Jeff Foster - Nothing is lacking

When you shift your focus
from what is absent
to what is present,
from what is missing
to what has been given,
from what you are not
to who you are,
from the ravages of linear time
to the immediacy of Now,
you are reconnecting
with love, truth and beauty,
and abundance is yours,
effortlessly.
For in truth,
nothing is lacking where you are,
nothing is missing from the present scene
of the movie of your life,
and you are forever full,
and at the point of completion.
The only reason
you cannot find Oneness
is because you never left.
The day is just waiting to be lived.
So breathe in life, friend,
breathe in life.

 

http://www.lifewithoutacentre.com/

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Ellen Davis - The Unknown

The unknown is the vast field of life
as it stands on that exquisite precipice
between the inhale and the exhale
that births lands and seas, suns and moons,
and all of the mountains and valleys
as the progeny of our loves and deaths.
The unknown is the formlessness
through which form is created
and the form which to many hide
the pure potentiality of formlessness.
The unknown is the next moment
that I step into now, as my arms open wide
to embrace what comes before me.
The unknown, the Silence,
the Mystery accessed in time as NOW,
is our birthright and the home
where when we can rest,
we birth and are birthed by eternities.

http://www.ellendavis.org/

Eckhart Tolle - Words!... (A New Earth)

Ego: The Current State of Humanity

Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don’t know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.

Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it and let it be without imposing a word or mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you. This is what great artists sense and succeed in conveying in their art. Van Gogh didn’t say: “That’s just an old chair.” He looked, and looked, and looked. He sensed the Being-ness of the chair. Then he sat in front of the canvas and took up the brush. The chair itself would have sold for the equivalent of a few dollars. The painting of that same chair today would fetch in excess of $ 25 million.

When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Being-ness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say, identified with. That disentanglement is what this book is about.

The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, creativity, and aliveness. They are concealed in the still gap between the perception and the interpretation. Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They have their own beauty— but do we need to become imprisoned in them?

Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by the vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The other sounds are consonants produced by air pressure: s, f, g, and so forth. Do you believe some combination of such basic sounds could ever explain who you are, or the ultimate purpose of the universe, or even what a tree or stone is in its depth?
—from A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle

 

PDF HERE

 

Mark Nepo - Dropping all we carry

Dropping all we carry
– all our preconceptions, our interior lists of the ways we’ve failed
and the ways we’ve been wronged, all the secret burdens we work at maintaining – dropping all regret and expectations lets our mentality die.
Dropping all we have constructed as imperative allows us
to be born again into the simplicity of spirit that arises from unencumbered being.
It is often overwhelming to imagine changing our entire way of life.
Where do we begin?
How do we take down a wall that took twenty-five or fifty years to erect?
Breath by breath.
Little death by little death.
Dropping all we carry instant by instant.
Trusting that what has done the carrying, if freed, will carry us.

~ Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have (Conari Press; October 1, 2011)

  

PDF HERE

 

Arvo Pärt - Alone with silence

 

Here I am alone with silence. 

I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. 

This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me.

 Arvo Pärt 

 

https://www.arvopart.ee/en/

 

