Ecstatic love for God -- heart and mind melted by passionate longing for Truth -- is the one essential factor in the process of awakening. Divine Presence, however one may understand and experience it, exists in and through all conscious beings... Merged in motiveless love, one experiences every moment the tremendous natural attraction of Divine Presence. This Presence is the inner guidance that we feel flowing through us as conscience, intellect, intuition, sense perception, and longing. Divine Presence alone generates the yearning of our heart, the seeking of our mind, the ease of our body, the illumination of our soul.
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
