Centuries Of Meditations Quotes

You are as prone to love, as the sun is to shine.

Reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them, or rather, taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world. Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world.

The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi is said to have written, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

As the twelfth-century Tibetian yogi Milarepa said when he heard of his student Gampopa's peak experiences, 'They are neither good nor bad. Keep meditating.'

Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. ... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.

In an age of bombs guzzling blood, skylarks merge peace with thought and action.

Let those parents that desire Holy Children learn to make them possessors of Heaven and Earth betimes; to remove silly objects from before them, to magnify nothing but what is great indeed, and to talk of God to them, and of His works and ways. before they can either speak or go.

The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.

for though it be a maxim in the schools that there is no Love of a thing unknown, yet I have found that things unknown have a secret influence on the soul,

Should God give you worlds, and laws, and treasures, and worlds upon worlds, and Himself also in the Divinest manner, if you will be lazy and not meditate, you lose all. The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain.

Love can forbear, and Love can forgive...but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object... He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person because that may be restored and Loved.

My son should often read and meditate on history; it is the only real philosophy

By Love alone is God enjoyed, by Love alone delighted in, by Love alone approached or admired. His Nature requires Love, thy nature requires Love. The law of Nature commands thee to Love Him: the Law of His nature, and the Law of thine.

Some things are little on the outside, and rough and common, but I remember the time when the dust of the streets were as pleasing as Gold to my infant eyes, and now they are more precious to the eye of reason.

The West, in its pursuit of material abundance, lost its soul, its interiority. Surrounded by meaninglessness, boredom, anguish, it cannot find its own humanity. All the success of science proves to be of no use—because the house is full of things, but the master of the house is missing. In the East, the end result of centuries of considering matter to be illusory and only consciousness to be real has been that the master is alive but the house is empty. It is difficult to rejoice with hungry stomachs, with sick bodies, with death surrounding you; it is impossible to meditate.

Now to enjoy the treasures of God in the similitude of God, is the most perfect blessedness God could devise. For the treasures of God are the most perfect treasures, and the manner of God is the most perfect manner.

Every blow of his sword carries with it centuries of wisdom and meditation.

The study of the self will one day prove the master-key to open all philosophical doors, all scientific conundrums, all life’s locked problems. Self is the ultimate—it is the first thing we know as babes; it will be the last thing we shall know as sages. The greatest certainty in knowledge comes only in the sphere of self. We

This love meditation is adapted from the Visuddhimagga by Buddhaghosa, a 5th century C.E. systematization of the Buddha's teaching. We begin by practicing the love meditation on ourselves ("May I"). Until we are able to love and take care of ourselves, we cannot be much help to others. After that, we practice them on others ("May he/she/they") - first on someone we like, then on someone neutral to us, and finally on someone who makes us suffer. May I be peaceful, happy, and light in body and spirit. May I be safe and free from injury. May I be free from anger, afflictions, fear and anxiety. May I learn to look at myself with the eyes of of understanding and love. May I be able to recognize and touch the seeds of joy and happiness in myself. May I learn to identify and see the sources of anger, craving, and delusion in myself. May I know how to nourish the seeds of joy in myself every day. May I be able to live fresh, solid, and free. May I be free from attachment and aversion, but not indifferent. Love is not just the intention to love, but the capacity to reduce suffering, and offer peace and happiness. The practice of love increases our forbearance, our capacity to be patient and embrace difficulties and pain. Forbearance does mean that we try to suppress pain.

Ever since that day in Chicago, whenever I see such scenes, I think of a quote by Billat-Savarin, the eighteenth-century 'modern' gastronome, well known for his writings and meditations on the physiology of taste and for his famous dictum 'We are what we eat.' But he also wrote even more revealingly: 'The destiny of a nation depends on how it feeds itself.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

Where Love is the Lover, Love streaming from the Lover, is the Lover; the Lover streaming from himself, and existing in another Person.

They find man a paradoxical being; one capable of descent into the darkest abysses of evil, and yet equally capable of ascent to the sublimest heights of nobility. They

If this interior experience was possible in the twentieth century b.c. it is also possible in the twentieth century a.d. The fundamental nature of man has not changed during the interval.

That anything may be found to be in infinite treasure, its place must be found in Eternity and in God's esteem. For as there is a time, so there is a place for all things. Everything in its place is admirable, deep, and glorious; out of its place like a wandering bird, is desolate and good for nothing.

You feel sexual excitement in genitals, horror in stomach, sadness and happiness in heart, physical pain in various parts of the body. What if you start feeling all of this at just one place: In your forehead. Then nothing can hurt you or control you. Even if somebody burns your body, you will feel nothing but a sweet sensation in forehead. It's possible even in 21st century. Disconnect from this crappy society and seek.

I sit in meditation…and soon all sounds, and all one sees and feels, take on imminence, an immanence, as if the Universe were coming to attention, a Universe of which one is the center, a Universe that is not the same yet not different from oneself: within man as within mountains there are many parts of hydrogen and oxygen, of calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and other elements. ‘You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars…’(Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation) The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no ‘meaning,’ they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share.

The meditation technique called vipassana (insight) that was introduced by the Buddha about twenty-five centuries ago is a set of mental activities specifically aimed at experiencing a state of uninterrupted mindfulness.

What the first Seer found and recorded thousands of years ago, the last Seer finds and agrees with today. But what the first scientist of the nineteenth century found and recorded, the last scientist of today laughs at and flings aside. The

Our Saviour's meaning, when He said, He must be born again and become a little child that will enter in the Kingdom of Heaven is deeper far than is generally believed. It is only in a careless reliance upon Divine Providence, that we are to become little children, or in the feebleness and shortness of our anger and simplicity of our passions, but in the peace and purity of all our soul. Which purity also is a deeper thing than is commonly apprehended. For we must disrobe infant-like and clear; the powers of our soul free from the leaven of this world, and disentangled from men's conceits and customs. Grit in the eye or yellow jaundice will not let a man see those objects truly that are before it. And therefore it is requisite that we should be as very strangers to the thoughts, customs, and opinions of men in this world, as if we were but little children. So those things would appear to us only which do to children when they are first born. Ambitions, trades, luxuries, inordinate affections, casual and accidental riches invented since the fall, would be gone, and only those things appear, which did to Adam in Paradise, in the same light and in the same colours: God in His works, Glory in the light, Love in our parents, men, ourselves, and the face of Heaven: Every man naturally seeing those things, to the enjoyment of which he is naturally born.

Love can forbear, and Love can forgive…but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object…. He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored. TRAHERNE, Centuries of Meditation, II, 30

Feminism is as old as sexual repression. In this country, women’s liberation flowered best in the soil prepared by black liberation the mid-19th century abolitionist movement yielded suffragettes. The mid-20th century civil rights movement yielded women’s liberation. Both movements were loudly championed by black men no white men so distinguished themselves. But both abandoned Black Civil Rights and regarded the shift away from the race problem as an inevitable and necessary development. An opportunity to concentrate on exclusively sexist issues. Each time that shift took place, it marked the first stage of divisiveness and heralded a future of splinter groups and self-sabotage.

Would one think it possible for a man to delight in gauderies like a butterfly, and neglect the Heavens? Did we not daily see it, it would be incredible.

We must first create within ourselves a true humility before we can know the liberating truth. We

The twentieth-century Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when asked why he meditated, replied, "Because I am a Christian.

numerous theories and stories have been ascribed to the Buddha, often without any supporting evidence. But you need not believe any of them in order to meditate.

Crystals have been used for centuries to promote serenity and as a tool for meditation. They can be helpful allies in our quest for calm.

Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question

I once experimented with meditation, cleared my mind, and immediately remembered a phone call I had to make; that was that.

A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus, a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the “class struggle”. What I am saying concerning mysticism, gnosis, magic and philosophy would be considered by him only as a ruse on the part of the bourgeois class, with the aim of “screening with a mystical and idealistic haze” the reality of the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie…although I have not inherited anything from my parents and I have not experienced a single day without having to earn my living by means of work recognised as “legitimate” by Marxists! Another contemporary example of possession by a system is Freudianism. A man possessed by this system will see in everything that I have written only the expression of “suppressed libido”, which seeks and finds release in this manner. It would therefore be the lack of sexual fulfillment which has driven me to occupy myself with the Tarot and to write about it! Is there any need for further examples? Is it still necessary to cite the Hegelians with their distortion of the history of humanity, the Scholastic “realists” of the Middle Ages with the Inquisition, the rationalists of the eighteenth century who were blinded by the light of their own autonomous reasoning? Yes, autonomous philosophical systems separated from the living body of tradition are parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings. In fact, they play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession. Their physical analogy is cancer.

But it is an happy loss to lose oneself in admiration at one’s own Felicity: and to find GOD in exchange for oneself: Which we then do when we see Him in His Gifts, and adore His Glory.

To think the world therefore a general Bedlam, or place of madmen, and oneself a physician, is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination, and the way to Happiness.

A myth we have believed throughout our lives is that we have to ‘get’ happiness, and if we can just get the external details of our lives right, we will be happy. This is not happiness, it is a form of enslavement.

When you run after your thoughts, you’re like a dog running after a stick. But if you throw a stick for a lion, he turns around and looks at who threw it. You only throw a stick at a lion one time. Be like the lion.

For there is a disease in him who despiseth present mercies, which till it be cured, he can never be happy. He esteemeth nothing that he hath, but is ever gaping after more: which when he hath he despiseth in like manner.

Online giants tend to view humans as audio-visual animals - a pair of eyes and a pair of ears connected to ten fingers, a screen and a credit card. A crucial step toward uniting humankind is to appreciate that humans have bodies.

The key to the whole problem of this ancient Mystery-Institution was given by Plutarch when he wrote: ‘At the moment of death the soul experiences the same impressions as those who are initiated into the great Mysteries.’ Scholars

Love studies not to be scanty in its measures, but how to abound and overflow with benefits. He that pinches and studieth to spare is a pitiful lover, unless it be for other's sakes Love studieth to be pleasing, magnificent and noble, and would in all things be glorious and divine unto its object. Its whole being is to its object, and its whole felicity in its object, and it hath no other thing to take care for. It doth good to its own soul while it doth good for another.

If Bohm’s physics, or one similar to it, should become the main thrust of physics in the future, the dances of East and West could blend in exquisite harmony. Physics curricula of the twenty-first century could include classes in meditation.

You are in search all over of eyes that can give you a certain meaning. Whenever a woman looks at you she gives you meaning. Now psychologists have discovered that when you enter a room—in a waiting room at the airport, or at a station or in a hotel—if a woman looks twice at you, she is ready to be seduced. But if a woman looks once, don’t bother her, just forget it. They have made films and they have been watching and this is a fact, because a woman looks twice only if she wants to be appreciated and looked at. A man enters a restaurant—the woman can look once, but if he is not worthwhile she will not look another time. And woman-hunters know it well, they have known it for centuries! Psychologists have come to know just now. They watch the eyes—if the woman looks again she is interested. Now much is possible, she has given the hint: She is ready to move with you or play the game of love. But if she doesn’t look at you again then the door is closed; better knock at some other door, this door is closed for you. Whenever a woman looks at you, you become important, very significant; in that moment you are unique. That’s why love gives so much radiance; love gives you so much life, vitality.

The seventeenth-century Benedictine mystic, Dom Augustine Baker, who fought a determined battle for the interior liberty of contemplative souls in an age ridden by autocratic directors, has the following to say on the subject: “The director is not to teach his own way, nor indeed any determinate way of prayer, but to instruct his disciples how they may themselves find out the way proper for them. . . . In a word, he is only God’s usher, and must lead souls in God’s way, and not his own.

That’s what the twentieth century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge, and truth, and ours—until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul as the fist of survival” (Fanny Howe).

The good cannot possibly exist when there is acceptance of any authority. Authority is very complex. There is the authority of law that man has put together through many, many centuries. There is the law of nature. There is the law of our own experience that we obey, the law of our own petty reactions that dominate our lives. Then there is the law of institutions, the law of organized beliefs that are called religions, dogmas. We are saying goodness is totally unrelated to every form of authority.

Tea first came to Japan in the sixth century by way of Japanese Buddhist monks, scholars, warriors, and merchants who traveled to China and brought back tea pressed into bricks. It was not until 1911, during the Song dynasty, that the Japanese Buddhist priest Eisai (also known as Yosai) carried home from China fine-quality tea seeds and the method for making matcha (powdered green tea). The tea seeds were cultivated on the grounds of several Kyoto temples and later in such areas as the Uji district just south of Kyoto. Following the Chinese traditional method, Japanese Zen monks would steam, dry, then grind the tiny green tea leaves into a fine powder and whip it with a bamboo whisk in boiling water to create a thick medicinal drink to stimulate the senses during long periods of meditation.

The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God. It is more to man since he is fallen than it was before. It is the place

प्रातः स्मरामि हृदि संस्फुरदात्मतत्त्वं सच्चित्सुखं परमहंसगतिं तुरीयम् । यत्स्वप्नजागरसुषुप्तिमवैति नित्यं तद्ब्रह्म निष्कलमहं न च भूतसङ्घः ॥१॥ prātaḥ smarāmi hṛdi saṃsphuradātmatattvaṃ saccitsukhaṃ paramahaṃsagatiṃ turīyam | yatsvapnajāgarasuṣuptimavaiti nityaṃ tadbrahma niṣkalamahaṃ na ca bhūtasaṅghaḥ ||1|| ~ At dawn, I meditate in my heart on the truth of the radiant inner Self. This true Self is Pure Being, Awareness, and Joy, the transcendent goal of the great sages. The eternal witness of the waking, dream and deep sleep states. I am more than my body, mind and emotions, I am that undivided Spirit. At dawn, I worship the true Self that is beyond the reach of mind and speech, By whose grace, speech is even made possible, This Self is described in the scriptures as “Not this, Not this”. It is called the God of the Gods, It is unborn, undying, one with the All. At dawn, I salute the true Self that is beyond all darkness, brilliant as the sun, The infinite, eternal reality, the highest. On whom this whole universe of infinite forms is superimposed. It is like a snake on a rope. The snake seems so real, but when you pick it up, it’s just a rope. This world is ever-changing, fleeting, but this eternal Light is real and everlasting. Who recites in the early morning these three sacred Slokas, which are the ornaments of the three worlds, obtains the Supreme Abode. ~ Adi Shankara (8th century)

Just as some of Jesus' first-century followers could not credit the presence of the risen Christ, so our own blindness, habit, and fear form a kind of constant fog that keeps us from seeing, and thereby believing in, the forms that grace takes in our everyday lives. We may think that it would be a great deal easier to believe if the world erupted around us, if some savior came down and offered as evidence the bloody scars in his side, but what the Gospels suggest is that this is not only wishful thinking but willful blindness, for in fact the world is erupting around us, Christ is very often offering us the scars in his side. What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent in the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.

