Monks Image Quotes

That's the sacred intent of life, of God--to move us continuously toward growth, toward recovering all that is lost and orphaned within us and restoring the divine image imprinted on our soul.

We can't stand it, to be alone. We cannot bear it, any more than the monks of old could bear it, men who though they had renounced all else for Christ's sake, nevertheless came together in congregations to be with one another, even as they enforced upon themselves the harsh rules of single solitary cells and unbroken silence. They couldn't bear to be alone. We are too much men and women; we are yet formed in the image of the Creater, and what can we say of Him with any certainty except that He, whoever He may be--Christ, Yahweh, Allah--He made us, did He not, because even He in His Infinite Perfection could not bear to be alone.

You speak as if God was white and Southern! As if we somehow owned his image. You speak like a fool. The Negro is not some other kind of creature than we are. Whiteness is not sacred. It can't on defining everything.

the words you say to yourself affect your self-image,

The question occurred to me: Well, if that's so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what's the big deal? Why all this bother? The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It's the language the soul understands.

And second, once we are caught in the pattern of creating ourselves from cultural blueprints, it becomes a primary way of receiving validation. We become unknowingly bound up in a need to please the cultural father--the man holding the brush--and live up to his images of what a woman should be and do. We're rewarded when we do; life gets difficult when we don't.

Elizabeth A. Johnson explains that including divine female symbols and images not only challenges the dominance of male images but also calls into question the structure of patriarchy itself.

The core symbols we use for God represent what we take to be the highest good....These symbols or images shape our worldview, our ethical system, and our social practice--how we relate to one another. For instance, [Elizabeth A.] Johnson suggests that if a religion speaks about God as warrior, using militaristic language such as how "he crushes his enemies" and summoning people to become soldiers in God's army, then the people tend to become militaristic and aggressive. Likewise, if the key symbol of God is that of a male king (without any balancing feminine imagery), we become a culture that values and enthrones men and masculinity.

One thing that became clear to me is that images of a divine mother are surprisingly important in the psychological wholeness of women, especially in the process of women taking up residence in their own authority.

Because we are made in God's image, in fleeing from a relationship with a loving God, we are also running from being our most authentic selves.

For years I'd written down my dreams, believing, as I still do, that one of the purest sources of knowledge about our lives comes from the symbols and images deep within.

The beautiful thing is that you can change your self-image, just like you can change everything else in your life if it is not serving to enhance it.

In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?

For modern people the pursuit of wisdom sounds like something you'd have to travel to Tibet for. To us, wisdom is mystical and esoteric. It conjures up images of cave-dwelling hermits, saffron-robed monks, and, well, Yoda.

...the incarnation is the complete refutation of every human system and institution that claims to control, possess, and distribute God. Whatever any church or religious leader may claim in regard to their particular access to God or control over your experience of God, the incarnation is the last word: God loves the world. God came into the world in the form of the people he created, the human race (including you and me), who bear his image. God's creation of humanity in his image gives hints of who he is, since we all are marked by his fingerprints. But as flawed humans, we give only a vague hint of God. Our broken reflection of God's image is easily drowned out by our broken humanity. then, two thousand years ago, God came in his fullness. He came to all of us in Jesus. The incarnation is not owned, trademarked, or controlled by any church. It belongs to every human being. The incarnation is not something that requires a distributor or middleman. It is a gracious gift to every person everywhere, religious or not. God gave himself to us in Jesus.

The ambiance of solitude, the absence of any disturbing noise and of worldly desires and images, the quiet and calm attention of the mind to God, helped by prayer and leisurely reading, flow into that "quies" or "rest" of the soul in God. A simple and joyful rest, full of God, that leads the monk to feel, in some way, the beauty of eternal life.

Wretched Girl, you must stay here with me! Here amidst these lonely Tombs, these images of Death, these rotting loathsome corrupted bodies! Here shall you stay, and witness my sufferings; witness, what it is to die in the horrors of despondency, and breathe the last groan in blasphemy and curses!

I am grown, with children of my own. But inside I am still a daughter. A daughter is a woman who remains internally dependent, who does not shape her identity and direction as a woman, but tends to accept the identity and direction projected onto her. She tends to become the image of woman that the cultural father idealizes.

Not setting the 'proper and accepted' religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn't the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a stand against patriarchy, and questing for spiritual meaning and wholeness, even when it meant exiting circles of orthodoxy, be a worthwhile example?

Images are ... musical. The way they are put together are musical.

Your self-image is a governor of sorts. It will never let you act in a way that is inconsistent with it.

The image of the Zen philosopher is the monk up in the green, quiet hills, or in a beautiful temple on some rocky cliff. The Stoics are the antithesis of this idea. Instead, they are the man in the marketplace, the senator in the Forum, the brave wife waiting for her soldier to return from battle, the sculptor busy in her studio. Still, the Stoic is equally at peace.

You speak as if God was white and Southern! As if we somehow owned his image. You speak like a fool. The Negro is not some other kind of creature than we are. Whiteness is not sacred, Mary! It can’t go on defining everything.

What finally helped was an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, who saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, whom God loves unconditionally anyway. My priest friend Margaret, who works with the aged and who shared this image with me, wanted me to see that even though these old people are no longer useful in any traditional meaning of the word, they are there to be loved unconditionally, like trees in the winter. When

A daughter is a woman who remains internally dependent, who does not shape her identity and direction as a woman, but tends to accept the identity and direction projected onto her. She tends to become the image of woman that the cultural father idealizes.

How different this world to the one about which I used to read, and in which I used to live! This is one peopled by demons, phantoms, vampires, ghouls, boggarts, and nixies. Names of things of which I knew nothing are now so familiar that the creatures themselves appear to have real existence. The Arabian Nights are not more fantastic than our gospels; and Lempriere would have found ours a more marvelous world to catalog than the classical mythical to which he devoted his learning. Ours is a world of luprachaun and clurichaune, deev and cloolie, and through the maze of mystery I have to thread my painful way, now learning how to distinguish oufe from pooka, and nis from pixy; study long screeds upon the doings of effreets and dwergers, or decipher the dwaul of delirious monks who have made homunculi from refuse. Waking or sleeping, the image of some uncouth form is always present to me. What would I not give for a volume by the once despised 'A. L. O. E' or prosy Emma Worboise? Talk of the troubles of Winifred Bertram or Jane Eyre, what are they to mine? Talented authoresses do not seem to know that however terrible it may be to have as a neighbour a mad woman in a tower, it is much worse to have to live in a kitchen with a crocodile. This elementary fact has escaped the notice of writers of fiction; the re-statement of it has induced me to reconsider my decision as to the most longed-for book; my choice now is the Swiss Family Robinson. In it I have no doubt I should find how to make even the crocodile useful, or how to kill it, which would be still better. ("Mysterious Maisie")

That’s the biggest problem with personas. A false self can never rest. It looks like a real person, but a persona is actually just a hologram, a projected image, and it requires constant energy to keep that image up. A persona is afraid to go to sleep, because to sleep is to die.

