Act without doing,
work without effort.
Think of the small as large
and the few as many.
Confront the difficult
while it is still easy;
accomplish the great task
by a series of small acts.
The master never reaches for the great
thus she achieves greatness.
When she runs into a difficulty,
she stops and gives herself to it.
She doesn't cling to her own comfort;
thus problems are no problem for her.
Contemplation is an excellent practice for integrating our meditations into everyday life... Simply reading one line of something inspirational each morning can provide excellent material for contemplation if we design a practice that helps to encourage contemplative moments throughout the day... For people in a busy, active environment, it is perhaps the most accessible spiritual practice. A few moments of contemplation can be accomplished even in the middle of a business meeting. This experience is not like a passing daydream, but affects the quality of life, deepening our spiritual connections, drawing us into reflection and constant realization of the soul's quest to be at one with its divine source at all times and in all places.
Contemplation is not something that is done alongside or before and after our everyday action. It's the doing itself that is contemplation because you yourself are so united with God that you are simply living the divine life; you are God living and doing you in the world. You are God's manifestation ... a movement of consciousness from God, with God, in God, as God, out in the world, a movement in which the divine conscious and my conscious, flowing together, stream out in love and in creative, healing, beautifying energy to create the world and to make it ever better.
A story of three brick masons illustrates the great difference our attitude toward our work makes:
The first person, when asked what he was building, replied gruffly, without even looking up, "I'm laying bricks."
The second person answered, "I'm building a wall."
But the third person said enthusiastically and with obvious pride and wonder, "I'm building a cathedral."
TO WORK IS TO PRAY
The work you do out of love without a thought of reward is the work of God.
A job is what we do for money;
Work is what we do for love.
I woke up from a dream several years ago and wrote the words, "God is a singing sound in the heart of silence." ... Silence is not an absence. It is a presence. Listen to the bird. Its sound comes from and returns to silence. Trees are surrounded by silence. They grow from silence. All things in nature are children of silence... At the core of my being there is an open road, and three words to guide me, TRUSTING/BREATHING/ATTENDING. Trusting that the universe is a friendly place. Breathing from the deepest part of myself. Attending to the process of becoming. These three guiding words of wisdom call me to travel the open road. To attend, breathe and trust in the heart of silence. To listen for the singing sound of God.
When I sing I feel ecstatic, as if in communion with God. Maybe, when I sing, that's when I feel and experience it most in my life -- that lack of separation from God... I think that a song, if you allow it into your heart, can remind you that you are whole, that you are not just a fragment, but everything. If people sing, if they let themselves really sing, they can feel that inside... No matter who you are, if you sing from deep within you, transformation happens. A song, whether you are singing or listening, can let your heart open to the spiritual world.
Music is always in the air, particularly at night, for nature (being born of it) is necessarily more sensitive at night to the beautiful.
Late that afternoon I listened to Thomas Tallis's SPEM IN ALIUM, a motet written in the 16th century for forty voice, forty separate parts... I was sitting in my chair looking at Ma's photograph as I listened. At once, as the music began, the photograph started to emit great waves of Light. The Light possessed my mind and body, and I heard the music not without me but within my heart.
Her voice: In my stillness all the voices of the world rise in ecstasy. In my silence all the voices of the world are reconciled.
Each voice in the sublime motet sang in perfectly lucid ecstatic harmony with every other voice, forming endlessly changing transforming masses of illumined ripe sound.
In the new creation souls will sing together like this.
Dr. Eaglefield Hull describes Scriabin's attitude to music: His first symphony is a "Hymn to Art" and joins hands with Beethoven's Ninth. His third, the "Divine Poem", expresses the spirit's liberation from its earthly trammels and the consequent free expression of purified personality; while his "Poem of Ecstasy" voices the highest of all joys -- that of creative work. He held that in the artists' incessant creative activity, the constant progression towards the ideal, the spirit alone truly lives.