April 2007 (Vol. XX, No. 4)
"Is there enough Silence for the Word to be heard?"
Blessings in the Oneness of the Silence, dear friends!As we come to know that we, all of us, are unconditionally loved by the Beloved of all hearts, we may begin to sense our shared Oneness with Love ... As we come to understand that there is but One Mind that each of us participates in, a Universal Consciousness, we may begin to sense our Oneness with All. Everyone has been aware of eternal moments be they in nature, in a child's birth, in listening to sublime music, in glimpses of wonder, or in the sudden sense of Presence with us: each a Hint of heaven here on earth, of our own consciousness being expanded out into the Infinity of Oneness that we are. Fear and all its companions have no home here: Love is all there is.
A human being is part of the whole, called by us the "universe," a part limited in time and space. One experiences oneself, one's thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of one's consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the Oneness of nature in its beauty.
To be fully human, we must recognize the full humanity of all other people. Each of us will be fully human only when we recognize the Aliveness of all Creation, when we learn to speak of God in Everything, and to humbly admit our interdependence and Oneness with the Great Web we call Creation.
The people of the world are limbs from one body,
sharing one essence.
When a single limb is oppressed,
all the others suffer agony.
Insects singing, larvae, pupae, seeds celebrating their fecundity, cones opening, draped boughs undulating from trunks connecting earth to sky, everything vital, everything expressing a divine Spirit, God filling all space. A single swirl of energy–birth, growth, feeding, breeding, decay–all of it continuous Life, teeming with mystery, and she a part of it.
She felt an incoming and an unfurling, a momentary mindlessness, a long-awaited union, a beautiful silent Oneness, and she was left with an unutterable calm.
"We did not weave the web of life," wrote Ted Perry in the spirit of Chief Seattle. "We are only a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourself. "The part can no longer make believe that it does not belong to the Whole or contribute to the life or death of the Whole. We are One great respiration, One great circulation, One great web of life over this round earth.
The Oneness of each to all through God is real, objective, existential. It is an eternal relationship which is shared in by every stick and stone and bird and beast and saint and sinner of the universe. On all, the wooing love of God falls urgently, persuadingly.
Creation separates the many from the One.
Spiritual evolution reunites the many with the One.
O, Blessed Peacemaker
You make your Home in our hearts
as Loving Companion Presence.
With unreserved, radical trust,
our path is made sure.
Bonded in Love, we become empowered
to serve with mercy and justice:
One with You…
One with All.
Blessed are You, O Life of our lives.
The thoughts of the earth are my thoughts.
The voice of the earth is my voice.
All that belongs to the earth belongs to me.
All that surrounds the earth surrounds me.
It is lovely indeed, it is lovely indeed.
The Spirit in all
when all become One,
Peace reigning on earth.
May we all attend to reuniting our heads, hearts, and hands, taking time to be receptive, suspending judgment, and awaiting patiently for insights that arise, unbidden. May we practice being still and really listening – to ourselves, to each other, and to the gentle whispers of the living intelligences of the natural world.
If we can do that, we will build a contagious energy that will ultimately lead to real healing and restoration – the restoration of our wholeness, as a global community – of our deep and fundamental interdependence and Oneness with each other, other species and the whole interwoven web of creation.
I long for the day when the statement,
"Our God is love, our race is human,
and our religion is Oneness,"
is more than the musings of my mind,
but is the creed of the heart of the human family.
It may seem difficult to believe that a simple culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness and Oneness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.
When all things return to the One, even gold loses its value.
But when the One returns to all things, even the pebbles sparkle.
. . And everything comes to One
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.
The word integrity has two meanings. The first is "honesty. "We have to be honest in facing our limitations, in facing the sheer complexity of the world, honest in facing criticism even of things which are deeply precious to us. Integrity also means wholeness, Oneness, the desire for a single vision, the refusal to split our minds into separate compartments where incompatible ideas are not allowed to come into contact. An undivided mind looks in the end for an undivided truth, a Oneness at the heart of things. The whole quest for integrity presupposes that in the end we are all encountering a single reality and a single truth.