This is what you are to do: Love God. Go to a quiet place. Calm yourself. And with a gentle stirring of love lift your heart up to God, loving God not for any gifts, but instead, love God for God's sake alone. Sitting thus, do not think about the presence of feelings that God is near. Do not cling to any thought of God, regardless of how sublime the thought might be. Do not pray for anyone or for yourself, regardless of the immensity of the need. Let your love for God alone be your sole concern. Of course, you will make mistakes, for, after all, you do not know what you are doing. You do not know how to life up your heart "with a gentle stirring of love." The very simplicity and radicality of what you are led to do leads you into the obscurity of the contemplative way. But no matter, led by God's promptings you learn (without knowing how) to listen to God's gentle stirrings of love within you. As the gentle stirring is meek, so, too, is your lifting up of it to God. As it is unseen, beyond the reach of your power to comprehend it, so, too, is your lifting up of this stirring. As it is fiery and mighty, so, too, your humble self-offering to God, loving God for God's own sake.
Dance was my way of praying, of listening, of celebrating, it was my way of being as beautiful as the life around me. Now I feel hideous, unloved, abandoned. I lie down and sob and I feel a screeching hunger for mil, for some essence to flow from the sky and reach down through my shattered mind and reconnect me to warmth and calm. And very gradually it happens. The life in the trees and grass and the warm rocks enters my body and joins me to them. One morning, I sit up and see the incandescent trees in silent communion with each other, immersed in love. This is the world, I think, the real world. Whatever happens to me, the world is still this luminous mystery.
Meditation is basically the practice of quieting the mind on deeper and deeper levels until we reach the underlying, subtle consciousness that is the root of all things. But a quiet mind does not mean the absence of thoughts. It means a mind that does not interfere with or distort the natural flow of sensations, feelings, perceptions, images, and thoughts through the open field of our consciousness. A quiet mind is a clear space, a mirror for the entire experience of inner and outer life.