That is my view of the monk, and is it false? Is it too proud? Look at the worldly and all who set themselves up above the people of God; has not God’s image and His truth been distorted in them? They have science; but in science there is nothing but what is the object of sense. The spiritual world, the higher part of man’s being is rejected altogether, dismissed with a sort of triumph, even with hatred. The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says: “You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires.” That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants. They maintain that the world is getting more and more united, more and more bound together in brotherly community, as it overcomes distance and sets thoughts flying through the air.

After this examination there are still gaps of doubt and apparent contradiction. And it is natural that it be so, because the Eternal Return is an experience. There lies its importance: in the fact of being. The Eternal Return is not the reincarnation as it has been spread in our days. Original Buddhism, on the other hand, could be pointing to something similar. Buddha was a shastriya, that is, a prince of the warrior caste, not a brahman, or priest, and his Doctrine was also for heroes and warriors. Then, it has been transformed by the monks. Buddha, like Nietzsche, talks about a reincarnation without mentioning the soul. What is it that reincarnates, then? As in Nietzsche it could be that 'atom-seed', or 'all those conditions that determine its existence and that they come back to give themselves', in the turn of the Energy, or of the Light that finds the old image. The Buddhist would want to be liberated, to leave the Circle; that's why it kills desire, that makes return. The Will to Power, as we have seen, returns to its 'archive', wishes to possess again its 'non-existence'. The difference: Nietzsche wants to return eternally, incorporates the Will and considers Nirvana a dream of decadents, of warriors who have become priests, monks. However, we do not know what Buddha really thought, because he did not talk about these things, nor did he explain Nirvana. Maybe, he just wanted to get out of this Circle to enter to fight in another wider Circle, that is more immense.

Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice. I gazed upon the prayer and the girl and the dove, and a sensation billowed in my chest, a small exultation like a flock of birds lifting all at once from the trees. I wished God might notice what I’d done and speak from the whirlwind. I wished him to say: Ana, I see you. How pleasing you are in my sight. There was only silence. It was while I busied myself putting away my writing tools that the second commandment appeared in my mind as if God had spoken after all, but it was not what I wished to hear. Thou shalt not make a graven image of anything living in heaven, or on the earth, or in the sea.

thought, If I’d been born male, dear God! the things I could have done! I longed for parity with men, the freedom and choices of men, the ability to quest without worrying about who would cook dinner or pick up the children. I longed for the power men had to name the world, for the world had been largely male defined. Even God “himself” was defined by men and envisioned in their image.

The kjerringsleppet were a marvelous image for the empowered self. A “woman on the loose” is a woman who leaves the woods where she has been growing strong all these years. She swoops out of the trees, ringing her bell. She is saying, I am here now. And I am not going away. The motto that the women on the loose adopted is: “To improvise, surprise, and come uninvited.” That’s not a half-bad motto.

I cannot ignore this murderous self: it is there. I smell it and feel it. . . . When it says: you shall not sleep, you cannot teach, I shall go on anyway, knocking its nose in. Its biggest weapon is and has been the image of myself as a perfect success: in writing, teaching and living. . . . My demon of negation will tempt me day by day, and I’ll fight it, as something other than my essential self, which I am fighting to save.20

Plus, there were the children to consider. They were, for me, the biggest concern of all...But what if I challenged the institution? Not setting the "proper and accepted" religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn't the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a stand against patriarchy, and questing for spiritual meaning and wholeness, even when it meant exiting the circles of orthodoxy, be a worthwhile example?

I’ve been recording my dreams for twelve years. I think of them as snapshots floating up from a mysterious vat, offering metaphoric pictures of what’s going on inside. Sometimes the images suggest where my soul wants to lead me and sometimes where it does not, giving me input and guidance about choices I might make. I am not thinking of the soul in the typical sense, as an immortal essence like the spirit, but rather as the rich, inner life of the psyche, the deepest impulse of which is to create wholeness.

From the small of her back, up to her shoulder blades, a delicate yet extravagant piece created, no doubt, by one of the monks at one of the temples. These images were supposed to warn away evil spirits, and he thought for a moment, that perhaps she considered him potentially evil. Tigers danced, dragons spun, spirits half human, half demon climbed across her reaching up to the palace where a wizard with four arms and long cascades of hair stood before a castle atop a mountain, smoke rose from crematoriums inside the castle. An imagined lost city, an astonishing universe...

The homeless man sitting by the road begging for beer money? Christ made manifest. The grocery clerk standing on her feet all day saying a thousand hellos to a thousand different strangers? Christ made manifest. The nun walking through the subway station, the Buddhist monk catching the city bus, the window washer scrubbing the side of a Manhattan sky rise five hundred feet in the air? Christ made manifest, Christ made manifest, Christ made manifest. The image of God imprinted on every human, everywhere—the shiny stuff of heaven made tangible across the faces of ethnicities and cultures and people groups.

[Lena Lees describes from trance her experience of Kuan Yin]: “I see Kuan Yin. She is like Venus, statuesque and standing in front of a beautiful pink half-shell. Quickly, she walks in front of me, pointing the way. We are entering the mouth of a cave. It’s so interesting. I see stairs carved out of rock in the cave. We walk up the stairs to a door. I know somehow this is just another entrance, a doorway to another time, place. Perhaps at another historical time monks lived there. Now, I’m seeing a huge image, a beautiful statue of Kuan Yin right at the top of the mountain. There are stairs leading up to her and it is as if I’m right on location, standing alongside a group of worshipers. I feel the potency of her energy. In these places, perhaps China or Vietnam, there is a palpable sense of being immersed in and supported by her presence. There is a need by the people to know more, to pick up and accumulate wisdom. I’m suddenly feeling a need to be in that kind of energy. Suddenly it is Kuan Yin who is speaking: “Some believe I am in servitude to Buddha. However, Buddha doesn’t see it like that. We’re more like brother and sister. I’m showing, Lena, my abode, a place on earth where humans can visit me and be in my potency. Lena is looking at my statue and then at my form. There’s a difference. I come to people in many forms, forms constructed from people’s own perceptions of how I should come to them. And it is individual spiritual needs that create these unique perceptions. In the end, it does not matter what form I take.” “Kuan Yin wants me to know that I can have the most divine life imaginable,” whispers Lena, still very deep in trance. “She’ll be here until the last soul passes off the earth. She remains in deity form to assist people in transcending their materialistic nature, to help them attain their highest spiritual level.

I have been all day thinking of a legend," he said. "I don't remember whether I have read it somewhere or heard it, but it is a strange and almost grotesque legend. To begin with, it is somewhat obscure. A thousand years ago a monk, dressed in black, wandered about the desert, somewhere in Syria or Arabia. . . . Some miles from where he was, some fisherman saw another black monk, who was moving slowly over the surface of a lake. This second monk was a mirage. Now forget all the laws of optics, which the legend does not recognise, and listen to the rest. From that mirage there was cast another mirage, then from that other a third, so that the image of the black monk began to be repeated endlessly from one layer of the atmosphere to another. So that he was seen at one time in Africa, at another in Spain, then in Italy, then in the Far North. . . . Then he passed out of the atmosphere of the earth, and now he is wandering all over the universe, still never coming into conditions in which he might disappear. Possibly he may be seen now in Mars or in some star of the Southern Cross. But, my dear, the real point on which the whole legend hangs lies in the fact that, exactly a thousand years from the day when the monk walked in the desert, the mirage will return to the atmosphere of the earth again and will appear to men. And it seems that the thousand years is almost up . . . . According to the legend, we may look out for the black monk to-day or to-morrow.