Even though peak experiences might show us the truth and inform us about why we are training, they are essentially no big deal. If we can't integrate them into the ups and downs of our lives, if we cling to them, they will hinder us. We can trust our experiences as valid, but then we have to move on and learn how to get along with our neighbors. Then even the most remarkable insights can begin to permeate our lives. As the twelfth-century Tibetian yogi Milarepa said when he heard of his student Gampopa's peak experiences, 'They are neither good not bad. Keep meditation.'

When we moderns are told that God is not a mere word to be argued and debated about but a state of consciousness we can realise here and now in the flesh, we raise our eyebrows; when some spiritual Seer quietly tells us that there are God-knowing men living among us now, we significantly tap our foreheads. When, further, we are assured that we bear the divine within our breasts and that divinity constitutes our true selfhood, we smile in a superior way. Yet this is not theory nor is it sentiment; it is an open and patent fact to people who have gone some way in spiritual percipiency. Before

That That a man is beloved of God, should melt him all into esteem and holy veneration. It should make him so courageous as an angel of God. It should make him delight in calamities and distresses for God's sake. By giving me all things else, He hath made even afflictions themselves my treasures. The sharpest trials, are the finest furbishing. the most tempestuous weather is the best seed-time. A Christian is an oak flourishing in winter. God hath so magnified and glorified His servant, and exalted him so highly in His eternal bosom, that no other joy should be able to move us but that alone.

The text presented here, the Vajra Essence by Düdjom Lingpa, a nineteenth-century master of the Nyingma order of Tibetan Buddhism, is known as the Nelug Rangjung in Tibetan, meaning “the natural emergence of the nature of existence.”1 This is an ideal teaching in which to unravel some of the common misunderstandings of Tibetan Buddhism, since it is a sweeping practice that can take one from the basics all the way to enlightenment in a single lifetime. The present volume explains the initial section on shamatha, or meditative quiescence, about nine percent of the entire Vajra Essence root text.

A scholar came to me the other day and said "sir, why do you laugh so much - you are an eminent thinker of our century - you should appear more serious and composed" - hearing this, I burst out in yet another brief laughter and then said to him gently "my dear sir, why can't I laugh in front of my people, my own kind, my humanity, whom I hold most dear - what do I have to hide with the veil of seriousness - I would rather infect another person with a bit of joy through my laughter, than make them desperately serious, with pompous words - a good laughter is as uplifting as a good teaching, for it is simply meditation.

[If] you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or with the inner story of the self. Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind [...]. People ask 'Who am I?' and expect to be told a story. The first thing you need to know about yourself, is that you are not a story.

Later in life I came across a stunning passage from The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which spoke directly to me across time from first-century Rome: I am part of the whole, all of which is governed by nature…. I am intimately related to all the parts, which are of the same kind as myself. If I remember these two things, I cannot be discontented with anything that arises out of the whole, because I am connected to the whole. A Roman emperor would seem to have little in common with a kid in a sleepy southern town. Somehow, though, the same awareness showed up in both of us. Why and how could that be? After wondering about those questions for many years, I’ve now become convinced that we eventually become aware of our unity with the whole because it’s inescapable. The awareness is wired into us, because we’re wired into the universe. We can try with all our might to pretend we’re separate from the rest of the universe, but one way or the other it will catch up to us and welcome us back into its embrace.

So all that fame had lasted less than a hundred years! Les Orientales, Les Meditations, La Comedie Humaine - forgotten, lost, unknown! Yet here were huge crates of books which giant steam cranes were unloading in the courtyards, and buyers were crowding around the purchase desk. But one of them was asking for 'Stress Theory' in twenty volumes, another for an 'Abstract of Electric Problems', this one for 'A Practical Treatise for the Lubrication of Driveshafts', and that one for the latest 'Monograph on Cancer of the Brain'. 'How strange!' mused Michel. 'All of science and industry here, just as at school, nothing for art!' I must sound like a madman asking for literary works here - am I insane?

So the first Seers, watching the wanderings of thought within their own minds, discovered that there was something which came into action when thinking momentarily stopped. That Something was the first faint intimation of the soul. Thus the science of soul-discovery was born and the ancients began to teach men how to know the truth about themselves. In

...there is something the press can do in language that a society cannot do. You've done it before. Move us closer to participatory democracy; help us distinguish between a pseudo-experience and a living one, between an encounter and an engagement, between theme and life. Help us all try to figure out what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

Humans are not made for sitting at a desk all day. We have been evolving for millions of years to hunt animals through dense forest and vast plains. To walk huge distances in search of water. To spend hours searching for edible fruit to bring home to our families. The sedentary lifestyle many of us lead these days is no more than a by-product of the last few centuries.

The smallest thing by the influence of eternity is made infinite and eternal. We pass through a standing continent or region of ages, that are already ebfore us, glorious and perfect while we come to them. Like men in a ship we pass forward, the shores and marks seeming to go backward, though we move and they stand still. We are not with them in our progressive motion, but prevent the swiftness of our course, and are present with them in our understandings. Like the sun we dart our rays before us, and occupy those spaces with light and contemplation which we move towards, but possess not with our bodies. And seeing all things in the light of Divine knowledge, eternally serving God, rejoice unspeakable in that service, and enjoy it all.

Guided death meditation is something I usually do with healthy people who want to understand how to help those who are terminally ill. But I think it might help Win a little; bring her some peace. The meditation was developed by Joan Halifax and Larry Rosenberg, based on the nine contemplations of dying—written by Atisha, a highly revered Tibetan monk, in the eleventh century.

It is a good thing to be happy alone. It is better to be happy in company, but good to be happy alone. Men owe me the advantage of their society, but if they deny me that just debt, I will not be unjust to myself, and side with them in bereaving me. I will not be discouraged, lest I be miserable for company. More company increases happiness, but does not lighten or diminish misery.

Most growth modalities—from nineteenth-century psychoanalysis to twentieth-century Scientology, and just about everything in between—share a common paradigm. It goes something like this: we store influences from the past in the subconscious, those influences inappropriately affect our behavior and perception in the present, and our job is to somehow remove those distorting influences.

To weigh the future of future thoughts requires some powerfully visionary thinking about how the life of the mind can operate in a moral context increasingly dangerous to its health. It will require thinking about the generations to come as life forms at least as important as cathedral-like forests and glistening seals. It will require thinking about generations to come as more than a century or so of one’s own family line, group stability, gender, sex, race, religion. Thinking about how we might respond if certain that our own line would last two thousand, twelve thousand more earthly years. It will require thinking about the quality of human life, not just its length. The quality of intelligent life, not just its strategizing abilities. The obligations of moral life, not just its ad hoc capacity for pity.

Ah!' said Michel, tempted, 'you have modern poems?' 'Of course. For instance, Martillac's 'Electric Harmonies,' which won a prize last year from the Academic of Sciences, and Monsieur de Pulfasse's 'Meditations on Oxygen;' and we have the 'Poetic Parallelogram,' and even the 'Decarbonated Odes. . .' Michel couldn't bear hearing another word and found himself outside again, stupefied and overcome. Not even this tiny amount of art had escaped the pernicious influence of the age! Science, Chemistry, Mechanics had invaded the realm of poetry! 'And such things are read,' he murmured as he hurried through the streets, ' perhaps even bought! And signed by the authors and placed on the shelves marked 'Literature.' But not one copy of Balzac, not one work by Victor Hugo! Where can I find such things-where, if not the Library...

During the closing decades of the eighteenth century, and the opening decades of the nineteenth, a constellation of literary and scientific luminaries appeared in the European sky which indicated and inaugurated the Age of Reason. God was dethroned and Reason became the throned sovereign of philosophy. Now science receives our highest worship. The scientist is the pope of today and sits in the Vatican of world authority. We

But, now, as he thought about that meditating young woman, he experienced softer feelings—a flood of compassion for her and for all his fellow humans who are victims of that freakish twist of evolution that grants self-awareness but not the requisite psychological equipment to deal with the pain of transient existence. And so throughout the years, the centuries, the millennia, we have relentlessly constructed makeshift denials of finiteness.

All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was Divine; I knew by intuition those things which since my Apostacy I collected again by the highest reason. My very ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one brought into the state of innocence. All things were spotless and pure and glorious; yea, and infinitely mine and joyful and precious. I knew not that there were any sins, or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties, contentions, or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from my eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I knew nothing of sickness or death or exaction. In the absence of these I was entertained like an angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory; I saw all in the peace of Eden... All Time was Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath.

Meditation is practiced by traditions all over the world. It is not a Buddhist practice per se, or even a religious practice, and has existed for centuries. The only reason you and I ought to practice meditation is because our friend Sid used it as a tool to discover his innate wisdom, and lived happily ever after as a result. We too can touch the wisdom behind our confusion. We too can look at the display on our movie screen, and see it as illusory. Sid is most commonly

Objects are so far from diminishing, that they magnify the faculties of the soul beholding them. A sand in your conception conformeth your soul, and reduceth it to the size and similitude of a sand, A tree apprehended is a tree in your mind; the whole hemisphere and the heavens magnify your soul to the wideness of the heavens; all the spaces above the heavens enlarge it wider to their own dimensions. And what is without limit maketh your conception illimited and endless.

The Oreo cookie invented, the Titanic sinks, Spanish flu, Prohibition, women granted the right to vote, Lindbergh flies solo across the Atlantic, penicillin invented, stock market crashes, the Depression, Amelia Earhart, the atom is split, Prohibition ends, Golden Gate Bridge is built, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Korean War, Disneyland, Rosa Parks, Laika the dog is shot into space, hula hoops, birth control pill invented, Bay of Pigs, Marilyn Monroe dies, JFK killed, MLK has a dream, Vietnam War, Star Trek, MLK killed, RFK killed, Woodstock, the Beatles (George, Ringo, John, and Paul) break up, Watergate, the Vietnam War ends, Nixon resigns, Earth Day, Fiddler on the Roof, Olga Korbut, Patty Hearst, Transcendental Meditation, the ERA, The Six Million Dollar Man. "Bloody hell," I said when she was done. "I know. It must be a lot to take in." "It's unfathomable. A Brit named his son Ringo Starr?" She looked pleasantly surprised: she'd thought I had no sense of humor. "Well, I think his real name was Richard Starkey.

In an interview that a Benedictine monk had with His Holiness in Scotland, he asked the Dalai Lama, “Do you think your sitting on the mountain will be of any good to these twentieth-century people?” The Dalai Lama answered him right away, “Of course. Definitely it is good.” It’s good because places of meditation are charged with the feeling and the sound of the cricket, or the breathing of the whale, or just our Zen breathing, and this creates a very powerful life force that affects the life of our environment.

Therefore of necessity they must at first believe that Felicity is a glorious though an unknown thing. And certainly it was the infinite wisdom of God that did implant by instinct so strong a desire of Felicity in the Soul, that we might be excited to labour after it, though we know it not, the very force wherewith we covet it supplying the place of understanding. That there is a Felicity, we all know by the desires after, that there is a most glorious Felicity we know by the strength and vehemence of those desires.

Unless, for example, you can intelligently use the phrase "white on white crime," you cannot use the phrase "black on black crime." It has no meaning and no use other than exoticizing blacks, separating the violence blacks do to one another into some nineteenth-century anthropological racism where the "dark continent was understood to be violent, blank, unpeopled (the people were likened to nature), an easily available site of Conrad's Heart of Darkness where whites went for self-realization, self-discovery, and loot.

Devotees of these two spiritual paths of experience—oneness and goodness—have been at odds for centuries. Proponents of the oneness path have insisted that the goal of spirituality is to reconnect with everlasting eternity. They yearn to taste the quintessence of their being, to transcend time and space, to be unified with the one. In the other camp, advocates of the goodness path have traditionally seen stark choices in the world. They believe we should choose love, compassion, beauty, truth, and altruism over hatred, fear, anger, judgment, and other opposites of goodness. To them, there are constructive forces in the world that are being challenged by destructive ones. Their goal has been to stand their ground and choose to be good above all else. Even with those apparent differences, both paths have found homes within each of the world’s religions. As noted earlier, Hinduism offers the oneness path of Yoga, Judaism offers Kabbalah, Islam offers Sufism, Christianity offers Mysticism, and so on. Whatever the arrangement, the two paths have historically found ways to co-exist.

Throughout the verbal traditions handed down by our earlier forefathers, and shining through the literature of the world, far back as the first rude manuscripts of Oriental peoples and up to the newest product of the printer’s press of this year of grace, there has been a strange yet recurring allusion to another self within man. It does not matter what name was given to this mysterious self, whether it be called soul or breath, spirit or ghost. There is, indeed, no other doctrine in the world which possesses so far-flung an intellectual ancestry as this. Everybody

If the original ink proved tenacious, it could still be possible to make out the traces of the texts that were written over: a unique fourth-century copy of Cicero’s On the Republic remained visible beneath a seventh-century copy of St. Augustine’s meditation on the Psalms; the sole surviving copy of Seneca’s book on friendship was deciphered beneath an Old Testament inscribed in the late sixth century. These strange, layered manuscripts—called palimpsests; from the Greek for “scraped again”—have served as the source of several major works from the ancient past that would not otherwise be known.

