Month: September 2012

Finding a deeper dimension to life

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To begin with, one needs to cultivate a practical conviction of the primacy of being over doing.  Our society values what one can do and this becomes the gauge of who one is.  The contemplative dimension of life is an insight into the gift of being human and inspires a profound acceptance and gratitude for that gift. Our culture is at a critical point because so many structures that supported human and religious values have been trampled upon and are disappearing. To find a way to discover Mystery in the midst of secular occupations and situations is essential, because for most people today it is the only milieu that they know.  Humanity as a whole needs a breakthrough into the contemplative dimension of life.  The contemplative dimension of life is the heart of the world.  If one goes to one’s own heart, one will find oneself in the heart of everyone else, and everyone else, as well as oneself, in the heart of ultimate Mystery.

Fr. Thomas Keating

Being curious and interested

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Whatever the scenery the practice is the same. Our practice is to face everything life is, and everything life isn’t. Everything we think and feel and everything we don’t. Wall gazing is a very thorough practice in facing the fleetingness of things, and not getting trapped in momentary apparitions. All apparitions, as it turns out, are momenttary.When your eyes are open and you are intimately engaged with what appears in front  of  you, it’s hard to stay bored because nothing stays one way for long.

Karen Maezen Miller, Booooring….

Not being our fears

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Fear is so fundamental to the human condition that all the great spiritual traditions originate in an effort to overcome its effects on our lives. With different words, they all proclaim the same core message: “Be not afraid.” . . . . It is important to note with care what that core teaching does and does not say. “Be not afraid” does not say that we should not have  fears— and if it did, we could dismiss it as an impossible counsel of  perfection. Instead, it says that we do not need to be our fears, quite a different proposition.

Margaret Wheatley, Be not Afraid

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Slowing down today

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Sitting is a natural slowing down of this rushing, self-centred, mind-body chattering that we often live. This is a practice of realization, which is what we are, and practice allows us to be who we are. As we practice we discover who and what we are….Being still is not a means to an end; it is not that we should be still and then create something else or change. Being still is being who we are.

Elihu Genmyo Smith, Everything is the Way

Semi-conscious living

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Considering that Merton died in 1968, these words have even more weight in the sense that the level of semi-attention and noise back then was tiny in comparison to what we experience now.

Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self. We live in a state of constant semiattention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise of what goes on around us all the time. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half-diluted: we are not quite ‘thinking,’ not entirely responding, but we are more or less there. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available. It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything and we may, in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and resentment. Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague sense that we are ‘part of’ something – although we are not quite able to define what that something is – and probably wouldn’t want to define it even if we could. We just float along in the general noise. Resigned and indifferent, we share semiconsciously in the mindless mind of Muzak and radio commercials which passes for ‘reality.’

Thomas Merton,  Essential Writings

Sunday Quote: Changing where we live

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I would like to see you living in better conditions.

Hafiz