The experience of ecstatic oneness with the Divine comes in many forms: quiet contentment, a sense of gentle rapture, a mystical feeling of universal harmony, all-consuming passion, flights of spiritual abandon, and ferocious joy. But the most powerful experience of ecstasy is a combination of these feelings, when, in one unforgettable moment, we touch the hidden God – the terrible and wonderful Mystery that has given birth to all things and that makes them glow and dance with Its life force. In those moments we may see what It sees and feel at least an infinitesimal part of what It feels.
In my life-long impatience, how much I have missed. Last night, washing the dishes, I really looked at my iron frying pan in the dishwater. The light made visible for a moment a tiny rainbow—a light through water revealing all the colors of life. It is so easy to miss the tiny symbols. Finding them is quite different from the business of trying to hatch up big symbolic experiences. It is RECOGNITION, not PURSUIT, of meaning—recognition of the sacramental, of the intersection of the two worlds, breaking through unsought because one is ATTENDING.
~ from SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON by Helen Luke
The breathing in and out of the earth's atmosphere by the body is a symbol of the eternal rhythm of the Self-I and Thou, in and out, up and down, forward and back, systole and diastole in their final unity. The conscious realization and incarnation of this rhythm, balance, unity, in the unique, individual pattern of one's life would lead — so I feel — to the breathing out of one's last breath into death into that air of eternity, which is the breath of life when the body is left behind.
~ from SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON by Helen Luke
Music is a DISCIPLINED feeling, sound given form and pattern through number and rhythm – the single sound of the universe bringing consciousness through incarnation in music to the inner ear of the soul . As a woman, it is the masculine creative spirit within, who brings me the sound of the music of God – unlike man, who hears it through the numinous feminine within. God's music unites all.
~ from SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON by Helen Luke
Colin Fletcher, in THE MAN WHO WALKED THROUGH TIME, describes how from moments of peak awareness, there came at last after long solitude and silence, and for the time being, a continuous sense of being one with the rhythm of all life and all time, of being inside as well as outside the life of everything he saw – animals, insects, the living rocks, the wind, the river; and finally, most difficult of all, he could feel even the craziness of modern humanity as part of the unbroken pattern of eternity.
~ from SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE 0N by Helen Luke
It is only when we come to total and unconditional "love" of our own darkness that we can know God incarnate in us, loving and understanding us in our totality. Pascal says that no one can love God without knowing their own misery.
~ from SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON by Helen Luke