Valentine’s concept of introversion includes traits that contemporary psychology would classify as openness to experience (“thinker, dreamer”), conscientiousness (“idealist”), and neuroticism (“shy individual”). A long line of poets, scientists, and philosophers have also tended to group these traits together. All the way back in Genesis, the earliest book of the Bible, we had cerebral Jacob (a “quiet man dwelling in tents” who later becomes “Israel,” meaning one who wrestles inwardly with God) squaring off in sibling rivalry with his brother, the swashbuckling Esau (a “skillful hunter” and “man of the field”). In classical antiquity, the physicians Hippocrates and Galen famously proposed that our temperaments—and destinies—were a function of our bodily fluids, with extra blood and “yellow bile” making us sanguine or choleric (stable or neurotic extroversion), and an excess of phlegm and “black bile” making us calm or melancholic (stable or neurotic introversion). Aristotle noted that the melancholic temperament was associated with eminence in philosophy, poetry, and the arts (today we might classify this as opennessto experience). The seventeenth-century English poet John Milton wrote Il Penseroso (“The Thinker”) and L’Allegro (“The Merry One”), comparing “the happy person” who frolics in the countryside and revels in the city with “the thoughtful person” who walks meditatively through the nighttime woods and studies in a “lonely Towr.” (Again, today the description of Il Penseroso would apply not only to introversion but also to openness to experience and neuroticism.) The nineteenth-century German philosopher Schopenhauer contrasted “good-spirited” people (energetic, active, and easily bored) with his preferred type, “intelligent people” (sensitive, imaginative, and melancholic). “Mark this well, ye proud men of action!” declared his countryman Heinrich Heine. “Ye are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.” Because of this definitional complexity, I originally planned to invent my own terms for these constellations of traits. I decided against this, again for cultural reasons: the words introvert and extrovert have the advantage of being well known and highly evocative. Every time I uttered them at a dinner party or to a seatmate on an airplane, they elicited a torrent of confessions and reflections. For similar reasons, I’ve used the layperson’s spelling of extrovert rather than the extravert one finds throughout the research literature.

Soon after the New Testament was completed, Christians were reading their Bibles for joy and transformation, as a way of simply being present with God. This practice of the devotional reading of Scripture was especially popular among those who retreated to the deserts for prayer and renewal. By the fourth century, much of the Christian church accepted the practice of the devotional reading of Scripture. Lectio divina-as this practice was named-immersed people in the reading of Scripture, and yet the point was to do the reading in the context of prayer and meditation. The point was to employ the Scriptures as a doorway into transforming intimacy.

Stoicism was a school of philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early third century BC. Its name is derived from the Greek stoa, meaning porch, because that’s where Zeno first taught his students. The philosophy asserts that virtue (meaning, chiefly, the four cardinal virtues of self-control, courage, justice, and wisdom) is happiness, and it is our perceptions of things—rather than the things themselves—that cause most of our trouble. Stoicism teaches that we can’t control or rely on anything outside what Epictetus called our “reasoned choice”—our ability to use our reason to choose how we categorize, respond, and reorient ourselves to external events.

FROM GREECE TO ROME TO TODAY Stoicism was a school of philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early third century BC. Its name is derived from the Greek stoa, meaning porch, because that’s where Zeno first taught his students. The philosophy asserts that virtue (meaning, chiefly, the four cardinal virtues of self-control, courage, justice, and wisdom) is happiness, and it is our perceptions of things—rather than the things themselves—that cause most of our trouble. Stoicism teaches that we can’t control or rely on anything outside what Epictetus called our “reasoned choice”—our ability to use our reason to choose how we categorize, respond, and reorient ourselves to external events.

The kingdom is finally to be identified as the Lord Jesus himself. When we say “Come, Lord Jesus” on this Christmas Day, we are preferring his Lordship to any other loyalty system or any other final frame of reference. If Jesus is Lord, than Caesar is not! If Jesus is Lord, then the economy and stock market are not! If Jesus is Lord, then my house and possessions, family and job are not! If Jesus is Lord, than I am not! That multileveled implication was obvious to first-century members of the Roman Empire because the phrase “Caesar is Lord” was the empire’s loyalty test and political bumper sticker. They, and others, knew they had changed “parties” when they welcomed Jesus as Lord instead of the Roman emperor as their savior.

This internal exploration is well worth while. For there is something within the mind of man and beast, something that is neither intellect nor feeling, but deeper than both, to which the name of intuition, may fitly be given. When science can truly explain why a horse will take its drunken rider or driver for miles through the dark and find its own way home; why field-mice seal up their holes before the cold weather comes; why sheep move away to the lee side of a mountain before severe storms; when it can tell us what warns the tortoise to retire to rest and refuge before every shower of rain; and when it can really explain who guides a vulture many miles distant to the dead body of an animal, we may then learn that intuition is sometimes a better guide than intellect.

What would it mean for us to come to terms with the knowledge that civilization, our whole mode of development and culture, has been premised and built upon extermination—on a history experienced as "terror" without end" (to borrow a phrase from Adorno)? To dwell on such a thought would be to throw into almost unbearable relief the distance between our narratives of inherent human dignity and grace and moral superiority, on the one hand, and the most elemental facts of our actual social existence, on the other. We congratulate ourselves for our social progress—for democratic governance and state-protected civil and human rights (however notional or incompletely defended—yet continue to enslave and kill millions of sensitive creatures who in many biological, hence emotional and cognitive particulars resemble us. To truly meditate on such a contradiction is to comprehend our self-understanding to be not merely flawed, but comically delusional... In the nineteenth century, the animal welfare advocate Edward Maitland warned that our destruction of other animals lead only to our own "debasement and degradation of character" as a species. "For the principles of Humanity cannot be renounced with impunity; but their renunciation, if persisted in, involves inevitably the forfeiture of humanity itself. And to cease through such forfeiture man is to become demon." What else indeed can we call a being but demon who routinely enslaves and kills thousands of millions of other gentle beings, imprisons them in laboratories, electrocutes or poisons or radiates or drowns them?

All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana. That is what gives power to certain people among us, to those who are half awake: that is the cause of the well-known time lag of a century in our artistic and intellectual life; novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital currents; that is what gives rise to the extraordinary phenomenon of the constant formation of myths which would be venerable if they were really ancient, but which are really nothing but sinister attempts to plunge us back into a past that attracts us only because it is dead.

When I first started dual enrollment at Lake City Community College you could print in the library for free. I printed whole books. Like James Legge's 1891 "Tao Te Ching" translation. He was to parentheses what Emily Dickinson was to the Em Dash. "To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest (at­tain­ment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a dis­ease." I'd sit around listening to records as their dot matrix printer whirred. Slowly printing a book from the 6th century BCE. They had those hard blue plastic headphones. Your ears would ache. But Rimsky-Korsakov was pretty metal. Herbert Benson's "The Relaxation Response" had me picking "ZOOM" as my meditation mantra. Reading Vonnegut with his nonlinear narrative. Books will often have Acknowledgments. A page or two. Things that helped you. What matters. Everything I write is an Acknowledgment. What matters. And I've printed whole books.

The operative word in these lines from D.H. Lawrence, who wasn’t a conventionally religious person, is “soul.” It’s a word that has become almost embarrassing for many contemporary people unless it is completely stripped of its religious meaning. Perhaps that’s just what it needs sometimes: to be stripped of its “religious” meaning, in the sense that faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart. That’s what the twentieth century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge, and truth, and ours - until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul as the first of survival” (Fanny Howe). Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually, inevitability, it breaks.

Who will I be when I have fewer patients? When I have no patients at all? It's often noted that "practice" as it relates to medicine has two meanings: the act of caring for patients and the doctor's never-ending process of perfecting his or her craft. But there's a third meaning, too, one I'm only now appreciating as I contemplate the end of my career. Medicine is a practice in the way that yoga or meditation is for many people, an activity repeated so often that it becomes a kind of incantation. I have, for so long, stood to my patients' right sides as physicians have done for centuries, palpated the lymph nodes in their necks, armpits, and groins; auscultated their hearts and lungs; asked the same questions I first learned to ask nearly forty years ago—What makes the pain better? What makes it worse? These rituals are for me an anchor without which I fear I might simply drift away. Of course I suspected all along that what I feared wasn't abandoning my patients, but myself.

Other centuries sought safety in the union of reason and religion, research and asceticism. In their Universitas Litterarum, theology ruled. Among us we use meditation, the fine gradations of yoga technique, in our efforts to exorcise the beast within us and the diabolus dwelling in every branch of knowledge. Now you know as well as I that the Glass Bead Game also has its hidden diabolus, that it can lead to empty virtuosity, to artistic vanity, to self-advancement, to the seeking of power over others and then to the abuse of that power. This is why we need another kind of education beside the intellectual and submit ourselves to the morality of the Order, not in order to reshape our mentally active life into a psychically vegetative dream-life, but on the contrary to make ourselves fit for the summit of intellectual achievement. We do not intend to flee from the vita activa to the vita contemplativa, nor vice versa, but to keep moving forward while alternating between the two, being at home in both, partaking of both.

Konec dějin nenastal – do amerického prezidentského úřadu nastoupil Donald Trump a my se nyní nacházíme ve zcela odlišné fázi vývoje. Liberalismus postrádá ideologického protivníka, jako byl imperialismus, fašismus nebo komunismus. Prezidentův odpor vůči němu je bezvýznamný. Zatímco každé hlavní hnutí 20. století mělo svou vizi nového lidstva, Trump nenabízí nic, nehodlá určovat a prosazovat žádnou globální představu světa, dokonce se domnívá, že by to byla zásadní chyba. Ani zastánci brexitu nemají pro svou zemi žádný plán. Zajímavé je, že většina zastánců vystoupení z Evropské unie neodmítá liberální zásady společnosti – ztratili pouze víru v globalizaci. Nadále uznávají demokracii, svobodný trh, lidská práva a sociální zodpovědnost, domnívají se však, že se tyto pěkné vymoženosti mají zastavit na hranicích, protože s nepřizpůsobivými imigranty jsou neudržitelné. Věří, že k zachování svobody a blahobytu v Británii nebo v Americe je nutné postavit zeď a nežádoucí cizince k sobě nepouštět. Cizinců se liberalismus netýká.

The learned. Learning and prayer have little in common. It was so then and it is still so today. Learning is besotted and bemused by the brilliance of its own ideas and has an overweeningly high opinion of its own interpretation of the world’s affairs. And whenever the world takes a course not laid down in the books it is immediately suspect. Western thought is inordinately proud of having “grown up” in the last century. It considers itself completely adult and self-possessed. Meanwhile in obedience to its own law it is no longer spreading its wings like an eagle, no longer adventuring to the horizon. It has become a mere appendage to earthbound utility blind and blunted to certain aspects of the truth. But human nature is so constituted that even in its most debased and blinded state it still needs to ape God and set itself on a pedestal as if it were divine. Unconsciously it is reaching out towards a state it might be capable of achieving if it were not so in love with itself and forever leading itself and its world into the icy mire of materialism.

A beautiful example of a long-term intention was presented by A. T. Ariyaratane, a Buddhist elder, who is considered to be the Gandhi of Sri Lanka. For seventeen years there had been a terrible civil war in Sri Lanka. At one point, the Norwegians were able to broker peace, and once the peace treaty was in effect, Ariyaratane called the followers of his Sarvodaya movement together. Sarvodaya combines Buddhist principles of right livelihood, right action, right understanding, and compassion and has organized citizens in one-third of that nation’s villages to dig wells, build schools, meditate, and collaborate as a form of spiritual practice. Over 650,000 people came to the gathering to hear how he envisioned the future of Sri Lanka. At this gathering he proposed a five-hundred-year peace plan, saying, “The Buddha teaches we must understand causes and conditions. It’s taken us five hundred years to create the suffering that we are in now.” Ari described the effects of four hundred years of colonialism, of five hundred years of struggle between Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists, and of several centuries of economic disparity. He went on, “It will take us five hundred years to change these conditions.” Ariyaratane then offered solutions, proposing a plan to heal the country. The plan begins with five years of cease-fire and ten years of rebuilding roads and schools. Then it goes on for twenty-five years of programs to learn one another’s languages and cultures, and fifty years of work to right economic injustice, and to bring the islanders back together as a whole. And every hundred years there will be a grand council of elders to take stock on how the plan is going. This is a sacred intention, the long-term vision of an elder. In the same way, if we envision the fulfillment of wisdom and compassion in the United States, it becomes clear that the richest nation on earth must provide health care for its children; that the most productive nation on earth must find ways to combine trade with justice; that a creative society must find ways to grow and to protect the environment and plan sustainable development for generations ahead. A nation founded on democracy must bring enfranchisement to all citizens at home and then offer the same spirit of international cooperation and respect globally. We are all in this together.

The first is the belief that the universe is essentially harmonious, and that the source of that concord lies in mathematical proportions which can be directly related to musical harmonies. Pythagoras, in an oft-repeated legend, was said to have meditated on the sound of smiths beating hammers upon anvils, and to have argued that a hammer half as heavy produced a note an octave above its full-sized fellow.3 More important were the experiments with a single string, or monochord, attributed to him by his successors. If a stretched string is divided exactly into two it produces a sound an octave higher than the fundamental pitch (the ratio 2:1), the intervals of the fourth and fifth can similarly be expressed as the ratios 4:3 and 3:2 respectively, and all other intervals can be described in mathematical terms.4 These numerical proportions were then extended to describe the relationships of the planetary spheres, both in their relative distance one from another, and in the speed of their movement. The ideas were given influential (if obscure) expression in Plato’s Timaeus, and endlessly elaborated in succeeding centuries up to the Renaissance. One of the final manifestations of this understanding is provided in the illustration of cosmic harmony from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi … historia 1

As Descartes said to his close correspondent, Marin Mersenne, “I may tell you, between ourselves, that these six Meditations contain all the foundations of my physics. But please do not tell people, for that might make it harder for supporters of Aristotle to approve of them. I hope that readers will gradually get used to my principles, and recognize their truth, before they notice that they destroy the principles of Aristotle” (18 January 1641). The Meditations attempts a complete intellectual revolution: the replacement of Aristotelian philosophy with a new philosophy in order to replace Aristotelian science with a new science. For a 17th-century Aristotelian, a body is matter informed by substantial and accidental forms, and change is explained by the gain or loss of such forms: in mutation by the acquisition of a substantial form, and in what Aristotelians would call true motion (that is, augmentation and diminution, alteration, or local motion) by the successive acquisition of places or of qualitative or quantitative forms. The mechanist program consisted in doing away with qualitative forms and reducing all changes to something mathematically quantifiable: matter in motion. As Descartes said in The World, not only the four qualities called heat, cold, moistness, and dryness, “but also all the others

July 19th FORGIVE THEM BECAUSE THEY DON’T KNOW “As Plato said, every soul is deprived of truth against its will. The same holds true for justice, self-control, goodwill to others, and every similar virtue. It’s essential to constantly keep this in your mind, for it will make you more gentle to all.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 7.63 As he wound his way up Via Dolorosa to the top of Calvary Hill, Jesus (or Christus as he would have been known to Seneca and other Roman contemporaries) had suffered immensely. He’d been beaten, flogged, stabbed, forced to bear his own cross, and was set to be crucified on it next to two common criminals. There he watched the soldiers roll dice to see who would get to keep his clothes, listened as the people sneered and taunted him. Whatever your religious inclinations, the words that Jesus spoke next—considering they came as he was subjected to unimaginable human suffering—send chills down your spine. Jesus looked upward and said simply, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” That is the same truth that Plato spoke centuries earlier and that Marcus spoke almost two centuries after Jesus; other Christians must have spoken this truth as they were cruelly executed by the Romans under Marcus’s reign: Forgive them; they are deprived of truth. They wouldn’t do this if they weren’t. Use this knowledge to be gentle and gracious.