The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less—a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I won't even say such great 'comfort'—since they put no faith in the solace of the senses—but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course—suggestion, say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgement, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity! This seems a very daring comparison. I apologise for having advanced it, yet perhaps it might satisfy many people who find it hard to think for themselves, unless the thought has first been jolted by some unexpected, surprising image. Could a sane man set himself up as a judge of music because he has sometimes touched a keyboard with the tips of his fingers? And surely if a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony leave him cold, if he has to content himself with watching on the face of another listener the reflected pleasure of supreme, inaccessible delight, such a man has only himself to blame. But alas! We take the psychiatrists' word for it. The unanimous testimony of saints is held as of little or no account. They may all affirm that this kind of deepening of the spirit is unlike any other experience, that instead of showing us more and more of our own complexity it ends in sudden total illumination, opening out upon azure light—they can be dismissed with a few shrugs. Yet when has any man of prayer told us that prayer had failed him?

If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk. So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.

This seems to be what the nature writer Henry Beston was getting at when he wrote in The Outermost House: We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

A tall, well-muscled blond man drew alongside Christian. He inclined his head to them. “Abbot,” he said to Christian in greeting. Christian seemed pleased to see him. “Falcon. It’s been a long time.” “Aye. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to greet you yester eve when you arrived.” Christian offered him a lopsided grin. “’Tis well understood. I heard about your escapade with the butcher’s daughter and your near miss with her father’s cleaver.” Falcon laughed. “Lies all. ’Twas the tanner’s daughter and her father’s ax.” Christian joined his laughter. “One day, my friend, you will meet the one father who can run faster than you.” “’Tis why God gave us horses.” He winked at Christian, then tilted his head so that he could see Adara. “’Tis a pleasure to meet you, Queen Adara. I am Lord Quentin of Adelsbury and my sword is ever at your disposal.” Christian gave him a meaningful stare. “And your sword had best stay sheathed, Falcon, until you’re on the battlefield.” “Your warning is well taken into consideration, Abbot, along with your sword skill and horsemanship. Have no fear of me. Your wife is ever safe from my designs. But no woman is safe from my charm.” Adara couldn’t help teasing the man who seemed of remarkable good spirit and cheer. “However some women might find themselves immune from it, my Lord Falcon.” “What, ho?” he said with a laugh. “Congratulations, Christian. You have found a woman as intelligent as she is beautiful. Tell me, Your Majesty, have you a sister who is fashioned in your image?” “Nay, my lord. I fear I am one of a kind.” He looked sincerely despondent at the news. “’Tis a pity, then. I shall just have to pray for Christian to lay aside his duties and become a monk in earnest.” Christian snorted at that prospect. “You would have a better chance courting my horse.” “Then I shall take my charm and work it on a woman who isn’t immune to it. Good day to you both.” Adara glanced over her shoulder as he fell back into the ranks with the other knights. “Don’t look at him,” Christian said in a teasing tone. “You’ll only play into his overbloated self-esteem.” She gave him a meaningful look. “In that regard, he reminds me of someone else I know.” “Ouch, my lady, you wound me.” “Never, Christian. I would never wound you.

The Monk in the Kitchen I ORDER is a lovely thing; On disarray it lays its wing, Teaching simplicity to sing. It has a meek and lowly grace, Quiet as a nun's face. Lo—I will have thee in this place! Tranquil well of deep delight, All things that shine through thee appear As stones through water, sweetly clear. Thou clarity, That with angelic charity Revealest beauty where thou art, Spread thyself like a clean pool. Then all the things that in thee are, Shall seem more spiritual and fair, Reflection from serener air— Sunken shapes of many a star In the high heavens set afar. II Ye stolid, homely, visible things, Above you all brood glorious wings Of your deep entities, set high, Like slow moons in a hidden sky. But you, their likenesses, are spent Upon another element. Truly ye are but seemings— The shadowy cast-oft gleamings Of bright solidities. Ye seem Soft as water, vague as dream; Image, cast in a shifting stream. III What are ye? I know not. Brazen pan and iron pot, Yellow brick and gray flag-stone That my feet have trod upon— Ye seem to me Vessels of bright mystery. For ye do bear a shape, and so Though ye were made by man, I know An inner Spirit also made, And ye his breathings have obeyed. IV Shape, the strong and awful Spirit, Laid his ancient hand on you. He waste chaos doth inherit; He can alter and subdue. Verily, he doth lift up Matter, like a sacred cup. Into deep substance he reached, and lo Where ye were not, ye were; and so Out of useless nothing, ye Groaned and laughed and came to be. And I use you, as I can, Wonderful uses, made for man, Iron pot and brazen pan. V What are ye? I know not; Nor what I really do When I move and govern you. There is no small work unto God. He required of us greatness; Of his least creature A high angelic nature, Stature superb and bright completeness. He sets to us no humble duty. Each act that he would have us do Is haloed round with strangest beauty; Terrific deeds and cosmic tasks Of his plainest child he asks. When I polish the brazen pan I hear a creature laugh afar In the gardens of a star, And from his burning presence run Flaming wheels of many a sun. Whoever makes a thing more bright, He is an angel of all light. When I cleanse this earthen floor My spirit leaps to see Bright garments trailing over it, A cleanness made by me. Purger of all men's thoughts and ways, With labor do I sound Thy praise, My work is done for Thee. Whoever makes a thing more bright, He is an angel of all light. Therefore let me spread abroad The beautiful cleanness of my God. VI One time in the cool of dawn Angels came and worked with me. The air was soft with many a wing. They laughed amid my solitude And cast bright looks on everything. Sweetly of me did they ask That they might do my common task And all were beautiful—but one With garments whiter than the sun Had such a face Of deep, remembered grace; That when I saw I cried—"Thou art The great Blood-Brother of my heart. Where have I seen thee?"—And he said, "When we are dancing round God's throne, How often thou art there. Beauties from thy hands have flown Like white doves wheeling in mid air. Nay—thy soul remembers not? Work on, and cleanse thy iron pot.

Zen is an especially intriguing school of Buddhism because it brings to mind paradoxical images of monks happily living quiet lives, meditating on mountaintops, as well as powerful martial artists.

We have to convince Monks and Filey we're lovers. I mean only to sleep here. You have my word you're safe from my advances." Surprisingly, that full mouth quirked into a wry smile. "So we lie like Tristan and Yseult with a sword between us?" Hard as it was, hard as he was, he couldn't help smiling at the absurd image. "I find myself currently embarrassed of a sword." He didn't say that, in the legend, the sword had proven no barrier to passion. He was in enough trouble.

Sitting there, sweating profusely in the jungle heat, monks to the left and monks to the right, I thought of that beautiful line by Albert Camus, who wrote that a man's life is nothing more than the rediscovery, through the detours of art, of those one or two images that first opened his heart.

