These are instructions for you,
instructions in opening a “spiritual” door….you will notice they are basically
the same, even though they come from men who spoke quite different languages,
lived centuries apart, and went their own way. The instructions can be summed
up simply” practice renunciation and meditation.
Fundamentally renunciation can
be understood as relating to a change in attitude. It is a shift from doing to
allowing, from grasping the world to allowing the world to enter us. It is the
meditative attitude carried into everyday life.
“Therefore if you desire to
discover your soul, withdraw your thoughts from outward and material things,
forgetting if possible your own body and its five senses…St John calls for the
banishment of memory:
‘Of all these forms and manners
of knowledge the soul must strip and void itself, and it must strive to lose
the imaginary apprehension of them, so that there may be left in it no kind of
impression of knowledge, nor trace of aught so-ever, but rather the soul must remain
barren and bare, as if these forms had never passed through it and is total
oblivion and suspension. And this cannot happen unless the memory be
annihilated as to all its form, if it is to be united with God.’ (St John of
the Cross)”
~Walter Hilton, The Scale of
Perfection
To have renunciation is to be
beyond various forms and colors. We have full appreciation of forms and colors
but they are bound to disappear and we should not be caught by that. We do not
give them up but accept that they go away; that is renunciation.
~Shunryu Suzuki, Wind Bell 1968
~From Arthur Deikman, Personal
Freedom and in Symposium on Consciousness
Art: He Qi
To discover the mystical, the
inner viewpoint, one must leave outer viewpoints aside. The process of
meditation or contemplative prayer, is inherently designed toward subjective
experience and away from objective ideation. Objectification, even of the self,
is imperative for a mind acting in the world. In Western culture we are taught
and affirmed through the use of the objective, outwardly directed mind. But
below the radar of thinking and outward sensing, we bring to our worldly
experience, insight, memory, feeling, intuition, all inward sensing mechanisms
that influence our thoughts and behavior, yet usually go unrecognized and invalidated.
 |
| Hydrogen atom through quantum microscope |
In physics, the diagram of an
atom is an imaginary objectification of particles and space that assists the
scientist in working with energy, which cannot be seen. In the consciousness of
human minds, form takes shape out of formlessness, matter out of energy. We can
work with what we can objectify, i.e. (thought and) matter.
But we forget that these are mental concepts and impart an assumption of
longevity and intense value to material reality.
So which is the longer lived? Energy, of course. All matter, all form
is fleeting, including thoughts and concepts which create form.
Meditation is the practice of
BEING. It is the practice of the simultaneous PRESENCE of objectivity and
subjectivity, of form and formlessness, the body and the mind, the storehouse
of subjective experience and the administrator of the body in the physical
world. To achieve the convergence of, the integration of, a perception of body
experience with mental awareness, one must allow that which is formed - even the concept of time - to yield to
formlessness, one must allow active mind to give way to receptive mind.
Renunciation is this yielding: of doing for being, of thought for no thought,
of outward sensing for inward sensing, of objectivity for subjectivity, of some
thing for no thing. This is the creation of a vessel (form) into which the
spirit (formless) may be expressed, the womb in which new life is birthed. It
is simply the wisdom we carry within us.
Peace and well-being are yours
already. You can access them anytime you wish…to be still and know.
_/\_ Peggy @ Ecumenicus
_/\_ Peggy @ Ecumenicus
Web site: www.newecumenicus.org
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