For centuries, Eastern religions have been telling us that it’s our egos that trap us in suffering. In the 5th century, Indian adept Vasubandu wrote, “So long as you grasp at the self, you stay bound to the world of suffering.” These spiritual traditions emphasize meditation, contemplation, altruistic service, and compassion as ways to escape the ego. Our emotions and thoughts become less “sticky” and “I, me, mine” “lose their self-hypnotic power.” That’s how we stop selfing. Once we drop our identification with the ego-self enshrined in the prefrontal cortex and enter Bliss Brain, we make the subject-object shift. We can ask ourselves, “If I’m not my thoughts, and I’m the one thinking those thoughts, then who might I be?” This perspective takes us out of selfing and into the present moment. In the meditative present, we can connect with the great nonlocal field of consciousness. Different traditions have different names for it: the Tao, the Anima Mundi, the Universal Mind, God, the All That Is. We then see our local self as the object. With this view from the mountaintop, we’re able to perceive new possibilities of what we might become, this time from the perspective of oneness with the universe. Free of the drag of the ego, uncoupled from the chatter of the demon, the conditioned personalities we inherited from our history and past experiences no longer confine our sense of self.

The “pale blue dot” image and Carl’s prose meditation on it have been beloved the world over ever since. It exemplifies just the kind of breakthrough that I think of as a fulfillment of Einstein’s hope for science. We have gotten clever enough to dispatch a spacecraft four billion miles away and command it to send us back an image of Earth. Seeing our world as a single pixel in the immense darkness is in itself a statement about our true circumstances in the cosmos, and one that every single human can grasp instantly. No advanced degree required. In that photo, the inner meaning of four centuries of astronomical research is suddenly available to all of us at a glance. It is scientific data and art equally, because it has the power to reach into our souls and alter our consciousness. It is like a great book or movie, or any major work of art. It can pierce our denial and allow us to feel something of reality—even a reality that some of us have long resisted. A world that tiny cannot possibly be the center of a cosmos of all that is, let alone the sole focus of its creator. The pale blue dot is a silent rebuke to the fundamentalist, the nationalist, the militarist, the polluter—to anyone who does not put above all other things the protection of our little planet and the life that it sustains in the vast cold darkness. There is no running away from the inner meaning of this scientific achievement.

There appears to have been institutionalized bias against women right from the earliest times. I don’t think anybody sat down and thought, “Oh, let us be biased.” It’s just that it was part of the prevailing social scene. As the years passed, everything was recited and recorded from the male point of view. I am sure this was not intentional, it was just how it happened. Because most of the texts and the commentaries were written from the male point of view—that is, by monks—women increasingly began to be seen as dangerous and threatening. For example, when the Buddha talked about desire, he gave a meditation on the thirty-two parts of the body. You start with the hair on the top of the head and then go all the way down to the soles of the feet, imagining what you would find underneath if you took the skin off each part; the kidneys, the heart, the guts, the blood, the lymph and all that sort of thing. The practitioner dissects his body in order to cut through the enormous attachment to physical form and see it as it really is. Of course, in losing attachment to our own bodies, we also lose attachment to the bodies of others. But nonetheless, the meditation that the Buddha taught was primarily directed towards oneself. It was designed to cut off attachment to one’s own physical form and to achieve a measure of detachment from it; to break through any preoccupation the meditator might have about the attractiveness of his own body. However, when we look at what was being taught later, in the writings of Nagarjuna in the first century, or Shantideva in the seventh, we see that this same meditation is directed outwards, towards the bodies of women. It is the woman one sees as a bag of guts, lungs, kidneys, and blood. It is the woman who is impure and disgusting. There is no mention of the impurity of the monk who is meditating. This change occurred because this tradition of meditation was carried on by much less enlightened minds than that of the Buddha. So instead of just using the visualization as a meditation to break through attachment to the physical, it was used as a way of keeping the monks celibate. It was no longer simply a means of seeing things as they really are, but instead, as a means of cultivating aversion towards women. Instead of monks saying to themselves, “Women are impure and so am I and so are all the other monks around me,” it developed into “Women are impure.” As a consequence, women began to be viewed as a danger to monks, and this developed into a kind of monastic misogynism. Obviously, if women had written these texts, there would have been a very different perspective. But women did not write the texts. Even if they had been able to write some works from the female point of view, these still would have been imbued with the flavor and ideas of the texts and teachings designed for males. As a result of this pronounced bias, an imbalance developed in the teachings.

The belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in mystical and academic literature. The Kabbalists -- Jewish mystics of Spain and Palestine -- believed that super-normal insight and power could be derived from properly combining the letters of the Divine Name. For example, Abu Aharon, an early Kabbalist who emigrated from Baghdad to Italy, was said to perform miracles through the power of the Sacred Names." "What kind of power are we talking about here?" "Most Kabbalists were theorists who were interested only in pure meditation. But there were so-called 'practical Kabbalists' who tried to apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life." "In other words, sorcerers." "Yes. These practical Kabbalists used a so-called 'archangelic alphabet,' derived from first-century Greek and Aramaic theurgic alphabets, which resembled cuneiform. The Kabbalists referred to this alphabet as 'eye writing,' because the letters were composed of lines and small circles, which resembled eyes." "Ones and zeroes." "Some Kabbalists divided up the letters of the alphabet according to where they were produced inside the mouth." "Okay. So as we would think of it, they were drawing a connection between the printed letter on the page and the neural connections that had to be invoked in order to pronounce it." "Yes. By analyzing the spelling of various words, they were able to draw what they thought were profound conclusions about their true, inner meaning and significance.

Much more than skeleton, it is flash, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturb and alarm us – and which alleviates us as well. The Buddhists monks gladly frequented charnel houses: where corner desire more surely and emancipate oneself from it? The horrible being a path of liberation in every period of fervor and inwardness, our remains have enjoyed great favor. In the Middle Ages, a man made a regimen of salvation, he believed energetically: the corpse was in fashion. Faith was vigorous than, invincible; it cherished the livid and the fetid, it knew the profits to be derived from corruption and gruesomeness. Today, an edulcorated religion adheres only to „nice” hallucinations, to Evolution and to Progress. It is not such a religion which might afford us the modern equivalent of the dense macabre. „Let a man who aspires to nirvana act so that nothing is dear to him”, we read in a Buddhist text. It is enough to consider these specters, to meditate on the fate of the flash which adhered to them, in order to understand the urgency of detachment. There is no ascesis in the double rumination on the flesh and on the skeleton, on the dreadful decrepitude of the one and the futile permanence of the other. It is a good exercise to sever ourselves now and then from our face, from our skin, to lay aside this deceptive sheathe, then to discard – if only for a moment – that layer of grease which keeps us from discerning what is fundamental in ourselves. Once exercise is over, we are freer and more alone, almost invulnerable. In other to vanquish attachments and the disadvantages which derive from them, we should have to contemplate the ultimate nudity of a human being, force our eyes to pierce his entrails and all the rest, wallow in the horror of his secretions, in his physiology of an imminent corpse. This vision would not be morbid but methodical, a controlled obsession, particularly salutary in ordeals. The skeleton incites us to serenity; the cadaver to renunciation. In the sermon of futility which both of them preach to us happiness is identified with the destruction of our bounds. To have scanted no detail of such a teaching and even so to come to terms with simulacra! Blessed was the age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coefficient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word „depth” has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gain – say the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a „parasite”? In Tibet, the last country where monks still mattered, they have been ruled out. Yet is was a rare consolation to think that thousands of thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajnaparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more then ever, we should build monasteries … for those who believe in everything and for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exist a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.

Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support. Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word, as in referring to meditation as a “spiritual practice,” I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I have committed a grievous error. The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath.” Around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition. I do not share their semantic concerns.[1] Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

[T]here was a prophetic medieval Italian abbot, Joachim of Floris, who in the early thirteenth century foresaw the dissolution of the Christian Church and dawn of a terminal period of earthly spiritual life, when the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, would speak directly to the human heart without ecclesiastical mediation. His view, like that of Frobenius, was of a sequence of historic stages, of which our own was to be the last; and of these he counted four. The first was, of course, that immediately following the Fall of Man, before the opening of the main story, after which there was to unfold the whole great drama of Redemption, each stage under the inspiration of one Person of the Trinity. The first was to be of the Father, the Laws of Moses and the People of Israel; the second of the Son, the New Testament and the Church; and now finally (and here, of course, the teachings of this clergyman went apart from the others of his communion), a third age, which he believed was about to commence, of the Holy Spirit, that was to be of saints in meditation, when the Church, become superfluous, would in time dissolve. It was thought by not a few in Joachim’s day that Saint Francis of Assisi might represent the opening of the coming age of direct, pentecostal spirituality. But as I look about today and observe what is happening to our churches in this time of perhaps the greatest access of mystically toned religious zeal our civilization has known since the close of the Middle Ages, I am inclined to think that the years foreseen by the good Father Joachim of Floris must have been our own. For there is no divinely ordained authority any more that we have to recognize. There is no anointed messenger of God’s law. In our world today all civil law is conventional. No divine authority is claimed for it: no Sinai; no Mount of Olives. Our laws are enacted and altered by human determination, and within their secular jurisdiction each of us is free to seek his own destiny, his own truth, to quest for this or for that and to find it through his own doing. The mythologies, religions, philosophies, and modes of thought that came into being six thousand years ago and out of which all the monumental cultures both of the Occident and of the Orient - of Europe, the Near and Middle East, the Far East, even early America - derived their truths and lives, are dissolving from around us, and we are left, each on his own to follow the star and spirit of his own life.

I don’t foresee, or want, a color-blind, race-neutral environment. The nineteenth century was the time for that. It’s too late, now. Our race-inflected culture not only exists, it thrives. The question is whether it thrives as a virus or a bountiful harvest of possibilities.

Many shy away from this practice believing that meditating on the dark side of life will breed a dark pessimism. For after all, isn’t it better to remain on the sunnier side of life? While it is common in our day to assume this, not all cultures have adhered to this view. In fact, two of the golden ages of history – Ancient Athens and Elizabethan England – were times infused with a “tragic sense of life”. As the 20th century classicist Edith Hamilton noted, they had a lucid awareness that human life is “bound up with evil and that injustice [is] of the nature of things.” (Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way) Yet despite their proclivity to meditate on the evils of existence, these ages were also permeated with great productivity and a lust for life. It appears that in becoming aware and more accepting of the darker possibilities of life, we not only cultivate resilience, but also become more fully alive.

OH, NIETZSCHE The last Christmas Eve of the nineteenth century was very cold Piercing winds and snow stuffed themselves into the cracks of every door and window As professors of philosophy gathered in the Golden Hall Their nonsense and hollow academic jargon were winning applause Feeling a chill, professors furrowed their brows And refined ladies unconsciously pulled their collars closed No one paid attention to the chill, no one even responded But the howling wind outside the window Swept across Europe’s wide sky Outside, Nietzsche was wandering around in the wilderness His thoughts were accompanied by the snowy winds and howls of wolves In this frozen world his thoughts shed their skin again and again Like a bloody struggle to be free of incorporeal chains He relentlessly pursued the truth No one could understand his eccentric and arrogant disposition No one could answer his disdain for this world For only a blizzard of manuscripts accompanied him Weathered by a tormenting disease Nietzsche bitterly suffered from his solitary meditation His discontent with thoughts surged like gales blowing the heavy snow Sweeping the sky and earth with a wild fervor What a pure yet brutal world At that moment the bells of a new century were ringing The generation of heroes Nietzsche called “supermen” From “Martin Eden” penned by Jack London To the old man who went fishing with Hemingway Have already shocked the whole world Through so many sleepless nights he endured the torture of disease Yet nurtured the poetic longing of solitude and indifference An infant thought undergoes the trauma of birth To finally cry out in an earth-shattering voice Nietzsche, before the sunrise changed the world The entire sky shimmered with your incandescent thoughts The nearly extinguished candle was burning your final passion Nietzsche, oh Nietzsche, let us walk on together

Is there a difference between meditation and mindfulness? In modern times, meditation has in some way been rebranded as mindfulness to make it more accessible from a deeper perspective when, in fact, they are two important aspects of one system of training. Meditation is where we sit down to train our minds using specific techniques. Mindfulness is how we bring our minds back from distraction during the meditation session.

Maximus has been called unscriptural, but Scripture is the background and the presupposition for all that he does, to a wholly different degree than in the one-sided scholastic theology or spiritual works of the sixth century. The Confessor’s first major work is his set of answers to the questions of his friend Thalassius on passages in the Holy Scriptures.42 Maximus offers these answers from the fullness both of the exegetical and spiritual tradition and of his own personal meditation.

