meditation as aridity, or even as dark night, can at the same time in a hidden but true sense be the brightest radiance of love. But this love must hide itself in the nakedness of faith... Every silence in meditation is meaningful. In other words, where in an earthly sense we experience wordlessness, the spheres of Word and meaning beyond expression open up.
Where fear and doubt imprison, faith and love liberate;
Where fear and doubt paralyze, faith and love empower;
Where fear and doubt dishearten, faith and love encourage;
Where fear and doubt sicken, faith and love heal; and,
Where fear and doubt make useless, faith and love create new life.
My life has been perhaps harder than the normal, but I have learned to endure what cannot be altered, with only my own inner strength to sustain me. During disastrous times, the inner voice was always there to comfort me, even if it did not always speak to me in so many words. Faith, though, has always played a great part in my life; faith and inner certainty. Endurance, coupled with love and faith have been the keynotes of my life, and through them I have been blessed beyond all measure.
Faith means receiving God, it means being overwhelmed by God. Faith helps us to find trust again and again when, from a human point of view, the foundations of truth have been destroyed. Faith gives us the vision to perceive what is essential and eternal. It gives us eyes to see what cannot be seen, and hands to grasp what cannot be touched, although it is present always and everywhere.