To become proficient in the discipline of contemplation, we must be willing to live in the midst of paradox. For we can only know the Mystery by letting go of knowing, and by putting aside our reason, our thinking, our too quick words. We must sit still, doing nothing at all. We must wait, allowing things to reveal themselves to us, and seek by allowing ourselves to be sought. In contemplation we must take Thou in by allowing ourselves to be taken in. By doing these things, we will gradually become "modern" contemplatives and find ourselves living at the still point of the turning world.
I began to face death and its implications very young. I could never have imagined then how many kinds of death there were to follow, one heaped upon another. The death that was the tragic loss of my country, Tibet, after the Chinese occupation. The death that is exile. The death of losing everything my family and I possessed ... for we had been among the wealthiest and most famous in Tibet.
~ from THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING by Sogyal Rinpoche
The wisdom of the peoples of elder cultures can make an important contribution to the post-modern world, one that we must begin to accept as the crisis of self, society and the environment deepens. This wisdom cannot be told, but it is to be found by each of us in the direct experience of silence, stillness, solitude, simplicity, ceremony and vision.