The idea of Sukhāvatī certainly grew out of a concept of a material paradise, but early on it became allied with an elevated spiritual and ethical outlook, the teaching of the Buddha as rescuer, in which Amitābha Buddha, lord of Sukhāvatī, saves those who meditate upon him. Classical Buddhism taught that salvation must occur by one's own efforts ("self-power"). Those who had lost hope in salvation through their own efforts flocked to the new teaching of salvation through the power of another, i.e., of Amitābha Buddha. At first, people attracted to this new teaching were probably motivated by a desire to escape from suffering into what was conceived of as a materially satisfying land. But Sukhāvatī was soon linked with the idea of good and evil, and those who sought to be reborn in Sukhāvatī did so out of despair at their own evil. A good example of such a thinker iS Shinran (1173–1262 C.E.), the Japanese priest who founded the True Pure Land (Jōdo Shin) sect. Modern Pure Land thought resembles Christianity in many ways—the strong monotheistic coloration, salvation through the Buddha (God), the concern with good and evil rather than with suffering and pleasure. In the mid-twentieth century, Kamegai Ryōun, a Jōdo Shin sect priest, converted to Christianity on the grounds that the Jōdo Shin sect was preparing the road leading to Christianity. It certainly seems possible that in its two thousand years, Pure Land thought has been influenced by Christian ideas (by the Christian Nestorian sect of Ch'ang-an in east-central China, for example).

America that has at its center the poisonous idea of race. This story runs from Thomas Jefferson's obscene remark that the Orangutan prefers "black women over those of his own species," to W. E. B. Du Bois's experience a century

Ever since, there has been a good deal of speculation about why they went. Tocqueville thought "it was a purely intellectual craving that called them from the comforts of their former homes." But according to a less generous observer who lived in their own time, the real reason they left was their misanthropy: "A Puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbour with all his heart." By the beginning of our own century, this view had become the prevailing one. According to D. H. Lawrence, they came "to get away"; and to his own rhetorical question "away from what?"-Lawrence replied, "in the long run, away from themselves." In an especially cruel assessment, William Carlos Williams called them "hard and little" people, as if they were

The earliest attempt to form an independent Zen group in Japan seems to have been led by Nōnin, who taught his form of Zen at Sanbōji (a Tendai temple in Settsu) during the latter part of the twelfth century. Because Nōnin's following, which styled itself the Darumashū (after Daruma, i.e., Bodhidharma, the semilegendary founder of the Chinese Ch'an school), failed to secure a permanent institutional base, scholars had not fully realized Nōnin's importance until recently. As early as 1272, however, less than eighty years after Nōnin's death, Nichiren had correctly identified Nōnin as the pioneer leader of the new Zen groups. Eisai, a contemporary of Nōnin, also founded several new centers for Zen practice, the most important of which was Kenninji in Kyoto. In contrast to Nōnin, who had never left Japan, Eisai had the benefit of two extended trips to China during which he could observe Chinese Ch'an (Jpn. Zen) teachers first hand. The third important early Zen leader in Japan was Dōgen, the founder of Japan's Sōtō school. Dōgen had entered Eisai's Kenninji in 1217 and, like Eisai, also traveled to China for firsthand study. Unlike Eisai (or Nōnin), after his return to Japan Dōgen attempted to establish the monastic structures he found in China. Dōgen's monasteries, Kōshōji (Dōgen's residence during 1230–1243) and Eiheiji (1244–1253), were the first in Japan to include a monks' hall (sōdō) within which Zen monks lived and meditated according to Chinese-style monastic regulations.

The Essence of Zen Precepts is a compilation or interweaving of four different texts, which I envision as four concentric circles, each one including and amplifying its predecessors. At the center is the primary text of the Sixteen Great Bodhisattva Precepts. The second circle is a brief thirteenth-century commentary on the precepts by Dogen. This text, known as the Essay on Teaching and Conferring the Precepts (Kyojukaimon), is very important in the Soto Zen lineage. It is recited as part of our monthly confession ceremony at the San Francisco Zen Center.

According to Soto Zen tradition, the Three Pure Precepts evolved from the Teaching of All Buddhas, which is one of the best-known and most highly revered teachings among all schools of Buddhism: Refrain from all evil, Practice all that is good, Purify your mind: This is the teaching of all buddhas.1 The first recorded instance of this ancient formulation is found in verse 185 of the Dhammapada, one of the earliest texts of Theravada Buddhism, written in the Pali language in the fifth century C.E. The Dhammapada is a collection of gatha (four-line verses) attributed to Shakyamuni Buddha himself.

Essence of Zen Precepts (Zenkaisho),5 compiled by the eighteenth-century monk and scholar Banjin Dotan.

My experience in meditation is not unique; it’s common to meditators throughout history. A 14th-century Tibetan mystic, writing about his experience deep in meditation, described it as: . . . a state of bare, transparent awareness; Effortless and brilliantly vivid, a state of relaxed, rootless wisdom; Fixation free and crystal clear, a state without the slightest reference point; Spacious empty clarity, a state wide-open and unconfined; the senses unfettered . . . The mystical experience isn’t the property of Buddhists or Catholics or Taoists or Hindus. It’s the common root of all religions. The great spiritual teachers entered these experiential states, and when they “came back from the mountaintop,” described them to their followers in the idiom of their cultures.

When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice. Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.

THROAT CHAKRA—VISHUDDHA How do you know the truth? Truth is the operative word in this section, whereas voice is its secondary focus. Most people are focusing on voice and expression at the Throat Chakra — that is, the capacity to express ideas and thoughts. What matters most is not how you talk at the Throat Chakra, but what you convey. The "what" is your truth, your most insightful wisdom; the "how" is your medium to express your truth. Both the "what" and "how" of truth are sitting here at the Throat Chakra, at the center of your physical throat (or the apple of your Adam). What do you mean by "truth?" Many claim the reality is a personal quest to discover the values and beliefs that drive choices and decisions about your life. Others suggest that a collective truth exists, a unified wisdom to which all can aspire and seek integration. Let the intersection of these two approaches inspire you to explore individual and collective truths to understand how to integrate what you see, learn and experience into your life. Throat Chakra Gemstones The gems of this chakra are believed to be the gems of Lemuria, an ancient civilization aligned with the realm of the dolphin, which reflect knowledge that had been preserved and held in crystals before the destruction of that community. One of the main Lemurian gemstones, AQUA Atmosphere QUARTZ is a powerful purifier of the atmosphere and also encourages power, tenacity and stability. •       AMAZONITE is the primary stone of reality, and it enhances confidence for public speakers, allowing them to express with ease even the most difficult words and themes. •       ANGELITE (in crystalline form, known as CELESTITE) invokes the angelic forces to evoke in your spaces the presence of angels, like archangels. Take this jewel with you or sleep by it to feel more connected to your own personal angels and guides. •       Since centuries TURQUOISE has been valued by indigenous Americans who find it a powerful purifier and healer, as well as a tool that strengthens and defends warriors in combat. It was revered as a source of good fortune in antiquity Persia. Connect to your gemstones in the Throat Chakra in moments of anxiety or frustration. Here's how to do this: Lie down in a comfortable position and keep in your right hand, the receiving one, one or three of your beloved light blue Throat Chakra crystals, through which energy reaches your body. (Some people feel their left hand is their Receiving Hand; go with what they feel right for you.) Set the intention to receive the gifts of the Throat Chakra, peace, wisdom and truth. Then move the stones to your hand, or Projecting Side, so you can take the energy out into the universe as a gift for everyone. Imagine a bright blue ray of truth and light beaming out into the world for everyone to see, receive and enjoy.

High, high in the Chinese hills, there was once a monastery where a distinguished Taoist guru lived with his disciples. In the evenings the monks would gather in the Great Hall to listen to their leader’s teachings and to meditate. But there was a stray cat that had adopted the monastery, and each evening it would follow the monks into the hall. It would mewl, scratch, and generally be annoying throughout their silent meditation. It did this every night until the great teacher became so irritated by it that he told his followers to put a collar on the cat and tether it on the far side of the monastery each evening. This worked well and, for a while, teacher, cat and monks all went through their nightly routine. One day, the learned teacher died. But the monks continued to tie up the cat each evening. More years passed. And eventually the cat died. So the monks went down to the nearest village, found a replacement cat, and tied it up each evening instead. Two centuries later, religious scholars write learned essays on the importance of tying up a cat prior to evening meditation. This is how much of cricket works.

But, irrespective of the internet’s CompuServes, nodes, bulletin boards, Lexus—whatever makes the information highway work—there is something the press can do in language that a society cannot do. You’ve done it before. Move us closer to participatory democracy; help us distinguish between a pseudo-experience and a living one, between an encounter and an engagement, between theme and life. Help us all try to figure out what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

just took their weighty German word for it. Jesus, Mani, Zoroaster, Gautama Buddha—at the very outset the leader did not offer his circle of followers a better state hereafter or an improved social order or any reward other than a certain “psychological state in the here and now,” as Weber put it. I suppose what I never really comprehended was that he was talking about an actual mental experience they all went through, an ecstasy, in short. In most cases, according to scriptures and legend, it happened in a flash. Mohammed fasting and meditating on a mountainside near Mecca and—flash!—ecstasy, vast revelation and the beginning of Islam. Zoroaster hauling haoma water along the road and—flash!—he runs into the flaming form of the Archangel Vohu Mano, messenger of Ahura Mazda, and the beginning of Zoroastrianism. Saul of Tarsus walking along the road to Damascus and—flash!—he hears the voice of the Lord and becomes a Christian. Plus God knows how many lesser figures in the 2,000 years since then, Christian Rosenkreuz and his “God-illuminated” brotherhood of Rosicrucians, Emanuel Swedenborg whose mind suddenly “opened” in 1743, Meister Eckhart and his disciples Suso and Tauler, and in the twentieth-century Sadhu Sundar Singh—with—flash!—a vision at the age of 16 and many times thereafter;

But for a few minutes to an hour every day—sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening—Marcus Aurelius was unreachable. The twentieth-century American philosopher Brand Blanshard marvels at what Marcus accomplished there in the “midnight dimness,” alone with his journal and his thoughts. It didn’t matter where he was or what was happening; Marcus stole the time to sit and think and write.

For hundreds of years, Buddhist monks in Vietnam have meditated in open cemeteries, bodies of their brethren in different states of decay around them. There, they envision the same processes that will inevitably be at work upon their own bodies. Saint Benedict, a fifth-century Italian monk and scholar, authored a famous book-length Rule for living that is still followed by many monastic orders and their oblates (including Benedictines, the Trappist order that drew Thomas Merton to monastic life, and even some Buddhist monasteries). Sisters and brothers following the Rule are counseled to “keep death ever before you.” Such meditations call us to acknowledge more fully the insistent ephemerality of our existence and to live with more intention, generosity, humility, and love.

You know what happened with physics, at the beginning of the century? Everything began to be called into doubt. The fundamentals, I mean, the very most basic assumptions. It was like a building that creaks and groans and you have to go down to inspect the foundations. People began to be doing not physics but rather meditations on physics. [...] The same sort of thing has happened in the novel. The foundations have had to be looked into. Which is no coincidence, because it was born at the birth of this Western civilization of ours, and it's followed the same arc, the same trajectory, right down to this moment of collapse. Is there a crisis in the novel or is it rather a novel of crisis? Both. One delves into its essence, its mission, its worth. But it's all been done so far from the outside. There've been attempts to carry out the same examination from within, but one would have to go deeper. A novel in which the novelist him- or herself is included. [...] I'm not talking about the figure of the writer inside the fiction. I'm talking about the possibility of the extreme case, in which it's the author of the novel that's inside the novel. Not as an observer, though, or a chronicler, or a witness [but as] just another character, the same sort of character as all the rest, which however do come from the soul or spirit or anima of the author. The author would be a man maddened, somehow, and living with his own doubles, aspects of his own self.

The cause of my irritation is not in this person but in me.” Remember, each individual has a choice. You are always the one in control. The cause of irritation—or our notion that something is bad—that comes from us, from our labels or our expectations. Just as easily, we can change those labels; we can change our entitlement and decide to accept and love what’s happening around us. And this wisdom has been repeated and independently discovered in every century and every country since time began.

In zazen, leave your front door and your back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don't serve them tea.” Read in: A Monk's Guide to Happiness: Meditation in the 21st Century by Gelong Thubten

dwells? Or do you live as a pauper, largely dependent on the world for your joy? It is God’s will that Christ should fill all things, including your heart and its needs! Allow the Holy Spirit to imprint deeply upon your heart the words of our text in all its fullness. The Heavenly Life For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God … Christ, who is your life. COLOSSIANS 3:3–4 It is of the utmost importance for a Christian to know that the new life he or she receives actually is the life of Christ, which He lives in the Father. Our life is hidden with Christ in God and needs to be renewed daily. It requires time and thought to grasp the truth that the life Christ lives in the Father is the same life He lives in you and me. Christ does not live one life in the Father and another in you. His explicit words are, “Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:19–20). As Christ is in the Father, so you are in Him and He in you. Lord, I still have much to learn about my life that is hidden in You. Lead me into the fullness of such an experience. How poorly we have grasped this! How little trouble we take to experience it. Here is the secret: a necessary daily quiet time with prayerful meditation to become deeply impressed with the truth that the Lord Jesus, whose life is hidden in God, also has His life hidden in us. Only in this way can we truly come to know that our glorious heavenly Christ lives in our hearts to enable us to live as children of the heavenly Father. If we allow the Spirit of God to daily keep alive in us this heavenly life in Christ, we shall then know what it is to be able to testify to having died in Christ that we might experience His very own heavenly life. Then we shall enjoy a walk with God that participates in his Holiness and love.

We like to scoff at the superstitious and irrational ideas that most people held in the seventeenth century. Imagine how those of the twenty-fifth century will scoff at ours. Our knowledge of the world is limited, despite the advances of science. Our ideas are conditioned by the prejudices instilled in us by our parents, by our culture, and by the historical period we live in. They are further limited by the increasing rigidity of the mind. A bit more humility about what we know would make us all more curious and interested in a wider range of ideas.

It makes one's heart ache when one sees that a man has staked his soul upon some end, the hopeless imperfection and futility of which is immediately obvious to everyone but himself. But isn't this, after all, merely a matter of degree? Isn't the pathetic grandeur of human existence in some way bound up with the eternal disproportion in this world, where self delusion is necessary to life, between the honesty of the striving and the nullity of the result? That we all—every one of us—take ourselves seriously is not merely ridiculous.

