Often we do not know what is really going on. Our perspective can barely accommodate another person’s point of view, no less the forward march of evolution or the eternal mind of God.
Better to admit not knowing and to relax in the mystery of life than to try to force our minds where they can’t go.
Elizabeth Lesser
Mystery is not much in favor these days. The notion that there are limits to what we can do, what we can know, limits to our dominion, does not sit well with kings and queens of the hill. Humility and reverence, we hear, are the attitudes of cowards. . . . By ‘mystery’ I do not mean simply the blank places on our maps. I mean the divine source — not a void, not a darkness, but an uncapturable fullness. We are sustained by processes and powers that we can neither fathom nor do without. I speak of that ground as holy because it is ultimate, it is what makes us possible, that shapes and upholds everything we see. The stories I am most interested in hearing, reading, and telling, are those that help us imagine our lives in relation to that ground.
Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World
In matters of soul,
it is advisable never to compensate or to try to escape,
but instead to tend better
the very thing that is causing trouble.
Thomas Moore, Soul Mates
Allie shared this lovely poem from Rumi at our MBSR Course last evening. It harmonizes well with the intention of the Course – using our body’s natural wisdom to help us deal with the challenges of life. Mindfulness is a practice of simple presence, before we attach any labels, stories or descriptions to what is happening in our life. Each day we practice shifting our attention, making ourselves available to the moment as it presents itself. In this way, our natural wisdom can reveal itself.
There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid, and it doesn’t move from outside to inside through conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead, from within you, moving out.
Rumi, Two Kinds of Intelligence.
In human beings there is a constant tension between order and disorder, connectedness and loneliness, evolution and revolution, security and insecurity. Our universe is constantly evolving: the old order gives way to a new order and this in its turn crumbles when the next order appears. It is no different in our lives in the movement from birth to death. Change of one sort or another is the essence of life… when we try to prevent the forward movement of life, we may succeed for a while… but inevitably there is an explosion.
To be human is to create sufficient order so that we can move on into insecurity and seeming disorder.
In this way we discover the new.
Jean Vanier, Becoming Human
Ultimately, any attempt at finding deeper meaning in our life which avoids the messy parts of our personality or our history – or which is afraid of the truth hidden in our deeper emotions – will leave us open to ongoing issues that will sabotage our real contentment. It is not only by ascending that we find greater happiness, but also by descending.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious.
Jung
Mindfulbalance 