We hunger to be known and understood. We hunger to be loved. We hunger to be at peace inside our own skins. We hunger not just to be fed these things but, often without realizing it, we hunger to feed others these things because they too are starving for them. We hunger not just to be loved but to love, not just to be forgiven but to forgive, not just to be known and understood for all the good times and bad times that for better for worse have made us who we are, but to know and understand each other to the same point of seeing that, in the last analysis, we all have the same good times, the same bad times, and that for that very reason there is no such thing in all the world as anyone who is really a stranger.
A paragraph from Frederick Franck's new book, A LITTLE COMPENDIUM ON THAT WHICH MATTERS, which he graciously sent to Friends of Silence, also speaks to this theme:
D. T. Suzuki wrote that the spiritual life is pain raised above the level of mere sensation. 'Spirituality, born from life-pain, is that specifically human impulse from delusion to the really-Real within and outside of ourselves,' which characterizes the maturation of the human inner process: the thrust towards, and the commitment to, the Real ... Authentic spirituality is intimately related to firsthand, direct experiencing. It may mature through various disciplines, as for instance structured meditation and verbalized prayer. To live in radical openness to pure experiencing in the kitchen, bedroom, subway, newspaper, that is: to everyday life, inside as well as around oneself may, however be the equivalent of both formal meditation and verbal prayer. It is it he finding of one's path without being 'bamboozled, confused, side-tracked.'