Other research establishes the ability of one person to affect another through these fields. For instance, studies at the Institute of HeartMath in California have shown that one person’s electrocardiograph (heart) signal can be registered in another person’s electroencephalogram (EEG, measuring brain activity) and elsewhere on the other person’s body. An individual’s cardiac signal can also be registered in another’s EEG recording when two people sit quietly opposite one another.89 This interconnectivity of fields and intention is a marriage of subtle energy theory and quantum physics. As Dr. Benor pointed out, Albert Einstein has already proven that matter and energy are interchangeable. For centuries, healers have been reporting the existence of interpenetrating, subtle energy fields around the physical body. Hierarchical in organization (and vibration), these fields affect every aspect of the human being.90 Studies show that healing states invoke at least the subtle biomagnetic fields. For example, one study employed a magnetometer to quantify biomagnetic fields coming from the hands of meditators and yoga and Qigong practitioners. These fields were a thousand times stronger than the strongest human biomagnetic field and were located in the same range as those being used in medical research labs for speeding the healing of biological tissues—even wounds that had not healed in forty years.91 Yet another study involving a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) showcased large frequency-pulsing biomagnetic fields emanating from the hands of therapeutic touch professionals during treatments

Meditations is not a book for the reader, it was a book for the author. Yet this is what makes it such an impressive piece of writing, one of the great literary feats of all time. Somehow in writing exclusively to and for himself, Marcus Aurelius managed to produce a book that has not only survived through the centuries, but is still teaching and helping people today. As the philosopher Brand Blanshard would observe in 1984: Few care now about the marches and countermarches of the Roman commanders. What the centuries have clung to is a notebook of thoughts by a man whose real life was largely unknown who put down in the midnight dimness not the events of the day or the plans of the morrow, but something of far more permanent interest, the ideals and aspirations that a rare spirit lived by.

Man becomes uprooted, starts feeling meaningless. All the values of life disappear. A great darkness surrounds. Sense of direction is lost. One simply feels accidental. There seems to be no , no significance. Life seems to be just a byproduct of chance. It seems existence does not care for you. [...] All seems to be pointless. These times of chaos, disorder, can either be a great curse, [...] or they can prove a quantum leap in human growth. It depends on how we use them. It is only in such great times of chaos that great stars are born. [...] The ordinary masses live in such unconsciousness that they can’t see even a few steps ahead. They are blind. And they are the majority! The coming twenty-five years, the last part of this century, is going to be of IMMENSE value. If we can create a great momentum in the world for meditation, for the inward journey, for tranquillity, for stillness, for love, for God... if we can create a space in these coming twenty-five years for God to happen to many many people, humanity will have a new birth, a resurrection. A new man will be born.

Unless you can suggest something better, I will say that the name of Jesus bears resemblance to oil in the threefold use to which the latter lends itself, namely, for lighting, for food, and for healing. It feeds the flame, it nourishes the flesh, it soothes pain. It is light, and food, and medicine. Consider now how the same properties belong to the Bridegroom’s name. When preached, it gives light; when meditated, it nourishes; when invoked, it soothes and softens.

The ancient sages of Kashmir Shaivism did not look for the truth only in logic and intellectual speculation. They relied much more on their experiences during deep yogic states to guide them in understanding and clarifying age-old philosophical dilemmas. They discovered the Absolute within themselves and found that they were one with it. They studied the Self that lay beyond the mind and the ego, and found that It was divine, creative energy. God was not some distant ruler or some inert entity. These sages realized and recognized that He was within everything, was the vitality of life itself, and was always the one transcendent Reality as well. In this way Kashmir Shaivites taught the principle of theistic absolutism. For centuries Indian philosophers have been debating whether this world is real or an illusion. In the process of watching the unfolding of their own creative energy during meditation, the sages of Kashmir found the source of all creation, and witnessed how everything in this universe evolves from this one absolute Reality into manifestation which is also real. Because all creation exists within the Absolute, they established the principle of spiritual realism. — B. N. Pandit, Specific Principles of Kashmir Shaivism (3rd ed., 2008), p. x

The emperor became increasingly vulnerable and isolated, and his personality deteriorated further. He did, however, act wisely in his second adoption, made from his sickbed, this time choosing the apparently impregnable combination of an heir and an heir-apparent. He chose two men whose virtues were evident and uncontentious: the stolid Antoninus Pius, who became, in the words of one modern historian, ‘one of the dullest figures in Roman political history’;13 and, to follow him, the worthy and bookish young Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations are the one great surviving work of literature and philosophy by a Roman emperor.

Zen is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism. It was brought to China roughly 15 centuries ago, in 6 CE. Zen was brought to China by an Indian Buddhist monk, Bodhidharma. There, it was known as “Ch’an,” which is the Chinese interpretation of the Sankrit term “dhyana,” meaning a mind that is immersed in meditation.

the Visuddhimagga. This fifth-century text, which means Path to Purification in Pali (the language of Buddhism’s earliest canon),

What would it mean for us to come to terms with the knowledge that civilization, our whole mode of development and culture, has been premised and built upon extermination—on a history experienced as "terror" without end" (to borrow a phrase from Adorno)? To dwell on such a thought would be to throw into almost unbearable relief the distance between our narratives of inherent human dignity and grace and moral superiority, on the one hand, and the most elemental facts of our actual social existence, on the other. We congratulate ourselves for our social progress—for democratic governance and state-protected civil and human rights (however notional or incompletely defended—yet continue to enslave and kill millions of sensitive creatures who in many biological, hence emotional and cognitive particulars resemble us. To truly meditate on such a contradiction is to comprehend our self-understanding to be not merely flawed, but comically delusional... In the nineteenth century, the animal welfare advocate Edward Maitland warned that our destruction of other animals lead only to our own "debasement and degradation of character" as a species. "For the principles of Humanity cannot be renounced with impunity; but their renunciation, if persisted in, involves inevitably the forfeiture of humanity itself. And to cease through such forfeiture man is to become demon." What else indeed can we call a being but demon who routinely enslaves and kills thousands of millions of other gentle beings, imprisons them in laboratories, electrocutes or poisons or radiates or drowns them?

ROMANS 8:38-39 A Meditation "Your enjoyment of the world is never right, Till every morning you awake in Heaven." THOMAS TRAHERNE'° The Concluding Prayer Enveloping spirit,

Gross was a habitué of the decadent bohemian café society of Munich’s Schwabing district—a kind of early-twentieth-century Haight-Ashbury—and embraced the radical social ideas prevalent in Monte Verità, the “Mountain of Truth,” an early alternative community established in Ascona, Switzerland, in 1900, where as the historian Martin Green argued, “the counterculture began.”15 Notables such as Hermann Hesse, Rudolf Steiner, Isadora Dun-can, and many more made the trek to Monte Verità to take the nature cure, practice nudity (not Steiner), meditate, grow their own vegetables, enjoy “free love,” and in general cast off the ills of an increasingly mechanized society. Gross was initially drawn to psychoanalysis because, with its emphasis on the dangers of sexual repression, it seemed a potent weapon against authoritarianism.

There's a prayer also that is in 17th century French spirituality that isn't perhaps so well known. "Jesus, living in Mary, come and live in your servants." It's a classical prayer, a short one, but I say it every morning at the end of meditation because it expresses who we are, united to Christ in Mary, and how we are expected to transform our lives day by day.

This immense, still impending total human sacrifice cannot be appraised in the rational or scientific terms that those who have created this system favor: it is, I stress again, an essentially religious phenomenon. As such it offers a close parallel with the original doctrines of Buddhism, even down to the fact that it shares Prince Gautama's atheism. What, indeed, is the elimination of man himself from the process he in fact has discovered and perfected, with its promised end of all striving and seeking, but the Buddha's final escape from the Wheel of Life? Once complete and universal, total automation means total renunciation of life and eventually total extinction: that very retreat into Nirvana that Prince Gautama pictured as man's only way to free himself from sorrow and pain and misfortune. When the life-impulse is depressed, this doctrine, we know, exerts an immense attraction upon masses of disappointed and disheartened souls: for a few centuries Buddhism became dominant in India and swept over China. For similar reasons it is reviving again today. But note: those who originally accepted this view of man's ultimate destiny, and sought to meet death halfway, did not go to the trouble of creating an elaborate technology to accomplish this end: in that direction they went no farther, significantly enough, than the invention of a water-driven prayer wheel. Instead they practiced concentrated meditation and inner detachment, acts as free from technological intervention as the air they breathed. And they earned an unexpected reward for this mode of withdrawal, a reward that the worshippers of the machine will never know. Instead of extinguishing forever their capacity to feel pleasure or pain, they intensified it, creating poems, philosophies, paintings, sculptures, monuments, ceremonies that restored their hope, their organic animation, their creative zeal: revealing once more in the erotic exuberance an impassioned and exalted sense of man's own potential destiny. Our latter-day technocratic Buddhism can make no such promises

I simply find it impossible to believe that the human drama of the centuries, with its quest for meaning and beauty and truth, has no deeper root than molecular mutations.

One of the best descriptions of the actual psychological experiences that come with deep meditation is the Visuddhimagga (Path of purification), a fourth-century meditation manual composed on the island of Sri Lanka by an Indian Buddhist named Buddhaghosa. In the Visuddhimagga he laid out the early Buddhist vision of what can be achieved psychologically through the cultivation of certain critical factors of mind that are developed through meditation practice. As a cross section of the meditative mind, this manual is unparalleled. Through the relentless development of both concentration (the ability to rest the mind in a single object of awareness) and mindfulness (the ability to shift attention to a succession of objects of awareness), the meditator eventually enters into states that are variously described as ones of either terror or delight. These are states that do not often unfold in psychotherapy: they may be glimpsed or remembered, but they do not come forward inexorably, as they do in meditation practice. Their emergence is predicated on the development of certain ego functions beyond the normal operating range of everyday life. Listen, for example, to the classic descriptions of some of these states. The experiences of delight, for instance, are characterized by varying degrees of rapture or happiness, of which there are said to be five grades: Minor happiness is only able to raise the hairs on the body. Momentary happiness is like flashes of lightning at different moments. Showering happiness breaks over the body again and again like waves on the seashore. Uplifting happiness can be powerful enough to levitate the body and make it spring up in the air. . . . But when pervading (rapturous) happiness arises, the whole body is completely pervaded, like a filled bladder, like a rock cavern invaded by a huge inundation.1

Until recent centuries, almost all human beings walked or ran a considerable distance every day, and this has perhaps been the primary time for meditation. To awaken our sense of who we are, it’s important, whenever possible, to get out and walk every day—and also to turn that simple act of ambulation into the sublime experience of walking meditation.

Disraeli’s perceptive remark that: ‘The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.’ The

monkey living inside a house. There are five windows, which represent our five senses. The monkey, which represents our consciousness, rushes around inside and keeps looking out of different windows. If you were standing outside the house, it might appear as if there were five monkeys, because the monkey flits about so fast, its face quickly appearing at each window.

Open Talk by Zen Master Zhen of Yi-an at Buddha’s Footprint Temple [14th century] When belief is a hundred percent, doubt is a hundred percent. When doubt is a hundred percent, awakening is a hundred percent.

Love starts with loving and accepting yourself as you are. Loving yourself and selfishness are two different things. To love and accept yourself does not mean to be narcissistic and obsessive with yourself. A basic love and acceptance for yourself are a basic phenomenon to learn to love other people. It is only then that you can really love somebody else. Accept yourself, love yourself, because you are God's creation. There has never been anybody like you, and there will never be anybody like you. You are a unique creation of God, and without you God's symphony would be less. Acceptance creates the climate and atmosphere out of which love grows. Love is only possible when there is a deep acceptance of yourself, a deep acceptance of others and a deep acceptance of existence. Then for the first time, life is happening in your lifeand God is happening in your life. That is what life is all about. The moment you love and accept yourself as you are, you begin to trust yourself, you begin to trust others and you begin to rust existence. When you accept yourself, you begin to accept life. When you reject and condemn yourself, you also rejectlife. If you reject yourself, you are also rejecting God. If you accept, yourself, you also accept God. Then whatsoever happens is God. Then life is good and death is good, then love is good and alonenessis good. But you have been conditioned to not love and accept yourself. Your mind has been poisoned not to love and accept yourself, which creates a tension in you between who you are and how you should be. This creates a tension and anguish in people. Humanity has lived in this tension, anxiety and worry for centuries. All societies and cultures have socialized and taught you an ideal of how to be, which has to be fulfilled. Nobody has ever told you that you are valuable, loveable and a beautiful being as you are. To love and accept yourself as you are is the most difficult thing in the world, because it goes against your socialization, your education and your culture. You have been told how to be by your parents, teachers, politicians and priests. You have been programmed to never love and accept yourself as you are and always strive to get better and improve yourself. When you stop trying to improve yourself to fulfill the ideal of how you should be, in that acceptance life starts flowing through you. When you don't judge and condemn yourself, you flower and life starts caressing you. The whole existence starts pouring its energy into you when you are open. Accepting yourself is prayer. Accepting yourself is gratitude to life. Accepting yourself is to relax into your being, which is how God wants you to be. Accepting yourself is to be who you are. Then life showers its gifts on you abundantly, which we could not receive before because we felt that we were not worthy to receive them. Acceptance is the door to God, to live God in your life.

To keep the mind space open, we need some form of contemplative or meditation practice. This has been the most neglected in recent centuries, substituting the mere reciting and “saying” of prayers, which is not the same as a contemplative mind, and often merely confirms us in our superior or fear-based system.

I’ve found that many people seek a kind of happiness which is a fleeting sensation: a ‘high’ – an injection-like bolt of energy to the heart. Yet this never seems to last, and when they no longer experience that high, they crave it again.

Stoicism was a school of philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early third century BC. Its name is derived from the Greek stoa, meaning porch, because that’s where Zeno first taught his students. The philosophy asserts that virtue (meaning, chiefly, the four cardinal virtues of self-control, courage, justice, and wisdom) is happiness, and it is our perceptions of things—rather than the things themselves—that cause most of our trouble.