For the next sixty days, you need to live the life of a monk, so you can’t have sex.” “What?” I shriek. “What in the fuck?” Ryan laughs. “And for the next thirty days, we are going to rebrand you.” I shake my head, hoping I heard wrong. Surely, I heard wrong. “I don’t understand,” I say, looking at Jeff and then finally snatching the contract from in front of him. Surely, they can’t stop me from having sex. Is there a law against stopping someone from having sex? That’s not actually a thing, is it? “Well, we are going to be working with you on how to polish your image like a shiny nickel,” Sylvia says. “And we have Erin, who is going to work with you on doing just that.

No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.” His words were very enlightening to me. Later, after I thought about it a bit, I realized that it wasn’t Buddhist philosophy at all, but was more akin to some modern physics theories. The abbot also told me he wasn’t going to discuss Buddhism with me. His reason was the same as my high school teacher’s: With my sort, he’d just be wasting his time. That first night, I couldn’t sleep in the tiny room in the temple. I didn’t realize that this refuge from the world would be so uncomfortable. My blanket and sheet both became damp in the mountain fog, and the bed was so hard. In order to make myself sleep, I tried to follow the abbot’s advice and fill myself with “emptiness.” In my mind, the first “emptiness” I created was the infinity of space. There was nothing in it, not even light. But soon I knew that this empty universe could not make me feel peace. Instead, it filled me with a nameless anxiety, like a drowning man wanting to grab on to anything at hand. So I created a sphere in this infinite space for myself: not too big, though possessing mass. My mental state didn’t improve, however. The sphere floated in the middle of “emptiness”—in infinite space, anywhere could be the middle. The universe had nothing that could act on it, and it could act on nothing. It hung there, never moving, never changing, like a perfect interpretation for death. I created a second sphere whose mass was equal to the first one’s. Both had perfectly reflective surfaces. They reflected each other’s images, displaying the only existence in the universe other than itself. But the situation didn’t improve much. If the spheres had no initial movement—that is, if I didn’t push them at first—they would be quickly pulled together by their own gravitational attraction. Then the two spheres would stay together and hang there without moving, a symbol for death. If they did have initial movement and didn’t collide, then they would revolve around each other under the influence of gravity. No matter what the initial conditions, the revolutions would eventually stabilize and become unchanging: the dance of death. I then introduced a third sphere, and to my astonishment, the situation changed completely. Like I said, any geometric figure turns into numbers in the depths of my mind. The sphereless, one-sphere, and two-sphere universes all showed up as a single equation or a few equations, like a few lonesome leaves in late fall. But this third sphere gave “emptiness” life. The three spheres, given initial movements, went through complex, seemingly never-repeating movements. The descriptive equations rained down in a thunderstorm without end. Just like that, I fell asleep. The three spheres continued to dance in my dream, a patternless, never-repeating dance. Yet, in the depths of my mind, the dance did possess a rhythm; it was just that its period of repetition was infinitely long. This mesmerized me. I wanted to describe the whole period, or at least a part of it. The next day I kept on thinking about the three spheres dancing in “emptiness.” My attention had never been so completely engaged. It got to the point where one of the monks asked the abbot whether I was having mental health issues. The abbot laughed and said, “Don’t worry. He has found emptiness.” Yes, I had found emptiness. Now I could be at peace in a bustling city. Even in the midst of a noisy crowd, my heart would be completely tranquil.

As a monk, I learned early on that our values are influenced by whatever absorbs our minds. We are not our minds, but the mind is the vehicle by which we decide what is important in our hearts. The movies we watch, the music we hear, the books we read, the TV shows we binge, the people we follow online and offline. What’s on your news feed is feeding your mind. The more we are absorbed in celebrity gossip, images of success, violent video games, and troubling news, the more our values are tainted with envy, judgment, competition, and discontent.

The Witch stood on an isthmus connecting two rocky lands, and on either side of her stretch patches of cerulean blue sea, with white-lipped waves of astonishing vigor and particularity. The Witch held in her hands a beast of unrecognizable species, though it was clearly drowned, or nearly drowns. She cradled it in an arm that, without attention to actual skeletal flexibility, lovingly encircled the beast's wet, spiky-furred back. With her other hand she was freeing a breast from her robe, offering suck to the creature. Her expression was hard to read, or had the monk's hand smudged, or age and grime bestowed a sfumato sympathy? She was nearly motherly, with miserable child. Her look was inward, or sad, or something. But her feet didn't match her expression, for they were planted on the narrow strand with prehensile grip, apparent even through the silver-colored shoes, whose coin-of-the-realm brilliance had first caught Boq's eyes. Furthermore, the feet were turned out at ninety-degree angles to the shins. They showed in profile as mirror images, heels clicked together and toes pointing in opposite directions, like a stance in ballet. The gown was a hazy dawn blue.

If the phrase “reading spiritually” conjures up a yogi with closed eyes chanting on his carpet, then we need to replace that image and any hurdles it causes for readers. Instead, imagine a mother reading aloud to her children in the living room, each child snuggled beside her, as she intones the words with her young ones, pausing intermittently to ask what they are feeling, thinking, and delighting in. Or try to go back in time and picture Julian of Norwich, in her anchoress cell attached to the cathedral, mulling over the visions that God lay before her, realizing in her heart that the meaning of the showings was love, always love, forever love. Maybe you hear monks humming like bees as they read the texts they are copying aloud and ruminating—meditating— on the words before them. Or you might see a pastor walking up and down in his office, wearing thin the beige carpet beneath his feet, asking himself questions and mumbling answers. (p. 111)

The whole of the attention must be given to the words of the short prayer: ‘O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.’ This prayer, continually repeated at each drawing of breath, becomes to a monk as it were second nature. Far from rendering the interior life mechanical, it has the effect, on the contrary, of freeing it and turning it towards contemplation by constantly driving away from the region of the heart all contagion of sin, and every external thought or image; and this by the power of the most holy Name of Jesus.

Cities fell apart in violent conflicts over a single letter: was Christ of the same being with the Father, or of like being, homoousios or homoiousios? Was he from two natures (ek duo), or in two (en duo)? Such language is seriously off-putting for most modern readers, including many educated Christians. And it uses so many technical terms that almost seem to the uninitiated like secret codes. Person? Subsistence? Nature? A critic could be forgiven for comparing the straightforward words of Jesus, with all the everyday analogies and images—sheep and harvests, the sparrows and the lilies of the field, the erring brother and the widow’s penny—to the arcane philosophical language used here. Jesus spoke of love; his church spoke in riddles. I may not be the only modern reader who hears the language of Chalcedon—two but not one—and finds his thoughts occasionally straying to the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A monk offers instructions for the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, in a deliberate parody of the Athanasian Creed: First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.

