If you fuse knowledge of your transcendent origin with tireless service in and for God, you will come, on earth and in this body, to know divine joy and be fed by the ceaseless passion-energy of divine love. Human and divine, inner peace and outer action, knowledge and love, will be married in you at ever greater depths to make you an ever more powerful and radiant warrior for Love and Justice in all dimensions.
~ from A WALK WITH FOUR SPIRITUAL GUIDES by Andrew Harvey
A work of beauty requires the diverse and contrary qualities of discipline, hard work, gentleness and love. To create a work of beauty, a human being needs a spiritual life and a rhythm, and those two things need to work well together. By "rhythm" I mean a slower, more thoughtful pace than that which is generally lived in this society.
To me the realization of God first came in the Atlas Mountains and then in the beauty of nature which stirred my whole inner being. The flowers growing everywhere were absolutely breathtaking, and I saw in them such beauty and wonder that could not have been put there by humankind. When I picked the frangi-pangi flower and thought much about it, I saw Spirit Creator. Who else could have made such beauty? Once natural beauty had turned my heart to God, I found myself continually raising my heart to God, without words but in thought. That is prayer in itself.
Don’t fill up your life with petty knowing. Leave space for something more mysterious, more beautiful, more profound than you can presently even imagine. The Great Creator has more beauty in store for you than you can even dream is possible at this point in your life... Leave space for the Great Mystery to offer something new and wonderful! Everything is unfolding in beauty; we need only stop holding on to the familiar.
Teachings can only bring us back to who we truly are. Our lives and deaths can be of the Beauty Way. But we must start now; we must become refined—the grinding away process to become truly who we are ... beautiful.
Liken yourself to a beautiful original part of creation—a true work of art. Then each day ask yourself how you are living: either in ways that show gratitude for this beauty or in ways that indicate how you are defacing it.