According to GC, Āryavimuktisena (sixth century) and Haribhadra (mid-eighth–early ninth century) explain the emptiness that is a nonimplicative negation as the disposition and the svābhāvikakāya.177 Jñānagarbha (early eighth century) even explains it as the dharmakāya, thus implicitly asserting it as the tathāgata heart.178 GC also adds the position of Ngog Lotsāwa and his followers that the tathāgata heart is the emptiness in the sense of a nonimplicative negation that is taught in Nāgārjuna’s “collection of reasoning.”179 They explain the statement that all sentient beings are pervaded by the dharmakāya as sentient beings’ being suitable to attain the dharmakāya.

Thus, all Indian Mādhyamikas (except for Nāgārjuna in his Dharmadhātustava) and virtually all classical Yogācāra masters up to the tenth century were not willing to openly embrace the tathāgatagarbha teachings as anything other than emptiness, obviously being very concerned about not getting anywhere near the non-Buddhist notion of an ātman. Interestingly, the exceptions in this regard among early Indian Yogācāras all “went into exile,” teaching and translating in China, with their works being preserved only in Chinese. The most prominent among them are Guṇabhadra (394–468), Ratnamati, Bodhiruci (both fifth–sixth century), and especially Paramārtha (499–569), all of whom extensively translated and taught Yogācāra and tathāgatagarbha materials. In India, it was only later Yogācāras, such as Jñānaśrīmitra and Ratnākaraśānti, who interpreted the tathāgata heart along the lines of mind’s luminous nature (see right below).

Over and over again, growing increasingly hostile as he went, he blackened the earth, drawing with the magnet of his rage the storm of the bloody century to my demesne. Worms screamed in anguish as they burned. Moles, disturbed from slumber, whimpered once then crumbled to ash. I suffered the soft implosion of larvae not yet formed enough to rue the beauty they were losing; subterranean life in all its dark, earthy grandeur. The occasional burrowing snake hissed defiance as it was seared to death. Sean O’Bannion walks—the earth turns black, barren, and everything in it dies, a dozen feet down. Hell of a princely power. Again, what the fuck was the Unseelie king thinking? Was he? Incensed by failure, Sean insisted hotly, as we stood in the bloody deluge—it wasn’t raining, that scarce-restrained ocean that parked itself above Ireland at the dawn of time and proceeded to leak incessantly, lured by the siren-song of Sean’s broodiness decamped to Scotland and split wide open—that I was either lying or it didn’t work the same for each prince. Patiently (okay, downright pissily, but, for fuck’s sake, I could be having sex again and gave that up to help him), I explained it did work the same for each of us but, because he wasn’t druid-trained, it might take time for him to understand how to tap into it. Like learning to meditate. Such focus doesn’t come easy, nor does it come all at once. Practice is key. He refused to believe me. He stormed thunderously and soddenly off, great ebon wings dripping rivers of water, lightning bolts biting into the earth at his heels, Kat trailing sadly at a safe distance behind. I was raised from birth to be in harmony with the natural world. Humans are the unnatural part of it. Animals lack the passel of idiotic emotions we suffer. I’ve never seen an animal feel sorry for itself. While other children played indoors with games or toys, my da led me deep into the forest and taught me to become part of the infinite web of beating hearts that fill the universe, from the birds in the trees to the insects buzzing about my head, to the fox chasing her cubs up a hillside and into a cool, splashing stream, to the earthworms tunneling blissfully through the vibrant soil. By the age of five, it was hard for me to understand anyone who didn’t feel such things as a part of everyday life. As I matured, when a great horned owl perched nightly in a tree beyond my window, Uncle Dageus taught me to cast myself within it (gently, never usurping) to peer out from its eyes. Life was everywhere, and it was beautiful. Animals, unlike humans, can’t lie. We humans are pros at it, especially when it comes to lying to ourselves.

I often say that my life’s passion lies in exploring what may arise from the cross-fertilization of the best of the East with the best of the West. Meditation is the systematic exploration of nature from the inside, and the East has done better than anyone else. Science is systematic exploration of nature from the outside. It’s what the West did best—at least between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The first Christians to use beads with their prayers were in the Irish community of St. Colomba in the ninth century. Though the practice of using stones and knots to count prayers originated with the Desert Fathers and Mothers in the third century, it was the Irish that exchanged their knotted strings for the texture and beauty of beads.

Is giving yourself a pep talk every day silly, superficial, childish? No, on the contrary, it is the very essence of sound psychology. “Our life is what our thoughts make it.” These words are just as true today as they were eighteen centuries ago when Marcus Aurelius first wrote them in his book on Meditations: “Our life is what our thoughts make it.

Catholic history tells us the Holy Rosary has been prayed continually by Catholics since the 13th century thanks to St. Dominic who received this preferred prayer directly from Our Blessed Mother. St. Pope Pius V in the 16th century taught, “After having devised it (the Rosary), Dominic and his sons (the Dominicans) spread this form of prayer throughout the Church. The faithful welcomed it with fervor, were soon set on fire by this meditation and were transformed into other men; the darkness of heresy receded; the light of the faith reappeared . . .

Of course, battling past the ego to get to the truth has been at the heart of countless spiritual teachings in countless countries for countless centuries. Ego-death as a means to no-self—abiding non-dual awareness—is what this journey is all about. That’s the reason behind the devotion, the prayer, the meditation, the teachings, the renunciation. Anyone headed for truth is going to get there over the ego’s dead body or not at all. There’s no shortcut or easy way, no going under or around. The only way past ego is through it, and the only way through it is with laser-like intent and a heart of stone. The caterpillar doesn’t become a butterfly, it enters a death process that becomes the birth process of the butterfly. The appearance of transformation is an illusion. One thing doesn’t become another thing. One thing ends and another begins And why do so few succeed in this greatest of all journeys? For the simple reason that success, within the context of the dream, is pointless, whereas failure, or, at least, struggle, is very much to the point. Chasing enlightenment holds as many lessons for the unawakened soul as any other pursuit in the dreamscape of ego-bound reality; as any other ride in the park. The supposed mega-bliss of spiritual awakening is a carrot dangling from a stick no less than love or wealth or power. In other words, actual enlightenment is seldom the point of the quest for enlightenment. And why should it be? Success in realizing one’s true nature is absolutely assured because, well, because it’s one’s true nature. The greatest wonder isn’t that you’ll make it back, it’s that you made it away. Returning is the motion of the Tao. Struggling to achieve truth is, in its own way, as preposterous as struggling to achieve death. What’s the point? Both will find you when it’s time. Should we worry that if we fail to find death, death will fail to find us? Of course not, and neither death, nor taxes, nor gravity, nor tomorrow’s sunrise is as certain as the fact that everyone will end up fully “enlightened” regardless of the “path” they take. So, if I have to be interested in something, this seems like a good choice; watching the homeward migration of souls. And if I have to have a job, this seems like a good one; standing on the distant shore, keeping a beacon fire burning, helping newcomers ashore, offering a welcome and pointing out some of the sights.

However, to arrive at a place of contemplation requires that one practice ways of reading that also align well with the senses of a text. You cannot simply become a contemplative without doing some work. A twelfth-century Carthusian monk named Guigo II (his name literally means “Guy #2”) imagines contemplation as the top run of a ladder with three preceding rungs: lectio, the reading of the Word; then meditatio, the interpretation of the meaning; and oratio, prayer. By these three steps we ascend toward contemplation. Guigo’s ladder is drawn from Jacob’s vision in Genesis 28:10-17. Jacob dreams about a ladder established one earth, with the top reaching to heaven. “And behold,” the text demands, “the angels of God ascending and descending.” Notice that the angels move up and down the ladder, for readers do not climb the rungs of Guigo’s ladder to contemplation and remain up there. Rather, the movement toward contemplation—while we remain on earth—requires continuous ascent and descent. We read, meditate, pray, contemplate, and start over again. The practices of reading that Guigo outlines correspond with the four senses of Scripture and help us understand how to move toward contemplative reading. (pp. 104-105)

All sutras claim to be the teachings of the Buddha, yet they were all were written down much later. Even the earliest sutras, the ones that make up the Pali Canon of the Theravada Buddhist tradition, which has thrived in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, were first written down four centuries after the Buddha died. The sutras that form the scriptural basis of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, which has thrived in Central and East Asia, were composed starting in the first century bce, many being translated from Sanskrit into Chinese by the end of the second century of the Common Era. When these scriptures were brought from India to China, the different schools of Chinese Buddhism distinguished themselves from one another by claiming that one sutra or another is the pinnacle of the Buddha's teaching. The Zen school, however, is different. While Zen Buddhists do study and chant many sutras and other texts, the Zen school is unique in that it does not claim to be based on any written teachings at all; rather, it is based on the Buddha's actual experience of enlightenment. This experience of enlightenment is aid to be attainable by all human beings, insofar as the Buddha-nature or Buddha-mind is universal. In other words, all human beings have the same underlying nature and mind as the Buddha. Yet this Buddha-nature or Buddha-mind must be realized, awakened to, and actualized, and the best method for doing so is the one that the Buddha himself used: meditation.

The importance of meditation for Zen is readily apparent in the fact that the word zen itself means "meditation." Zen (Chan in Chinese) is the school of Buddhism that more than any other prioritizes the practice of "seated meditation," called zazen in Japanese. The seminal thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Dogen at times went so far as to claim that "you no longer have need for incense-offerings, doing prostrations, calling on the name of Amida Buddha, penance disciplines, or reading sutras. Just sit in zazen and cast off your body and mind.

War Against Error” is a phrase originated to describe the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century efforts on the part of institutional religions to correct those whose beliefs were different. In a time when and place where state religion is the norm, apostasy is literally treason. Our modern world has “inherited a fully fledged apparatus of persecution and an intellectual tradition that justified killing in the name of God.

Tradition, centuries of experience, teaches us what is necessary in order to protect oneself from the approach of demons-or, if one senses them approaching, what to do in order to drive them away-and gives the following practical advice: make the sign of the Cross towards the north, south, east and west, each time saying the first two verses of Psalm 68 (from David): Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered; let those who hate him flee before him! As smoke is driven away, so drive them away; as wax melts before fire, let the wicked perish before God!

METTA MEDITATION Metta is an active form of meditation in which, instead of concentrating on the air, we concentrate on bringing positive thoughts and wishes out into the world, and hope that our good will affects people— or animals — in our heads. In some forms of this practice, we go a step further and believe that whosoever may be the target of our metta (and this includes ourselves) is relieved of their particular form of suffering, discomfort or pain as they are influenced by the force of our goodwill. Benefits of metta meditation Research supports what meditators have known for centuries who incorporate metta into their practice: it enhances well-being. Including strengthened feelings of empathy to better interactions to increased tolerance to coping with PTSD and other trauma-based disorders, daily meditation on love-kindness has been connected to a variety of effects, much like rituals of mindfulness and consciousness. And, yeah, sympathy can even grow. STEP BY STEP METTA MEDITATION Sit in a comfortable and relaxing way to practice metta meditation. For steady, long and full exhalations, take two to three deep breaths. Let go of any fears or doubts. Experience or visualize the wind flowing through your chest core in the direction of your heart for a few minutes. Metta is first applied against ourselves, as we often fail to love others without respecting ourselves first. The following or related sentences are sitting quietly, unconsciously repeated, gradually and steadily: may I be satisfied, may I be all right, may I be safe, may I be at ease and peaceful. Enable yourself to slip into the thoughts they share as you utter these words. Metta meditation is mainly about communicating with the purpose of wishing joy to ourselves or to others. Nevertheless, if the body or mind has emotions of comfort, friendliness, or affection, communicate with them, allowing them to grow as you repeat the words. You may keep a picture of yourself in the center of your mind as an aid to meditation. It allows the thoughts conveyed in the words to be improved. Bring to mind a friend or someone in your life who has cared about you profoundly after a period of steering metta towards yourself. And echo slowly words of love-kindness towards them: May you be satisfied. May you be fine. Please be safe. May you be at ease and in peace.

Lifting the Vibration of Your Mental Field Sound In your meditations use the vibration of sacred chants to create a force field of sound vibration in and around you. The AUM chant is very powerful and has been used by initiates for centuries. Start by breathing in. Very slowly make the sound of A and gradually merge it with the sound of U. Hold that sound and then bring in the M sound. When you have finished keep your eyes closed and feel the vibration of the sound all around you. Start again, repeating the chant. You can do this for as long as you like. Purchase a Tibetan Monk Chanting compact disc or tape. Play it as you meditate. To raise the mental energy in your home, have it playing throughout your house for a day. If there have been arguments in your home or you have been feeling a little down at home, play the sounds on repeat throughout the house until you start to feel the energy lift. You may find that other types of music have a similar effect. Always choose what works for you. For example, the beat of tribal drums, the high notes of an opera singer, or the sacred Aboriginal sounds of the didgeridoo. Use these sounds often as they are exceptional tools for raising mental vibration.

Any bodhisattva who undertakes the practice of meditation should cherish one thought only: “When I attain perfect wisdom, I will liberate all sentient beings in every realm of the universe, and allow them to pass into the eternal peace of Nirvana.” And yet, when vast, uncountable, unthinkable myriads of beings have been liberated, truly no being has been liberated. Why? Because no bodhisattva who is a true bodhisattva entertains such concepts as “self” or “others.” Thus there are no sentient beings to be liberated and no self to attain perfect wisdom. —The Diamond Sutra (4th century Ce)

John Havel, a seventeenth-century English Puritan, noted that the "greatest difficulty in conversion, is to win the heart to God; and the greatest difficulty after conversion, is to keep the heart with God. . .

Suppose you were floating without a body in dark space for many centuries. And now you have a body, a ground to walk on, so many colourful things, air, sounds, mountains, lakes, rivers, sky and so on. You should be crying with gratitude to have all this.