One of the most interesting is that which follows the Leke faith. This is a kind of Buddhism based on the worship of Maitreya, the Buddha who will next appear in this world. However, unlike other Buddhists, their faith does not include the worship of sacred images, pagodas or monks. Their principal religious monument is a wooden structure without walls. In the centre is a tall pole bearing a sacred umbrella. The people of the Leke faith abide by ten rules of conduct which seem to reflect Buddhist ideas. The

Why a monk? How can he wear orange and breathe slowly all the time. Sometimes I’m convinced the human race as a whole is pathetic in it stupidity, but I’m beginning to understand why we’ve survived this long. We have the remarkable ability to get something out of nothing, explanations out of mystery, truth out of air. The great religions and causes are the best magic tricks in history, conjuring neither pigeons nor rabbits. Even an elephant out of a top hat would pale in comparison to the stunning answers we come up with to calm ourselves (or, as the case may be, enrage, justify, avenge ourselves). You don’t need to be a Buddhist, or a Christian, or a Muslim; the truth isn’t found only in ancient books. It can be anywhere, depending on your eyes. If I’m to believe the monk, and I do, we mould our lives according to dreams and visions whose substance is poorly imagined. Our truths are as numerous and unpredictable as wind currents, as invisible, as undeniable. The only prop necessary for the whole show is faith. With faith, you will have your truth, no matter how absurd it may appear to others. If you have a vision, you’re obliged to believe in it even if your neighbours think you are stark raving mad. What must the monk’s mother say of her eyebrowless, malnourished son, a perfectly sane young man living on rice and vegetables and pure Asian light? He relinquished his seaside, his clothes, his name, but he knows what he’s received in exchange. I like the image of him in my mind, the grey eyes, skin, mouth, egg-bald head rising out of orange sheets. He is so convinced, so convincing. I wonder about people like him, and the people who are monks without robes, the ones who wonder around in the noisier world, they’re gods in their pockets. Bertrand Russell was once asked if he would die for his beliefs. He laughed and said, “Of course not. After all, I may be wrong.” I laugh myself, thinking how wrong I might be. But it doesn’t matter. Belief, and the faith feeds itself; truth shines out like a new born moon.

Chinese define image in these terms: there are three mirrors that form a person’s reflection; the first is how you see yourself, the second is how others see you and the third mirror reflects the truth.

The church’s principal officers are not monks, artisans, and a retinue of priests whose calling is to serve images they’ve made, but heralds, announcing God’s mighty acts in history. Zwingli’s

There was Asuka, birthplace of Yamato Japan, with its long-vacant burial mounds, surfaces carved with supernatural images of beasts and semi-humans, their makers and their meaning lost in the timeless swaying of the rice paddies around them; Koya-san, the holy mountain, reputedly the resting place of Kobo Daishi, Japan’s great saint, who is said to linger near the mountain’s vast necropolis not dead but meditating, his vigil marked by the mantras of monks that drone among the nearby markers of the dead as ancient and eternal as summer insects in primordial groves;

alive, your life will be transformed. You see, the words you say to yourself affect your self-image and your self-image determines what actions you take. For

When coins go out of circulation, after all, the metal doesn’t simply disappear. In the Middle Ages—and this seems to have been true across Eurasia—the vast majority of it ended up in religious establishments, churches, monasteries, and temples, either stockpiled in hoards and treasuries or gilded onto or cast into altars, sanctums, and sacred instruments. Above all, it was shaped into images of gods. As a result, those rulers who did try to put an Axial Age–style coinage system back into circulation—invariably, to fund some project of military expansion—often had to pursue self-consciously anti-religious policies in order to do so. Probably the most notorious was one Harsa, who ruled Kashmir from 1089 to 1101 AD, who is said to have appointed an officer called the “Superintendent for the Destruction of the Gods.” According to later histories, Harsa employed leprous monks to systematically desecrate divine images with urine and excrement, thus neutralizing their power, before dragging them off to be melted down.9 He is said to have destroyed more than four thousand Buddhist establishments before being betrayed and killed, the last of his dynasty—and his miserable fate was long held out as an example of where the revival of the old ways was likely to lead one in the end.

We are not our minds, but the mind is the vehicle by which we decide what is important in our hearts. The movies we watch, the music we hear, the books we read, the TV shows we binge, the people we follow online and offline. What’s on your news feed is feeding your mind. The more we are absorbed in celebrity gossip, images of success, violent video games, and troubling news, the more our values are tainted with envy, judgment, competition, and discontent.

Now, whenever she smelled the gums, the balsams, and the special aromatics that arrived with merchants from afar, her head reeled with images of temples, shrines, palaces, fortresses, mysterious walls, tapestries, paintings, jewels, liquors, icons, drugs, dyes, meats, sweets, sweetmeats, silks, bolts and bolts of cotton cloth, ores, shiny metals, foodstuffs, spices, musical instruments, ivory daggers and ivory dolls, masks, bells, carvings, statues (ten times as tall as she!), lumber, leopards on leashes, peacocks, monkeys, white elephants with tattooed ears, horses, camels, princes, maharajah, conquerors, travelers (Turks with threatening mustaches and Greeks with skin as pale as the stranger who had befriended her at the funeral grounds), singers, fakirs, magicians, acrobats, prophets, scholars, monks, madmen, sages, saints, mystics, dreamers, prostitutes, dancers, fanatics, avatars, poets, thieves, warriors, snake charmers, pageants, parades, rituals, executions, weddings, seductions, concerts, new religions, strange philosophies, fevers, diseases, splendors and magnificences and things too fearsome to be recounted, all writhing, cascading, jumbling, mixing, splashing, and spinning; vast, complex, inexhaustible, forever.

We tend to attribute the complexity and busyness of our lives to a false culprit. We blame it on our environment. The pace of activity in our cities, our workload or office culture, our stage in life, and the current demands on our time are the assumed chief causes of our overwhelmed lives. Quaker missionary Thomas Kelly, writing in 1941, made a different observation after spending a full year “slowing down” and “simplifying” on a twelve-month sabbatical in Hawaii. Like other Americans, he had carried with him to the tropics the “mad-cap, feverish life” he knew on the mainland.15 Your inner life is not a mirror image of your environment. If anything, the opposite is true. We create an environment that mirrors our inner life. Kelly observed: Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! If only we could find the Silence which is the source of sound!16 All of these teachers are circling around the same thing: hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.

Pictures affect your self-image and your self-image affects the way you feel, act and achieve. If your self-image tells you that you are too young to be a successful lawyer or too old to change your habits for the better, you never will achieve these goals.

is an indication of the impact Oppenheimer made on Edsall that the title he chose was one suggested to him by Oppenheimer: The Gad-Fly. This was an allusion to Socrates’s description of himself in Plato’s Apology as a gadfly whose role in society was “to sting people, and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth.” Eagerly embracing this image, Edsall, in his editorial for the first issue, published in December 1922, announced:

If you say you are weak and lack enthusiasm, this too will be the nature of your world. But if you say that you are healthy, dynamic and fully alive, your life will be transformed. You see, the words you say to yourself affect your self-image and your self-image determines what actions you take. For example, if your self-image is one of a person who lacks the confidence to do anything of value, you will only be able to take actions that are aligned with this trait. On the other hand, if your self-image is one of a radiant individual who is fearless, again, all your actions will correspond to this quality. Your self-image is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

When coins go out of circulation, after all, the metal doesn't simply disappear. In the Middle Ages-and this seems to have been true across Eurasia-the vast majority of it ended up in religious establishments, churches, monasteries, and temples, either stockpiled in hoards and treasuries or gilded onto or cast into altars, sanctums, and sacred instruments. Above all, it was shaped into images of gods. As a result, those rulers who did try to put an Axial Age-style coin­ age system back into circulation-invariably, to fund some project of military expansion-often had to pursue self-consciously anti-religious policies in order to do so. Probably the most notorious was one Harsa, who ruled Kashmir from 1089 to nor AD, who is said to have ap­ pointed an officer called the "Superintendent for the Destruction of the Gods." According to later histories, Harsa employed leprous monks to systematically desecrate divine images with urine and excrement, thus neutralizing their power, before dragging them off to be melted down.9 He is said to have destroyed more than four thousand Buddhist estab­lishments before being betrayed and killed, the last of his dynasty-and his miserable fate was long held out as an example of where the revival of the old ways was likely to lead one in the end.

