silence
Silence, whispers and love.
February 22, 2021‘In the Bhagavad Gita we are told that we transcend our suffering to the degree that we are able to passionately employ our gifts in the service of others.’
-Rolph Gates & Katrina Kenison
‘Let us be silent so we may hear the whisper of God.’
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“One day, if you ever write a book, tell them you got this from your dying dad: ‘Love big, forgive always, do good, and don’t be an asshole’
‘L O V E. Let love lead your life and your choices. Let it become who you are, and just be grateful. For all of it. Life is really heard, but it’s also really good, and it’s all yours, my baby. So grab it hard, hold it tight, learn all you can. Experience everything, and when it comes time to let go, like I need to now, just be thankful for it all.’
-Seane Corn’s dad
(Seane’s dad passed from cancer around 10 years ago.)
The answers come in silence.
April 18, 2020
Died: April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey
“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.”
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
The day after COVID protests in Michigan, Idaho, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, California, and Virginia:‘Amazing and depressing how much of politicized American individualism (on guns, on vaccines, now on COVID mitigation) is childish acting out, adults throwing tantrums when parental figures try to discourage or stop them from doing unwise things.’-Kurt Anderson, author of the book, How America Went Haywire
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Dualism, it’s a good thing.
January 6, 2020In a nondualistic kinda way.
Fr. Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation
When I first learned contemplation in my Franciscan novitiate, I was taught a practice of silent, wordless prayer. Over the decades, I have learned there are many paths to contemplation, a myriad of ways to access nondual consciousness. Regardless how we practice—with stillness, breath, observation, chanting, walking, dancing, calm conversation—contemplation calls the ordinary thinking mind into question. We gradually come to recognize that this thing we call “thinking” does not enable us to love God and love others. We need a different operating system, and it both begins with and leads to silence.
Even through practices full of sounds and words, contemplation helps us access a foundational silence, a deep, interior openness to Presence. One of our faculty members, Barbara Holmes, writes: “An ontological silence can occupy the heart of cacophony, the interiority of celebratory worship. . . . Silence [is] the source of all being. . . . Silence is the sea that we swim in.” [1] And yet we’re often oblivious to it. Thus, the need for practice.
In my book The Naked Now, I call non-silence “dualistic thinking,” where everything is separated into opposites, like good and bad, life and death. In the West, we even believe that is what it means to be educated—to be very good at dualistic thinking. Join the debate club! But both Jesus and Buddha would call that judgmental thinking (Matthew 7:1-5), and they strongly warn us against it.
Dualistic thinking is operative almost all of the time now. It is when we choose or prefer one side and then call the other side of the equation false, wrong, heresy, or untrue.
But what we judge as wrong is often something to which we have not yet been exposed or that somehow threatens our ego. The dualistic mind splits the moment and forbids the dark side, the mysterious, the paradoxical. This is the common level of conversation that we experience in much of religion and politics and even every day conversation. It lacks humility and patience—and is the opposite of contemplation.
In contemplative practice, the Holy Spirit, [Gaia, Energy] frees us from taking sides and allows us to remain content long enough to let it teach, broaden, and enrich us in the partial darkness of every situation. We need to practice for many years and make many mistakes in the meantime to learn how to do this. Teachers of contemplation show us how to stand guard and not let our emotions and obsessive thoughts control us.
When we’re thinking nondualistically, with this guarded mind and heart, we will feel powerless for a moment, stunned into an embarrassing and welcoming silence. Then we will discover what is ours to do.
Cathari, (from Greek katharos, “pure”), also spelled CATHARS, heretical Christian sect that flourished in western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Cathari professed a neo-Manichaean dualism—that there are two principles, one good and the other evil, and that the material world is evil.
Catharism was a heretical, Christian dualist or Gnostic revival movement that thrived in some areas of Southern Europe, particularly what is now northern Italy and southern France, between the 12th and 14th centuries.
[wikipedia]
Ram Dass
December 23, 2019April 6, 1931~December 22, 2019
“We’re fascinated by the words, but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”
“Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.”
Unconditional Love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not ‘I love you’ for this or that reason, not ‘I love you if you love me.’ It’s love for no reason, love without an object.
jaijaijai
Between silence.
April 20, 2019
‘Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of god.’
-Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
Some days are indeed times of great pain and some are of great joy, but most are…in between. Most are, in fact, times of waiting, as the disciples waited during Holy Saturday. We’re waiting. Waiting to get into a good school. Waiting to meet the right person. Waiting to get pregnant. Waiting to get a job. Waiting for things at work to improve Waiting for diagnosis from the doctor. Waiting for life just to get better.
And there is,
is an active waiting; it knows that, even in the worst of situations, even in the darkest times, God is at work.
And to look carefully for signs of the new life that are always right around the corner–just like they were on Holy Saturday.
-James Martin, Jesuit priest
https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/we-live-holy-saturday
I am not attempting, O Lord, to penetrate your loftiness,
for I cannot begin to match my understanding with it,
but I desire in some measure to understand your truth,
which my heart believes and loves.
For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe,
but I believe in order to understand.
For this too I believe,
that “unless I believe, I shall not understand.” ([Isaiah 7:9)
-Anselm of Canterbury
Touch.
August 11, 2016
TOUCH
David Whyte
Is what we desire in one form or another, even if we find it through being alone, through the agency of silence or through the felt need to walk at a distance: the meeting with something or someone other than ourselves, the light brush of grass on the skin, the ruffling breeze, the actual touch of another’s hand; even the gentle first touch of an understanding which until now, we were formally afraid to hold.
Whether we touch only what we see or the mystery of what lies beneath the veil of what we see, we are made for unending meeting and exchange, while having to hold a coherent mind and body, physically or imaginatively, which in turn can be found and touched itself. We are something for the world to run up against and rub up against: through the trials of love, through pain, through happiness, through our simple everyday movement through the world.
And the world touches us in many ways, some of which are violations of the body or our hopes for safety: through natural disaster, through heartbreak, through illness, through death itself. In the ancient world the touch of a God was seen as both a blessing and a violation – at one and the same time. Being alive in the world means being found by the world and sometimes touched to the core in ways we would rather not experience. Growing with our bodies, all of us find ourselves at one time violated or wounded by this world in difficult ways, and still we live and breathe in this touchable, sensual world, and through trauma, through grief, through recovery, we heal in order to be touched again in the right way, as the physical consecration of a mutual, trusted invitation.
Nothing stops the body’s arrival in each new present, except death itself, which is intuited in all cultures as another, ultimate, intimate form of meeting. Nothing stops our ageing nor our witness to time, asking us again and again to be present to each different present, to be touchable and findable, to be one who is living up to the very fierce consequences of being bodily present in the world.
To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstanding of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.
…
Excerpted from ‘TOUCH’ From
CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment
and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
Image: Deborah Koff-Chapin
‘Deborah Koff-Chapin is one of the world’s leaders in Transformative Arts.
Michael Grady, Dean, Graduate School Arts and Consciousness John F Kennedy University’
Mahatma Gandhi
July 1, 2016
‘It has often occurred to me that a seeker after truth has to be silent.’