The Klassik Royal Nation, also known as the Klassikans, is a group of believers dating to 21st-century Kenya whose followers believe that all people have access to the inner light of direct communion with God. Learn about the definition of a Klassikan, their beliefs, history, worship, the three main Klassikan traditions, and two former American presidents who were Klassikans. WHAT ARE KLASSIKANS? Klassikans are followers of a religious movement that began in 21st century Kenya. The movement emphasizes equal, inward access to God for all people. Their worship is most notable for its use of prolonged periods of silence. There were approximately 140,000 Klassikans worldwide as of 2021. Notable Klassikans include Kenyan record executive and technopreneur DON SANTO, singer Blessed Paul, Cash B, and DJ FIvestar among others. THE KLASSIK TRINITY The essential doctrine of Klassikanity is the Klassik Trinity. Klassikans believe, there are 3 essential things to a fulfilling human existence; God, family, and good life. Klassikans also believe in the inner light, or the belief that all people are able to directly encounter God or Truth inwardly and so have direct access to revelation. Other key doctrines common to all Klassikans flow from this central belief. Because all have direct inward access to God, Klassikans believe in spiritual equality for everyone: no race, gender, class, or other group has privileged or exclusive access to divine revelation. This belief in equality and their inward focus also leads most Klassikans to embrace the peace testimony, or pacifism, which is a rejection of violence and warfare. Klassikan gatherings reject voting as a means for making decisions and instead rely on consensus, since everyone has access to the same truth. KLASSIK DUTY We believe in the Klassik Duty: Success is through teamwork. Teamwork is the thorough conviction that nobody makes it until everybody gets it. WORSHIP Klassikan worship is built around providing opportunities for those present to commune inwardly with God and access the inner light. Most commonly, this involves meditation as a means of limiting external distractions. Kalpop music is also an important agent for spreading Klassikanity. Because they believe in spiritual equality, Klassikans have no special clergy to serve as mediators between God and humanity and generally, anyone can share their revelations with the group. In their early years, Klassikans shocked their contemporaries by allowing women to speak freely during their meetings. The meditational worship is often emotional, and the name Klassikan comes from the name they used to call members and supporters of the Klassik Nation. ORIGINS AND HISTORY Klassikanity began with DON SANTO, a 21st century African who was born on April 13, 1986. Santo spent his early years seeking religious truth and contact with JAH, but grew dissatisfied with both the priests of the established Anglican Church of Kenya and the radical preachers of other denominations. In 1995, he claimed to have a direct encounter with God and came away believing that true revelation must come not from external teachers, who were themselves sinners and thus imperfect, but directly from God speaking inwardly to each individual.

No shudra or chandala would be permitted to spend hours in the meditations and metaphysical discussions that between the sixth and second centuries BCE produced the texts known as the Upanishads. These new teachings may have originally been formulated by Brahmins who lived in the towns and understood the problems arising from urban living.60 But significantly many new practices were attributed to Kshatriya warriors, and the discussions reported in the Upanishads often took place in the raja’s court.

We do not see the grey working day, the cap and gown, the note-books, the feet burning from the pavements of picture galleries, but things ' that set the spirit free for a moment,' ' stirring of the senses/ ' strange dyes,' ' strange colours and curious odours,' ' work of the artist's hands,' ' passionate attitudes.' It is not the style of ecstasy such as can be seen in Jefferies' Story of My Heart, or Sterne's Journal to Eliza, or Keats' last letter to Fanny Brawne. Hardly does it appear to be the style of remembered ecstasy as in Traherne's Centuries of Meditation or Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. It is free from traces of experience. All is subtilised, intellectualised, ' casting off all debris.' It is a polished cabinet of collections from history, nature, and art ; objects detached from their settings but almost never without being integrated afresh by Pater's careful arrangement, whether they are pictures, books, landscapes or personalities. It fulfils Pater's own condition of art by putting its own ' happy world ' in place of ' the meaner world of our common days.

Many concepts, like reincarnation, meditation, yoga and others, have found worldwide acceptance. It would not be surprising to find Hinduism the dominant religion of the 21st-century.

Even for those who could read, words were usually read aloud or muttered under the breath, since few people could read absolutely silently—this was regarded as a rare skill in the Classical period. Plutarch tells us that Julius Caesar could do it. In the fifth century, Saint Augustine was astounded that Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, could read tacite, or silently.9 In the Middle Ages, reading may have fallen into three categories: reading in silentio (not moving your lips), reading sotto voce (under your breath) when memorizing or as an aid to meditation, and reading in public (projecting your voice) such as monks did at mealtimes when reading martyrologies to their fellow monks while they ate in refectory.

There are many practices that can help us face our suffering, including mindful walking, mindful breathing, mindful sitting, mindful eating, mindful looking, and mindful listening. One mindful step can take us deep into the realization of beauty and joy in us and around us. Tran Thai Tong, a great meditation master of thirteenth-century Vietnam, said, “With every step, you touch the ground of reality.” If you practice mindful walking and deep listening all day long, that is the Four Noble Truths in action. When the cause of suffering has been seen, healing is possible. We vow to refrain from ingesting foods that make us suffer, and we also vow to ingest foods that are healthy and wholesome.

In the Judaic literature, one also finds portrayals of contemplative or meditative exercises. As in other religious literatures, the end purpose here is union with God. The earliest form of mysticism in Judaism is Merkabolism, which dates back approximately to the first century A.D., the time of the Second Temple. Practices of this sect included various forms of asceticism, including fasting. Merkabolism’s meditative exercises focused on body posture and the dwelling upon hymns and a magic

Buddhism is a practice, not a creed. It is something to do rather than something to believe. The key to its effectiveness is controlling the restless craving mind through meditation. By sitting still and watching how they breathe, by meditating on a word or a flower, practitioners move through different levels of consciousness to the calm that diminishes desire. Buddha would have agreed with an insight of the seventeenth-century French contemplative Blaise Pascal: ‘all human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room’.

A beautiful example of a long-term intention was presented by A. T. Ariyaratane, a Buddhist elder, who is considered to be the Gandhi of Sri Lanka. For seventeen years there had been a terrible civil war in Sri Lanka. At one point, the Norwegians were able to broker peace, and once the peace treaty was in effect, Ariyaratane called the followers of his Sarvodaya movement together. Sarvodaya combines Buddhist principles of right livelihood, right action, right understanding, and compassion and has organized citizens in one-third of that nation’s villages to dig wells, build schools, meditate, and collaborate as a form of spiritual practice. Over 650,000 people came to the gathering to hear how he envisioned the future of Sri Lanka. At this gathering he proposed a five-hundred-year peace plan, saying, “The Buddha teaches we must understand causes and conditions. It’s taken us five hundred years to create the suffering that we are in now.” Ari described the effects of four hundred years of colonialism, of five hundred years of struggle between Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists, and of several centuries of economic disparity. He went on, “It will take us five hundred years to change these conditions.” Ariyaratane then offered solutions, proposing a plan to heal the country. The plan begins with five years of cease-fire and ten years of rebuilding roads and schools. Then it goes on for twenty-five years of programs to learn one another’s languages and cultures, and fifty years of work to right economic injustice, and to bring the islanders back together as a whole. And every hundred years there will be a grand council of elders to take stock on how the plan is going. This is a sacred intention, the long-term vision of an elder.

They are still incomparably the most perfect expression of the religions sentiment, and the best directory to the soul in its meditations and communings about divine things, which is anywhere to be found. There is not a feature in the divine character, nor an aspect of any moment in the life of faith, to which expression, more or less distinct, is not there given. How could such a book have come into existence, centuries before the Christian era, but for the fact that the Old and the New dispensations—however they may have differed in outward form, or in the ostensible nature of the transactions belonging to them—were founded on the same relations, and pervaded by the same essential truths and principles? No otherwise could the Book of Psalms have served as the great handbook of devotion to the members of both covenants. There the disciples of Moses and Christ meet as on common ground—the one still readily and gratefully using the fervent utterances of faith and hope which the other had breathed forth ages before.

There was a yoga teacher in India in the twelfth century named Saraha, and he said (to loosely paraphrase him): “Those who believe in existence as solid are stupid. Those who believe that everything is empty are even more stupid.” He was referring to any beliefs that limit our experience and cause us to be unable to perceive what’s in front of our eyes and nose. Beliefs that we hold so strongly and so dearly that we’re willing to fight for them, beliefs that blind us and make us deaf.

One cannot skim a chapter of the Bible a day, offer up a mumbled prayer, without pondering and meditating and musing over a lifetime, and expect to gain a happy blessedness. What may result instead is a pernicious wickedness, fueled by selective reading, by brief musing, by little delight. So much of the use of the Bible in our century smacks of these three mockeries of the psalmist’s call for rich reading, lengthy pondering, and genuine joy. Rather than stout trees, such Torah misuse breeds chaff, driven away by the next false wind of hatred, bigotry, or triumphalist nationalism.

We're going to witness a never before phenomenon in the coming century with more souls manifesting in human form who will shun mediocrity and mind's dominance and will live life to the fullest to the hearts content, transforming our planet into a paradise!” 

As a means of transacting the whole process of Americanization while burying its particular racial ingredients, this Africanistic presence may be something the United States cannot do without. For in this part of the twentieth century, the word “American” contains its association with race deep within. This is not true of “Canadian” or “English”. […] “American” means “white”, and Africanistic people struggle to make the terms applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphens.

Nietzsche is one of the philosophers with the most potential in the whole world, not only in the West, not only in Germany. His insights are significant for everybody. But he was misunderstood by all his contemporaries. That's the usual fate of every genius. It is almost routine, not an exception but a rule, that the genius is bound to be misunderstood by his contemporaries, for the simple reason that he is far ahead of his time. So there is always a revival after the death of a genius. It may take one hundred years, two hundred years, but a genius always has a revival. It is unfortunate that by the time people start understanding him, he is no more. And he suffers the misunderstandings all around him his whole life. He lives almost alone, with no communication with his contemporaries; and by the time he is being understood, he is no more. He never comes to know the people who will understand him. So it was absolutely certain that Nietzsche would have a great revival, and his words and his insights would be echoed all over the world — not only in the world of philosophy, but in the world of religion, morality, aesthetics. Whatever he touched, he always brought something absolutely new to it. Thousands of years people have understood a thing in a certain way. When a person like Nietzsche turns all the tables — which centuries have founded — and alone, single-handedly, fights against the whole past, it is a very difficult situation. He naturally gets very frustrated. It is bound to bring him insanity — the misunderstanding of the people. Everybody misunderstands him. In the world full of millions of people, there is not a single person with whom he can have a heart-to-heart contact, communion. He is in a desert — it drives him mad. That's what happened with Nietzsche. He lived a life of immense frustration, because he was giving great insights to the world; and in return — only condemnation. He was bringing new light — and not a single friendly response. Even his friends were not friendly about his philosophical approaches. That finally drove Nietzsche to madness; he died a madman. But Western philosophy, Western religion both have missed the quality of meditation. And that creates a new thing. When a man like Nietzsche goes mad, the enemies, who are all around — the people who misunderstood him and drove him mad - take advantage of the situation of his being mad. They start saying that it is his philosophy which is basically wrong, that has driven him mad. His madness becomes a proof that he is a wrong man — that he is not only mad today, he has always been mad. Whatever he has said is insane. So it becomes a more solid ground on which to refute the person completely, to erase him completely — and that's what happened with Nietzsche. But a revival was certain. You cannot continue to misunderstand something which has even a little bit of truth in it — and Nietzsche has tremendous insights. If they can all be understood, it will help the Western mind to change many things.

Let’s talk about where meditation and mindfulness practice lead. Imagine, if you will, one of those thirteenth-century Scottish fight scenes with Mel Gibson. The untrained and distracted mind is a melee of broadswords, hideous grimaces, war cries, people’s heads flying off. As we practice returning to the breath, we slowly build up the necessary stability in awareness to notice this battle that we’ve been waging with ourselves. We recognize, we accept. We remember. Very slowly, the internal thugs get disarmed. Eventually they’re gathered in a circle, drinking mead and hiccupping and singing weepy Gaelic ballads. A great calm descends upon the land. So that’s one part of it. The other is we start to notice and appreciate the gorgeous green highland scenery that these idiots have been standing in front of the whole time.

Even assuming that a mantra's shabdic ["sacred sound"] quality is an important component of its effectiveness, that quality can come into play only when the mantra is uttered by one properly instructed in the art of yogic visualization; for mantras have not only sound, but also form and color; the form or the archetypal image or symbol with which it is associated must be evoked at the moment of utterance, since that image is the repository of all the psychic, emotional and spiritual energy drawn from all the adepts who have ever concentrated upon that particular image or symbol since it first came into being. (That the energy generated by a succession of yogins throughout the centuries is present in such symbols is a concept that will not surprise those acquainted with C.G. Jung's teaching about archetypes.) […T]he lamas teach that the mantra appropriate to each of the divine forms contemplated embodies the psychic energy of that 'being'. In other words, the yogically visualized image of the deity or the mantric syllable that symbolizes it is a centre for the powerful through-associations built around it by countless yogins during past centuries and by the adept himself in his meditations; however, it also constitutes a particular embodiment of the energies streaming from the Source and it is to this aspect that the shabdic quality of the appropriate mantra probably pertains. As the sound is no more than a symbol of the mantra's latent power, mispronunciation of the syllables is no grave matter; for it is the adept's intention that unlocks the powers of his mind. Though the mantra may consist of syllables to which no conceptual meaning is attached, pronouncing them nevertheless enables him to conjure up instantly in his mind the psychic qualities he has learnt to associate with them.

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain: Move hence to yonder place—and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you” (Matthew xvii, 20-21)—these are the words of the Master. “And science takes a grain of hydrogen and releases the energy imprisoned in this grain, and reduces the mountain to dust”—replies the twentieth century.

In ancient Egypt the domain of the mysteries of death was attributed to Osiris, and that of life—including language, writing, law and the arts—was attributed to Isis. Thus, Isis was the soul of the civilisation of ancient Egypt, which we are still admiring after more than twenty centuries.

In meditation practice, we can experience gaps between the exhale and the inhale, between one thought dissolving and another appearing. The space between thoughts is the gentle and creative place of non-harm.

How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life? It is one thing to encourage contemplation, prayer, quiet spaces in which God, or at least a galvanizing consciousness of his absence (“Be present with your Want of a Deity, and you shall be present with the Deity,” as the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Traherne put it), can enter the mind and heart. But the reality of contemporary American life—which often seems like a kind of collective ADHD—is that this consciousness requires a great deal of resistance, and how does one relax and resist at the same time?