In Yoke

And then there crept a little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.-John KeatsEaswaran's recollections: "Today I was walking with some friends in Armstrong Redwoods Park and I was astonished at those trees. The more I looked at them, the more I came to appreciate them. It was completely still, unlike our tropical forests in India, where elephants trumpet, tigers roar, and there is a constant symphony of sound.Here everything was still, and I enjoyed the silence so much that I remembered these lines of John Keats. It is a perfect simile for the silence of the mind, when all personal conflicts are resolved, when all selfish desires come to rest. All of us are looking for this absolute peace, this inward, healing silence in the redwood forest of the mind. When we find it, we will become small forces for peace wherever we go.I'm interested in experiencing this more & more.Being, meditating, contemplating, musing, gleanings morsels for...

Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life? -Henry Havelock Ellis  When we wake up from a dream into waking consciousness, we do not pass from unreality to reality; we pass from a lower level of reality to a higher level. And, the mystics of all religions say, there is a higher level still, compared with which this waking life of ours is as insubstantial as a dream. Yet until we do wake up, nothing sounds more absurd than the assertion that we are dreaming, and nothing seems more solid than this world of the senses. Why should this be so? If original goodness is our real nature, why are we unable to see it? The answer is simple: because we see life not as it is but as we are. We see "through a glass darkly," through the distorting lenses of the mind - all the layers of feeling, habit, instinct, and memory that cover the pure core of goodness deep within. ~Easwaran

Is that I am being led, being guided, being loved, being used, being prayed through --I am not in the drivers seat. Gal.2:20

Envy and wrath shorten the life.    – Ecclesiasticus All of us have a need to forgive, whether in large or small matters. All of us suffer little irritating pinpricks every day. It is not very effective to analyze these small wrongs and then forgive them one by one. Much more effective is not to dwell on them at all. Whenever a stray bit of wrath arises and wants to talk over some incident from the past, don’t invite that thought in. When we can withdraw our attention completely from the past, it is not possible to get resentful; it is not possible to be oppressed by mistakes in our past, no matter who made them. All our attention is in the present, which makes every moment fresh, every relationship fresh. Staleness and boredom vanish from our life. I love this insight from the teacher, Easwaran. He is reaffirming that we do not have any need of the resentments and slights that we may perceive have been directed towards us. Little things can accumulate into outbursts of ...

Each of us sees the Unseen in proportion to the clarity of our heart, and that depends upon how much we have polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more - more Unseen forms become manifest. -Jalaluddin Rumi Easwaran posits- "As your meditation deepens, there will still be occasions when you get upset, but you will be able to watch what goes on in the lab of your mind. It's like getting into a glass-bottomed boat, where you venture out onto the ocean and watch all the deep-sea creatures lurking beneath the surface: resentment sharks, stingrays of greed, scurrying schools of fear. You slowly gain a certain amount of detachment from your mind, so you can observe what is going on, collect data, and then set things right. Some of the chronic problems that millions of people suffer from today might be solved by gaining a little detachment from their minds and emotions, so they can stand back a little when the mind is agitated and see the ways in which it make...

“A relationship is not a something . You can’t see it or touch it. It is a BETWEEN- between you and me- a space that enables us to I-You each other, just as God I-You’s us by His Spirit. Living by the Spirit is an entry into mystery, into something beyond our control, into something we can’t contain, into something we can only receive. Although we can treat God like an idea to be discussed, an experience to be savored, and a power to be used, these are all I-It relations, distorted relations. The Spirit is constantly drawing us back into I-You relating with God and with each other.” After all, it seems that Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom can be simply explained as his message about Relationship. He had a vibrant relationship with the Lord, and is sharing that it can be a relationship in which you can participate, as well. from “I-Thou”by Martin Buber, as translated by Eugene Peterson, in ‘Practice Resurrection’.

From Rohr: "The manifestation of the Great I AM in Jesus, which was the momentous Christian epiphany, became so thrilling to the new Era that they forgot the continued need to balance his newly discovered divinity with his personally, and even more strongly proclaimed humanity. Remember, virtually Jesus' only form of self reference -- 87 times in the 4 Gospels - was ben'adam - a "son of the human one". We, as a church, have never really been able to balance his divinity and his humanity, which is why we have never been able to put it together in ourselves. We just don't have the proper software for the task. Theism believes that there is a God. Christianity believes that God and humanity can coexist in the same place. These are two utterly different proclamations about the nature of the universe. In my experience, most Christians are very good Theists, who just happen to have named their god Jesus." The concept of Trinity- both coexistant as Holy...