While not inherently "green" in the current sense of ecology, Zen evidences quite a number of core qualities and values that can be considered ecofriendly and help it serve as a model for new theories that address problems of conservation and pollution control. Traditional Japanese society is characterized by an approach based on healthy, efficient, and convenient living derived from a mental outlook that makes the most of minimal natural resources. Zen particularly endorses the values of simplicity, in that monks enter the Samgha Hall only with robes, bowls, and a few other meager possessions; thrift, by making a commitment to waste nothing; and communal manual labor, such that through a rotation of chores everyone contributes to the upkeep of the temple. The image of dedicated monks sweeping the wood floors of the hallways by rushing along on their hands in a semi-prostrate position is inspiring. Furthermore, the monastic system's use of human and material resources, including natural space, is limited and spare in terms of temple layout, the handling of administrative duties and chores, and the use of stock items. The sparse, spartan, vegetarian Zen cook, who prepares just enough rice gruel for his fellow monks but not a grain too much or too little, demonstrates an inherent—if not necessarily deliberate—conservationist approach. The minimalist aesthetic of rock gardens highlights the less-is-more Zen outlook that influenced the "Buddhist economics" evoked by E. F. Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful.

The brutality of language conceals the banality of thought and, with certain major exceptions, is indistinguishable from a kind of conformism. Cities, once the initial euphoria of discovery had worn off, were beginning to provoke in her a kind of unease. in New York, there was nothing, deep down, that appealed to her in the mixture of puritanism and megalomania that typified this people without a civilization. What helps you live, in times of helplessness or horror? The necessity of earning or kneading, the bread that you eat, sleeping, loving, putting on clean clothes, rereading an old book, the smell of ripe cranberries and the memory of the Parthenon. All that was good during times of delight is exquisite in times of distress. The atomic bomb does not bring us anything new, for nothing is more ancient than death. It is atrocious that these cosmic forces, barely mastered, should immediately be used for murder, but the first man who took it into his head to roll a boulder for the purpose of crushing his enemy used gravity to kill someone. She was very courteous, but inflexible regarding her decisions. When she had finished with her classes, she wanted above all to devote herself to her personal work and her reading. She did not mix with her colleagues and held herself aloof from university life. No one really got to know her. Yourcenar was a singular an exotic personage. She dressed in an eccentric but very attractive way, always cloaked in capes, in shawls, wrapped up in her dresses. You saw very little of her skin or her body. She made you think of a monk. She liked browns, purple, black, she had a great sense of what colors went well together. There was something mysterious about her that made her exciting. She read very quickly and intensely, as do those who have refused to submit to the passivity and laziness of the image, for whom the only real means of communication is the written word. During the last catastrophe, WWII, the US enjoyed certain immunities: we were neither cold nor hungry; these are great gifts. On the other hand, certain pleasures of Mediterranean life, so familiar we are hardly aware of them - leisure time, strolling about, friendly conversation - do not exist. Hadrian. This Roman emperor of the second century, was a great individualist, who, for that very reason, was a great legist and a great reformer; a great sensualist and also a citizen, a lover obsessed by his memories, variously bound to several beings, but at the same time and up until the end, one of the most controlled minds that have been. Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. We know Yourcenar's strengths: a perfect style that is supple and mobile, in the service of an immense learnedness and a disabused, decorative philosophy. We also know her weakness: the absence of dramatic pitch, of a fictional progression, the absence of effects. Writers of books to which the work ( Memoirs of Hadrian ) or the author can be likened: Walter Pater, Ernest Renan. Composition: harmonious. Style: perfect. Literary value: certain. Degree of interest of the work: moderate. Public: a cultivated elite. Cannot be placed in everyone's hands. Commercial value: weak. People who, like her, have a prodigious capacity for intellectual work are always exasperated by those who can't keep us with them. Despite her acquired nationality, she would never be totally autonomous in the US because she feared being part of a community in which she risked losing her mastery of what was so essential to her work; the French language. Their modus vivendi could only be shaped around travel, accepted by Frick, required by Yourcenar.

Between the sixth and ninth centuries, the practice of public or ecclesial penance began to be replaced by a system of private penance that Celtic monks introduced throughout western Europe. Reconciliation back into the ranks of 'the faithful' had previously been granted only after completion of a public penance lasting many years. By contrast, in the system of private penance, after a penitent's confession (whereby the priest made a judgment and assigned an appropriate penance for the sins committed), reconciliation or absolution was given on the subsequent Holy Thursday or, by the year 1000, immediately. Harsh but shorter private penances, as listed in the penitential books (for example, a considerable repetition of prayers, interspersed with genuflections and long periods of kneeling with hands outstretched in imitation of Jesus on the cross), were now offered as substitutes for the earlier public penances that had taken years to complete. The commutation of penances lasting decades into penances of shorter duration ultimately generated a concern about dying without having fully 'satisfied for' the 'temporal punishment due to sin' in this life, and thereby the fear of being consigned to 'purgatory.' As a result, the offering of Masses for the dead, for a stipend, increased and the granting of indulgences expanded.  Indulgences came from the practice of commuting penances, wherein certain prayers or pious practices were substituted for a longer period of penance in one's lifetime. For example, Pope John the Twenty-Second (1316-34) granted ten thousand days of indulgence to those who recited the prayer Hail Holy Face (Salve sancta facies) while looking at the image of Christ's face on the 'relic' cloth in St. Peter's Basilica. Technically, that pious practice, which also presupposed a pilgrimage to Rome, substituted for twenty-eight years of penance. ... The fifteenth century especially gave rise to the practice of applying such indulgences, or remissions of temporal penances, to souls in purgatory, even though there is no measurement of time beyond death. Pope Sixtus IV (1471-84), who expanded the practice of indulgences, explained that a 'plenary remission' simply offered the suffrage or intercession of the official prayers of the Church for the relaxation of the 'punishments' of the soul in purgatory: 'We, to whom the fullness of power has been given from on high, from the treasury of the universal Church, which consists of the merits of Christ and his saints committed to us, offer help and intercession to the souls in purgatory.' Unfortunately, in the popular mind, and in the exaggerations of some who preached the indulgences offered for a donation to a cause, such plenary remissions were too often misinterpreted as guarantees that souls would be immediately liberated into heaven. 

The feelings or imaginings which tend to prevent the mind from entering into the heart and so attaining to pure prayer, or prayer of the heart, are either those which are the result of sin, or an attraction towards sin, or those which make us think we are being drawn towards good actions or a real meeting with God himself, but which in fact do not lead to God. That is why the Fathers warn monks even against images that seem to be good. They exhort them not to rely on any kind of imagination or impression. Moreover the Fathers consider thought, even theological thought, to be a no less dangerous obstacle to the mind's entry into the heart. They must be watchful not to rest in theological thinking, or to slip into it, when they are moved to prayer or while they are praying. Thinking about God interrupts direct encounter with him. By theological thinking a man becomes shut in on himself.

