If you ask for grace to realize who you are, ask also for the courage you will need to do so. To realize who you are, you will have to walk through all the shadows in your inner landscape. It is not easy. You will need to give up all your views about yourself again and again, each time they crystallize into a pattern. You will have to experience and release all the pain in your life. You will have to embrace your death. You will have to bear everything to realize everything. A perfect divine economy.
~ from A FIELD GUIDE TO THE SOUL by James Thornton
Dear Friends ~ As I write, the wind stirs leaves barely tinged with autumn color as a steady rain soaks into the earth so recently parched by summer’s sun. On the cusp of seasonal change, the land seems poised between fecundity and hibernation. So we too live our lives poised between action and contemplation, in that silent space of longing, expectation, and hope. Wisdom is both a mystic’s way of being in that sacred space and a gift of the spirit that we seek to cultivate. According to psychologists, wisdom "involves an integration of knowledge, experience, and deep understanding that incorporates tolerance for the uncertainties of life...and it confers a sense of balance." -- from "All About Wisdom" at Psychology Today.com
"We are knee-deep in a river, searching for water," writes Kabir Helminski, a contemporary Wisdom teacher in the Sufi lineage, using a vivid image to capture the irony of our contemporary plight. The sacred road maps of wholeness still exist in the cosmos...But to read the clues it is first necessary to bring the heart and mind and body into balance, to awaken. Then the One can be known—not in a flash of mystical vision but in the clarity of unitive seeing.
Wisdom without love is like having lungs
but no air to breathe. Do not seek wisdom in order
to acquire knowledge but in order to
live and love more fully.
~ from MY SECRET IS SILENCE: Poetry and Sayings of Adyashanti
I believe we are all called by many names, and that the names we are called are directly related to our destiny... The discovery of our destiny is our unique contribution to wisdom. When we achieve a sense of wisdom, we will reflect it and shine as both image and likeness.
What does it mean to be made in the image of God?... In part, it is to say that wisdom is deep within us, deeper than the ignorance of what we may have done or become... When we lose touch with the wisdom that is within us, we live out of ignorance... Grace is given not to implant in us a foreign wisdom but to make us alive to the wisdom that was born in us.
Mystical wisdom derives from an ardent desire to abandon normal intellectual functions so that divine insight may enlighten this ardor and add to it another fire, much stronger, which lifts the burning soul towards an even deeper wisdom.
~ Hugh of Balma in LISTENING TO SILENCE, compiled by Robin B. Lockhart
A holy and disciplined mind turns
from ignorance and falsehood,
ignoring their myriad distractions,
while the soul stands firm, allowing
Wisdom to have her way.
