Wisdom and compassion must walk together. Having wisdom without compassion is like walking with one foot. You will fall down. If you have both wisdom and compassion, you can walk very well, step by step.
~ Step by Step: Meditations on Wisdom and Compassion by Maga Ghosananda
The essential self is fundamentally invulnerable and at ease, because it is anchored in Being. This anchoring at the core of oneself allows the personality to be much more vulnerable, open, honest. If the essential self adopts a provisional or social identity — which may be necessary for certain reasons—it does not take it too seriously, does not become completely identified with it. The essential self does not become inflated with its identity, it lives in the humility of presence and can keep a sense of humor about itself.
You are unquenchable spirit,
A heart of Light
Called to make more
Than just an appearance.
Invited to show up
With your truest self,
Your deepest you,
Awake and uncovered,
Even with all the risk
Such intentional wholeness implies.
Serious spiritual practice is more than serene walks in the woods, lit candles and incense. You have to be committed. Your have to be willing to enter into your own darkness and transcend it.
Transfiguring experience is not granted to people as an easy and ready access to glory. Only in going up the mountain, rejecting and being rejected by the world, identifying with those who are most broken, does one encounter the divine refulgence...Our substitution of consumer tourism for pilgrimage, of canned experience for life-changing risk, is symptomatic of our inability to entertain in any way the reality of our own transfiguration.
~ from THE SOLACE OF FIERCE LANDSCAPES by Belden C. Lane
When a gong or "singing bowl" is struck in the silent stillness, a reverberating sound is suddenly born...it lingers briefly...decays and dies. The sound can represent the span of our life-experience, but never our Life. Our true self is not the perishable sound, but the imperishable, still silence from which the sound arose and resonated temporarily. Indeed, this truth has even greater depths for it may be understood, that in our essence, we are none other than That which strikes the gong, so to speak, and silently witnesses the resulting "sound."
When we express our creativity, we are a conduit for the Great Creator to explore, express, and expand its divine nature and our own. We are like songbirds. When one of us gives voice to our true nature, it is contagious and others soon give tongue as well. We do not live or create in isolation. Each of us is part of a greater whole and, as we agree to express ourselves, we agree to express the larger self that moves through us all.
Crack yourself open!
What use is it to continue to hide
behind your facades and roles?
Why waste your energy playing games?
Isn’t it time to cry your tears;
to shout your passion;
to dance like Zorba;
and to let your soul touch
the Soul of the world?
Knowing yourself is not so much about introspection as interaction. To know yourself is to realize that you are more than the little self that has been given to you by your history—the pattern that others made—that your true self is, in truth, much larger and includes other people, other cultures, other species even. That life is less about BEING and more about INTERBEING. We come to know ourselves, then, through coming to know each other. And the deeper that knowledge, the richer and more creative the world we build together.
~ from"Tuimanye" (meaning know yourself") by Danny Martin, Perspectives, Fall '98
Community calls for open mind and open heart...to be a place where the truth of the one-ness of human community shatters all barriers, refuses all prejudice, welcomes all strangers, listens to all voices. We must ask what God wants for the world, rather than simply what we want. We need the wisdom of humility now. We need that quality of life that makes it possible for humanity to see beyond itself, to value the other, to touch the world gently and peacefully and make the whole world better as we move ahead.
~ Joan Chittister in "Spirituality and Health" -- Nov/Dec 2003
There is a Japanese word, kintsukuroi, that means "golden repair." It is the art of restoring broken pottery with gold so the fractures are literally illuminated—a kind of physical expression of its spirit. As a philosophy, kintsukuroi celebrates imperfection as an integral part of the story, not something to be disguised...In kintsukuroi, the true life of an object (or a person) begins the moment it breaks and reveals that it is vulnerable.
Greetings dear friends ~ In a little corner of my garden, I noticed bright green slender crocus leaves pushing their way up through the crusted brown earth. They steadfastly emerged still capped with dry clods of dirt and endured the unsettling vagaries of freezing nights and late season snowfall—a wintery spring after a spring-like winter. Our spirits, too, need lifting—need to emerge, become unbound, push up toward the light. We need to nurture a sense of wonder for if we stay buried in gloom we chance missing opportunities for awakening and for gratitude. Sometimes I find myself so immersed in worry for what might be lost, undone, unraveled that I fail to understand and appreciate what is here right now in front of me. To live with an open heart, to live with a sense of awe, doesn't mean we are blind to suffering or pain or fear, only that we also see the blessings all around us—the sacred gifts of life, love, and beauty.
At our birth we emerge from the root mystery of the cosmos, a deep and silent mystery into which we will one day be reabsorbed. Our own lives are a spiral pattern of creative unfolding, death, and regeneration. Fashioned out of the creative power of starlight and the fecund body of the Earth, we are the children of Earth and starry heaven caught up in the timeless rhythms of the celestial dance.
~ from "Luminous Alignments" by David Fideler, Parabola 5/'07
To wonder is to stand in awe of the ultimate mystery of life and to understand that mystery exists not merely in the ecstatic but in the ordinary daily life. Eliot Deutsch observed that wonder, unlike curiosity, does not try to figure out, or to explain. We do not wonder "at," "about," or "why" —we wonder with.
If I had influence with the good angel who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world would be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
To be a contemplative is to be a watch in the night for the approach of Mystery. And it is a readiness to be transformed in an engagement with that Mystery.
~ Fr. Iain Matthew in DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL, newly translated by Mirabai Starr
Remain in wonder if you want the mysteries to open up for you. Mysteries never open up for those who go on questioning. Questioners sooner or later end up in a library. Questioners sooner or later end up with scriptures, because scriptures are full of answers.— And answers are dangerous, they kill your wonder.
There are times when life can't help itself and, as the Psalmist wrote, "Deep calls unto deep." Then the mass of the world dances on the pinhead of our wonderment, and our breath so carefully cultivated carries us, like the wind, whithersoever it will.
~ from ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE, by Marv and Nancy Hiles
The root of the word "educate" means "to care"—a caring that flows naturally from a deep feeling for the world. This kind of care seems to embody a type of wisdom that has nothing to do with information or knowledge in its restricted sense. Our connection to the world is not through information about it, but through a sense of wonder. How long since the cry of insects and the sight of the setting sun brought us deeply into ourselves?
~ (John Wilson) aka Paramananda in REFLECTIONS ON EVERYDAY LIFE
Children live in a world of dreams and imagination, a world of aliveness...There is a voice of wonder and amazement inside of all of us; but we grow to realize we can no longer hear it, and we live in silence. It isn't that God stopped speaking; it is that our lives became louder.
~ Mike Yaconelli in DANGEROUS WONDER: THE ADVENTURE OF CHILDLIKE FAITH
Wonder is a searching attitude of simultaneously knowing and not-knowing, of finding pattern and breaking apart, [it] goes against the grain of our organizing mind, but is intrinsic to the creativity of introspection, art, and empathy.