As I read deeper in the Zen poets, I soon stumbled upon Ikkyū, the fifteenth-century sword-wielding monk of Daitokuji, who had entered a temple at the age of six and gone on to express his contempt for the corrupt monasteries of his time in famously controversial poems. Like the Sixth Dalai Lama, in his way, Ikkyū had been a patron - and a laureate - of the local taverns, and of the pretty girls he had found therein; and like his Tibetan counterpart, or John Donne in our own tradition, he had deliberately conflated the terms of earthly love with those of devotion to the Absolute. The very name he gave himself, "Crazy Cloud", had played subversively on the fact that "cloud water" was a traditional term for monks, who wandered without trace, yet "cloud rain" was a conventional idiom for the act of love. His image of the "red thread" ran through the austere surroundings of his poems as shockingly as the scarlet peonies of Akiko. And in his refusal to kowtow to convention, the maverick monk had turned every certainty on its head: whores, he said, could be like ideal monks - since they inhabited the ideal Zen state of "no min" - while monks, in selling themselves for gold brocade, were scarcely different from whores. Many of his verses trembled with this ambiguity. One couplet, taken one way, was translated as "Making distinctions between good and evil, the monk's skill lies in knowing the essential condition of the Buddha and the Devil"; taken another way, it meant: "That girl is no good, this one will do; the monk's skill is in having the appetite of a devilish Buddha.

mind cannot tell the difference between an image that we envision and one that is real. So this little technique actually fools it into thinking we are taking this quick break from our daily routines

The literature of apocalypse is scary stuff, the kind of thing that can give religion a bad name, because people so often use it as a means of controlling others, instilling dread by invoking a boogeyman God. ... [Apocalyptic literature] is not a detailed prediction of the future, or an invitation to withdraw from the concerns of this world. It is a wake-up call, one that uses intensely poetic language and imagery to sharpen our awareness of God's presence in and promise for the world. The word "apocalypse" comes from the Greek for "uncovering" or "revealing," which makes it a word about possibilities. And while uncovering something we'd just as soon keep hidden is a frightening prospect, the point of apocalypse is not to frighten us into submission. Although it is often criticized as "pie-in-the-sky" fantasizing, I believe its purpose is to teach us to think about "next-year-country" in a way that sanctifies our lives here and now. "Next-year-country" is a treasured idiom of the western Dakotas, an accurate description of the landscape that farmers and ranchers dwell in - next year rains will come at the right time; next year I won't get hailed out; next year winter won't set in before I have my hay hauled in for winter feeding. I don't know a single person on the land who uses the idea of "next year" as an excuse not to keep on reading the earth, not to look for the signs that mean you've got to get out and do the field work when the time is right. Maybe we're meant to use apocaly[tic literature in the same way: not as an allowance to indulge in an otherworldly fixation but as an injunction to pay closer attention to the world around us. When I am disturbed by the images of apocalypse, I find it helpful to remember the words of a fourth-centry monk about the task of reading scripture as "working the earth of the heart," for it is only in a disturbed, ploughted0up ground that the seeds we plant for grain can grow.

You are what you think about all day long. You are also what you say to yourself all day long. If you say that you are old and tired, this mantra will be manifested in your external reality. If you say you are weak and lack enthusiasm, this too will be the nature of your world. But if you say that you are healthy, dynamic and fully alive, your life will be transformed. You see, the words you say to yourself affect your self-image and your self-image determines what actions you take. For example, if your self-image is one of a person who lacks the confidence to do anything of value, you will only be able to take actions that are aligned with this trait. On the other hand, if your self-image is one of a radiant individual who is fearless, again, all your actions will correspond to this quality. Your self-image is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

To me - the scientist, the preacher, the entrepreneur, the janitor, the showgirl, the sex worker and all others are one and the same human spirit in which I see the image of my own self.

The monk wakes from a dream into a world of mists and thunderclouds. The clouds play children's games with him. They show him dissolving images of yaks and sheep, serpents and hawks, angels and dragons. He closes his eyes and the clouds count to ten. He opens his eyes and they look for him.

The monks used two types of meditation. Deity Yoga involves generating and holding a three-dimensional color image of a deity surrounded by his or her divine entourage. The other type of meditation is called Open Presence, in which attention is broadly distributed without focusing on any experiences, images, or thoughts that may arise. The claim tested about Deity Yoga was the assertion that highly complex images could be mentally maintained for minutes to hours. Kozhevnikov also tested nonmeditators and meditators who did not engage in their practice prior to the test. The results showed that all the groups performed at the same level before meditation, but after meditation, the Deity Yoga practitioners, according to Kozhevnikov, “demonstrated a dramatic increase in performance on imagery tasks compared with the other groups. Therefore, [Deity Yoga] specifically trains one’s capacity to access heightened visuospatial memory resources via meditation, rather than generally improving long-lasting imagery abilities” (p. 645).59

In the daylight that followed my arrival, the pale grey Trappe resembled not so much an abbey as a hospital, an asylum or a reformatory. It dwindled off into farm buildings, and came to an end in the fields where thousands of turnips led their secret lives and reared into the air their little frostbitten banners. Among the furrows an image mouldered on its pedestal; and, under a sky of clouded steel, the rooks cawed and wheeled and settled. Across the December landscape, flat and waterlogged with its clumps of drizzling coppice and barren-looking pasture-land, ran a rutted path which disappeared beneath an avenue of elm-trees. Willows, blurred and colourless as the detail of an aquatint, receded in the mist; and, here and there, the pallor of the woods was interrupted by funereal clumps of pine. Isolated monks, all of them hooded and clogged, at work in the fields, ploughing or chopping wood, dotted this sodden panorama and the report of their falling axes reached the ear long seconds after the visual impact. Others were driving slow herds of cattle to graze.

(Describing a stop at a village cafe in Italy while filming Taming of the Shrew) It was a perfect choice, the kind of place where chickens brood under the table, though there were none here There was the usual arbour of vines. Two men there intrigued Elizabeth. One was a distinguished oldish man, well dressed, who sat alone at a terraced table and neither ate nor drank nor moved. The other looked like a mendicant monk of some obscure order. He read from a parchment and ate bread. He didn't look up at all. He had a large beard. At seven-thirty just at dusk a Mass began at the church on the hill the other side of the road The Church of the Madonna of the Divine Love. The voices of the choir drifted on the air like an invisible mist, like unseen tumbleweed, like a dream. we stopped eating our fave (raw kidney beans) and rough cheese and we stopped drinking the vin de pays to listen. It was one of those moments which are nostalgic before they're over. The two men had gone, the tramp monk maybe to the Mass and the other who knows where. we drove home feeling holy and clean while the moon bright as I've ever seen her and with a wisp of chiffon cloud around her throat (E's image not mine) shone on us from the cloudless night.