Max Picard - The World of Silence

Silence, however, stands outside the world of profit and utility; it cannot be exploited for profit; you cannot get anything out of it.  It is “unproductive.”  Therefore it is regarded as valueless.  Yet there is more help and healing in silence than in all the “useful things.”  Purposeless, unexploitable silence suddenly appears at the side of the all-too-purposeful, and frightens us by its very purposelessness.  It interferes with the regular flow of the purposeful.  It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the damage inflicted by exploitation.  It makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness.  It gives something of its own holy uselessness, for that is what silence itself is: holy uselessness.

~~~

We need to recover an oasis of silence within the rhyme and reason of our active life, 

for it is in silence that we meet God face to face.

 

 

 

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Michael Casey - Leisure As Silence

Leisure is not idleness or the pursuit of recreational activities.  It is, above all, being attentive to the present moment, open to all its implications, living it to the full.  This implies a certain looseness in lifestyle that allows heart and mind to drift away from time to time.  Monastic life is not a matter of shoehorning the maximum number of good works into a day.  It is more important that monks and nuns do a few things well, being present to the tasks they undertake, leaving room for recuperation and reflection, and expecting the unexpected.  Leisure allows openness to the present.  It is the opposite of being enslaved by the past or living in some hazy anticipation of a desirable future.  Leisure means being free from anything that would impede, color, or subvert the perception of reality.  Far from being the headlong pursuit of escapist activities and having fun, authentic leisure is a very serious matter because it is the product of an attentive and listening attitude to life.

Benedict’s monastery is a place of leisure because those who live there are committed to a life of mindfulness.  Being attentive requires, first of all, that we renounce the desire to control what happens around us, to manipulate reality, to impose our will on events or on other people.  We often think that those who try to keep control of everything around them are strong and domineering people, attempting to rule others and to mold them in their own likeness.  Usually this is not so.  Control-freaks are most often fearful people who are threatened by the prospect that events would be allowed to take an independent direction.  Underneath the firm grip and the bluster is a wavering self-confidence that fears to face the unexpected.  By constraining everything to squeeze itself into the hard shell of their expectations, they fail to read and respect the reality of the world around them.  They are heedless of what is outside themselves because they are driven mercilessly by their own insecurity.  Their life is a constant battle to prevent reality from asserting its independence.  Their inner voices are shouting so loudly that they can hear nothing else.

We all need to learn the art of silence, to still the clamor that comes from within as well as securing for ourselves a zone where outward noise is sometimes hushed.  Above all we need to teach ourselves to become somewhat more silent, because it is through an undisciplined tongue that much of our personal and social disturbance comes.  In a world where communication is huge, it takes a fair amount of resolution to create for oneself a sphere of silence, in which external urgencies are put on hold and words are weighed.  Just as it is important for us to make “quality time” for people we love, so we need to reserve some moments – and more than moments – for coming to an understanding of what is happening within us and around us.  We will never have a listening attitude to life unless we spend time listening.  That means we stop talking and we stop engaging in the consciousness-absorbing activities and start paying attention.  If we do this often enough, it may become semi-habitual.

Of course, such periods of silence and solitude have to be purchased at the expense of other activities, and that is what we do not like.  We do not want to give up any of the elements that we have built into our lives, be they ever so trite and paltry.  We have first to be convinced of the value of holy leisure.  This is where a problem arises.  Leisure is content-free; it is good in so far as it is filled with goodness, but it obviously has the capacity to be poisoned by malice. This is why there is, notably in Latin, a certain ambiguity about the term itself and a corresponding ambivalence towards the reality it describes.  Leisure is empty space.  We find it hard to make room for nothing in our crowded lives; like nature we abhor a vacuum.  Better to do something useful, we say, than simply mope.  A period of involuntary inactivity due to unforeseen circumstances we find very hard to endure.

Attentiveness is acquired by most people through a habit of reflectiveness – learning to step back from experience to ponder its meaning.  Most often meaning presents itself to a gently disengaged consciousness – fierce interrogation habitually yields nothing.  As Archimedes discovered, insights often come at the most unlikely moment.  Those who give a high priority to the pursuit of wisdom should, accordingly, try to structure their lives so that times of disengagement are multiplied.  This is not necessarily a matter of scheduling in high-powered periods of concentration; at least this is not Benedict’s way.  In the traditional ordering of the monastic day “intervals” were provided in which nothing much happened.  Provision was made for the possibility of moving from one place or activity to another, for leaving aside a particular occupation and temporarily disengaging from its concerns.  Leisure means living gently; it is the opposite of being driven or obsessed.  It involves getting on with the job at hand and detaching oneself from it when it is time to move on to something else.  To some extent leisure invites us to cultivate the virtue of inefficiency.  We are far more likely to notice the scenery if we dawdle along the way than if we rocket along at mind-numbing speed.  Leisure calls us to avoid the cumulative sense of incompletion that occurs when we find ourselves burdened with the weight of so many cares and unfinished tasks.  It is a childlike concern only for the present.  I suppose it was easier in a world not dominated by calendars and clocks simply to take each day as it comes.  On the other hand, making the effort to overthrow the tyranny of time yields proportionately higher profits to those of us who try it sometimes.  It is like a liberation.  We have to realize, however, that the tyrant is inside us, not outside.

 From Strangers to the City