For the blessed souls who have entered the profound union of divine life: rest and activity, contemplation and action, silence and speaking, receiving the gift of God in love and returning love by waves of thanksgiving and praise, are the same thing.
~ From THOUGHTS by Edith Stein with thanks to Walter Reinsdorf
"We are knee-deep in a river, searching for water," writes Kabir Helminski, a contemporary Wisdom teacher in the Sufi lineage, using a vivid image to capture the irony of our contemporary plight. The sacred road maps of wholeness still exist in the cosmos...But to read the clues it is first necessary to bring the heart and mind and body into balance, to awaken. Then the One can be known—not in a flash of mystical vision but in the clarity of unitive seeing.
Wisdom without love is like having lungs
but no air to breathe. Do not seek wisdom in order
to acquire knowledge but in order to
live and love more fully.
~ from MY SECRET IS SILENCE: Poetry and Sayings of Adyashanti
I believe we are all called by many names, and that the names we are called are directly related to our destiny... The discovery of our destiny is our unique contribution to wisdom. When we achieve a sense of wisdom, we will reflect it and shine as both image and likeness.
What does it mean to be made in the image of God?... In part, it is to say that wisdom is deep within us, deeper than the ignorance of what we may have done or become... When we lose touch with the wisdom that is within us, we live out of ignorance... Grace is given not to implant in us a foreign wisdom but to make us alive to the wisdom that was born in us.
Mystical wisdom derives from an ardent desire to abandon normal intellectual functions so that divine insight may enlighten this ardor and add to it another fire, much stronger, which lifts the burning soul towards an even deeper wisdom.
~ Hugh of Balma in LISTENING TO SILENCE, compiled by Robin B. Lockhart
A holy and disciplined mind turns
from ignorance and falsehood,
ignoring their myriad distractions,
while the soul stands firm, allowing
Wisdom to have her way.
