The human person is a threshold where many infinities meet. There is the infinity of space that reaches out into the depths of the cosmos; the infinity of time reaching back over billions of years. …. A world lies hidden behind each human face. In some faces the vulnerability of inner exposure to these depths becomes visible. When you look at some faces, you can see the turbulence of the infinite beginning to gather to the surface. this moment can open in a gaze from a stranger, or in a conversation with someone you know well. Suddenly, without their intending it or being conscious of it, their gaze becomes the vehicle of some primal inner presence. This gaze lasts for only a second. In that slightest interim something more than the person looks out. Another infinity as yet unborn, is dimly present. you feel that you are being looked at from the strangeness of the eternal. The infinity gazing out at you is from an ancient time. We cannot seal off the eternal. Unexpectedly and disturbingly, it gazes in at us through the sudden apertures in our patterned lives. A friend, who loves lace, often says that it is the holes in lace that render it beautiful. Our experience has this lace structure…..
John O’Donohue, Anam Chara
Normally we do everything we can to avoid just being. When left alone with ourselves, without a project to occupy us, we become nervous. We start judging ourselves or thinking about what we should be doing or feeling. We start putting conditions on ourselves, trying to arrange our experience so that it measures up to our inner standards. Since this inner struggle is so painful, we are always looking for something to distract us from being with ourselves.
What makes thoughts problematic for most of us is that we are compulsively prone to believing in their contents – their stories and value-judgements – so maintaining any kind of real objectivity with thought, as we might be able to do with other sense objects like sight or sound or smell or taste or touch, seems like an impossibility. Thought seems to be in a totally different category, although in truth it’s not. With time and the skilful development of meditation, we might well be able to learn to focus and calm the mind to the point where conceptual thought stops altogether. I would see this as a pleasant bonus rather than a final goal. More useful is to aspire and practise to see thought as transparent, insubstantial. In this way, when thought is there – whether deliberate or not – there is no sense of cluttering or entangling within the heart and mind. Its presence is just like a fragrance or a physical feeling, a visual image or a sound – it embellishes the silence and stillness of the mind, rather than occluding or corrupting it.
Mindfulbalance 