Before the universe was born.
there was something formless and perfect
It is serene. Empty.
Solitary. Unchanging.
Infinite. Eternally present.
It is the mother of the ten thousand things.
For lack of a better name,
I call it the Tao.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 25
Those who are willing to be vulnerable
move among mysteries
Theodore Roethke, American Poet, Straw for the Fire
The Winter Solstice – a day which held great spiritual and mythic significance for people down through the ages. All over the Northern Hemisphere, ancient festivals marked this, the shortest day of the year. The word in Irish – Grianstad – means the stopping of the sun, a pause in the battle between darkness and light, where light eventually triumphs.
Jung realized that the problems of our time are rooted …above all in the loss of a living myth which would give meaning to our lives.
He saw that the dissociation of the conscious ego from what he called the primordial or instinctual soul presented a growing and unperceived danger to humanity. The more we emphasized reason and the supremacy of the rational mind, the greater the danger that instinct — whose power we have failed to acknowledge or understand — would drive, possess, delude and overwhelm us and the more we would fall victim to secular and religious ideologies and utopian goals which could ultimately lead us to destroy ourselves.
The paramount goal we need to focus on is reconnecting our conscious mind with the deeper dimension of the soul.
Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul
[When] you get to the end of a meeting, a day, let that unravel. You cultivate the wisdom of no-performance and no-result. You listen to any judgements that are rattling in your mind, establish mindfulness on the mind-state and its feeling, then let the defenses and identities go.
It’s a matter of acknowledging the inner helicopter that is hovering over ‘If only this’ and ‘I should have said that’ and ‘How dare they do this!’ and steadily touching the ground. Allow the feeling to be felt and breathe through it. Let it end, even let the wish that it all end come to an end. When the rotor blades stop, just here, on the other side of failure, is purity and release.
Ajahn Sucitto, Happy Deathday
Paraphrasing the words of Goethe’s Faust, “two selves dwell within our breast.”
One part of us is meant to live and function in the world we see around us — to eat, sleep, and produce our children, to answer the challenges of the natural and social world: in the words of Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes, to be born and die, to kill and to heal, to build and destroy, to weep and to laugh, get and lose, keep and cast away. This is human life “under the sun,” the world that we see and know and call real.
But God, the “something,” is above the sun, above all that our eyes can see and our mind can name, and there is a higher part of ourselves that senses that and calls to us.
We are two-natured beings. Such is the ancient teaching.
Jacob Needleman, 1934 – 2022, American Philosopher, Money and the Meaning of Life
If you know how to be happy with the wonders of life that are already there for you to enjoy, you don’t need to stress your mind and your body by striving harder and harder, and you don’t need to stress this planet by purchasing more and more stuff.
Much of our modern way of life is permeated by mindless overborrowing. The more we borrow, the more we lose. That’s why it’s critical that we wake up and see we don’t need to do that anymore. What’s already available in the here and now is plenty for us to be nourished, to be happy. Only that kind of insight will get us, each one of us, to stop engaging in the compulsive, self-sabotaging behaviours of our species.
Thich Nhat Hanh
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