I suspect that these monks would have found baffling, if not downright comical, our either/or mentality, our fussing and fuming over whether scripture is literal or symbolic, historical or fantastical. Although their access to scholarly tools was primitive compared to what is available in our day, their method of biblical interpretation was in some ways more sophisticated and certainly more psychologically astute, in that they were better able to fathom the complex integrative, and transformative qualities of revelation. Their approach was far less narcissistic than our own tends to be, in that their goal when reading scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves.

You said there were five steps to follow to make my desires come true,” I said impatiently. “What are the remaining three?” “Yes, John. Step one is to have a clear vision of your outcome. Step two is to create positive pressure to keep you inspired. The third step is a simple one: never set a goal without attaching a timeline to it. To breathe life into a goal you must attach a precise deadline to it. It’s just like when you are preparing cases for court; you always focus your attention on the ones the judge has scheduled to be heard tomorrow rather than on the ones without any court date. “Oh, and by the way,” explained Julian, “remember that a goal that is not committed to paper is no goal at all. Go out and buy a journal — a cheap coil notepad will do. Call this your Dream Book and fill it with all your desires, objectives and dreams. Get to know yourself and what you are all about.” “Don’t I already know myself?” “Most people don’t. They have never taken the time to know their strengths, their weaknesses, their hopes, their dreams. The Chinese define image in these terms: there are three mirrors that form a person’s reflection; the first is how you see yourself, the second is how others see you and the third mirror reflects the truth. Know yourself, John. Know the truth.

If any locals had seen the dark-robed group as they moved through the darkness they might well have felt the stirrings of fear. Monks – anonymous, rootless, untraceable – were able to commit atrocities with near impunity. ‘Our angels’ some Christians called them. Rubbish, said non-Christians. They were not angels but ignorant, boorish thugs, men in appearance only who ‘led the lives of swine, and openly did and allowed countless unspeakable crimes’. As the author Eunapius wrote with sardonic distaste: ‘in those days every man who wore a black robe and consented to behave in unseemly fashion in public, possessed the power of a tyrant, to such a pitch of virtue had the human race advanced!’ Even a wholeheartedly Christian emperor mutedly observed that ‘the monks commit many crimes’. And on that night, these monks were about to commit another. Shenoute’s target was not, this time, one of his monks but one of the wicked, godless pagans. In sermon after furious sermon Shenoute had turned his famously fiery prose on these people. Their hearts were ‘the nests of the spirits of wickedness’. If disturbed then these evil people would spit out poison. The Bible, Shenoute told his congregants, said that those who set up pagan images should be killed. As he put it in one particularly vigorous sermon, God wished His people to ‘remove the abominations from His presence’. The emperors, Shenoute thundered, had declared that the entire earth must be cleansed of perversions. No stone was to be left on top of any other stone of any pagan temple. Not one. In the entire earth.

If you say that you are healthy, dynamic and fully alive your life will be transformed. You see, the words you say to yourself affect your self-image and if your self-image determines what actions you take. For example, if your self-image is one of a person who lacks the confidence to anything of value, you will only be able to take actions that are aligned with this trait. On the other hand, if your self-image is one of a radiant individual who is fearless, again all your actions will correspond to this quality. Your self-image is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

If you say that you are healthy, dynamic and fully alive your life will be transformed. You see, the words you say to yourself affect your self-image and your self-image determines what actions you take. For example, if your self-image is one of a person who lacks the confidence to do anything of value, you will only be able to take actions that are aligned with this trait. On the other hand, if your self-image is one of a radiant individual who is fearless, again all your actions will correspond to this quality. Your self-image is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

The concept of sin does not exist so that people who may need therapy more than theology can be convinced that they are evil and beyond hope. It is meant to encourage people to believe that they are made in the image of God and to act accordingly. Hope is the heart of it, and the ever-present possibility of transformation.

A papyrus fragment shows Bishop Theophilus standing triumphantly over an image of Serapis, Bible in hand, while on the right-hand side monks can be seen attacking the temple. St Benedict, St Martin, St John Chrysostom; the men leading these campaigns of violence were not embarrassing eccentrics but men at the very heart of the Church.

It is a reason why so many who seek holiness or spiritual improvement impose on themselves a strict austerity. And it is why schools and colleges used to emulate the ways of monasteries. The first Christian hermits and monastics who practiced extreme austerity in the desert saw themselves as emulating Jesus during his sojourn in the wilderness. Once monastic life became institutionalized, removing oneself from carnal temptation was a major reason why religiously minded individuals would choose to take vows. The Rule of St. Benedict, set down around the year 530, included commitments to poverty, humility, chastity, and obedience, and this became the paradigm for most Christian monastic orders. The vow of poverty generally involved renouncing all individual property, although the monastic community was allowed to hold property, and of course some monasteries eventually became quite wealthy. But the lifestyle of most monks in the Middle Ages was kept deliberately austere. Here is how Aelred of Rievaulx, writing in the twelfth century, describes it: Our food is scanty, our garments rough, our drink is from the streams and our sleep upon our book. Under our tired limbs there is a hard mat; when sleep is sweetest we must rise at a bell’s bidding. . . . self-will has no scope; there is no moment for idleness or dissipation.4 Strict precautions to eliminate the possibility of sexual encounters, regular searches of dormitories to ensure that no one was hoarding personal property, a rigid and arduous daily routine to occupy to the full one’s physical and mental energy: by means of this sort monasteries and convents did their best to provide a temptation-free environment. More than a trace of the same thinking lay behind the preference for isolated rural locations among those who sought to establish colleges in nineteenth-century America. Sometimes the argument might be conveyed subtly by a brochure picturing the college surrounded by nothing but fields, woods, and hills, an image that also appealed to the deeply rooted idea that the land was a source of virtue.5 But it was also put forward explicitly. The town of North Yarmouth sought to persuade the founders of Bowdoin College of its advantageous location by pointing out that it was “not so much exposed to many Temptations to Dissipation, Extravagance, Vanity and Various Vices as great seaport towns frequently are.”6 And the 1847 catalog of Tusculum College, Tennessee, noted that its rural situation “guards it from all the ensnaring and demoralizing influences of a town.”7 Needless to say, reassurances of this sort were directed more at the fee-paying parents than at the prospective students. One should also add that not everyone took such a positive view of the rural campus. Some complained that life far away from urban civilization fostered vulgarity, depravity, licentiousness, and hy

(The monks) approach was far less narcissistic and our tends to be. Their goal when reading Scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves.

...and she came to the monk wearing cosmetics, much gold jewelry, and an elaborate silk dress. The monk admonished her gently; 'By supposing your body to require [all this],' he said,'you condemn the Creator for deficiency.' It is a remark that might be interpreted as misogyny, but in the context of the story--the monk pleads that he is only a man with the same nature as hers, and has no special access to God--it is clear that the monk believes the woman to be made in the image of God, good as she is, without unnecessary adornment.

Then there are transcendent images, which are the rarest of all. Sometimes they have shitty light and no concept. They can be ill-composed and a big blurry mess. A naked child runs with outstretched arms, screaming from the burn of napalm. Nick Ut. A monk sitting in lotus, dead calm and engulfed in flames. Quang Duc. A man fires a pistol into the head of another on the street in Saigon. Eddie Adams. A man jumps a puddle and hovers for a moment. Henri Cartier-Bresson.