Spiritwalk Thought for Today

Archive/August 1998

Some day,

after we have mastered the winds,

the waves, the tides, and gravity,

we shall harness the energies of love.

Then, for a second time in the history of the world,

man will have discovered fire.

~  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

August 2, 1998

Grandfather,
Look at our brokenness.
We know that in all creation
Only the human family has strayed from the Sacred Way.
We know that we are the ones who are divided.
And we are the ones who must come back together,
To walk in the Sacred Way.

Grandfather,
O Sacred One,
Teach us love, compassion and honor
That we may heal the earth
And heal each other.

~ Ojibway prayer

August 3, 1998

Our real journey in life is interior;

It is a matter of growth, deepening,

and of an ever greater surrender

to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts.

Never was it more necessary to respond to that action.

~ Thomas Merton

August 4, 1998

~ Sharon Salzburg

August 5, 1998

 

If you rip open my heart, Holy Father,

You will find only dances and tales ~ nothing else…

Shall I continue Holy Father?

 

            I am listening.

 

When an almond tree became covered with blossoms in the heart of winter,

All the trees around it began to jeer.

"What vanity," they screamed, "what insolence!

Just think, it believes it can bring spring in this way!"

The flowers of the almond tree blushed with shame.

"Forgive me my sisters," said the tree.

"I swear I did not want to blossom,

but suddenly I felt a warm springtime breeze in my heart."

 

~ Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)

   Saint Francis

Thursday, August 6, 1998

The purpose of meditation is to awaken in us the sky-like nature of mind,
and to introduce us to that which we really are,
our unchanging pure awareness,
which underlies the whole of life and death.

In the stillness of meditation,
we glimpse and return to that deep inner nature
that we have so long ago lost sight of
amid the busyness and distraction of our minds…

We are fragmented into so many different aspects.
We don’t know who we really are,
or what aspects of ourselves we should identify or believe in.
So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control
over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions,
leaving nobody at home.

Meditation, then is, bringing the mind home….

~ Sogyal Rinpoche

Friday, August 7, 1998

Ask and it shall be given you;
Seek and you shall find;
Knock, and it shall be opened to you.
For whoever asks, receives;
And he who seeks, finds;
And to him who knocks, the door is opened.

~ Jesus of Nazareth
Matthew 7:7:8

August 8, 1998

The winds of grace are always blowing,
but it is you that much raise your sails.”

~ Rabindarath Tagore

August 9, 1998

A man of knowledge chooses a path with a heart
and follows it and then he looks and rejoices and laughs
and then he sees and knows.

He knows that his life will be over altogether too soon.
He knows that he as well as everybody else is not going anywhere.
He knows because he sees…

a man of knowledge endeavors and sweats and puffs
and if one looks at him, he is just like any ordinary man,
except that the folly of his life is under control.

~ Carlos Castenada (Don Juan)

August 10, 1998

Affirmation

I am protected behind the battlements of my good conscience.
I have burned my past darkness.
I am interested only in today.
Today I Know I am the light of good news.
I am a lighthouse for souls tossed on the sea of sorrow.


~ Paramahansa Yogananda

August 11, 1998

 

You who want knowledge,

seek the Oneness

within.

 

There you will find

the clear mirror

already waiting.

 

~  Hadewijch II,

     13th Century

Wednesday, August 12, 1998

We all move on the fringes of eternity

and are sometimes granted vistas through the fabric of illusion.

~ Ansel Adams

August 14, 1998

As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished.
No reality fits an ideology.
Life is beyond that.
That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life….
Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning.
Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery
and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.

~ Anthony de Mello

August 15, 1998

Each man has only one genuine vocation ~

to find the way to himself…

His task is to discover his own destiny ~ not an arbitrary one ~

and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself.

Everything else is only a would-be existence,

an attempt at evasion,

a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conmformity;

and fear of one’s inwardness.

~ Hermann Hesse

August 16, 1998

And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts;

a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused,

whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

and the round ocean and the living air,

and the blue sky and in the mind of man;

a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things,

all objects of all thought,

and rolls through all things.

~ William Wordsworth

August 17, 1998

A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness

into the intricate web of life in which all things

are expressions of a single Whole.

You can call this web God, the Tao, the Great Spirit,

the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father,

but it can be known only as love.

~ Joan Borysenko

August 18, 1998

O Supreme Eternal Reality,

Pure Being beyond all subject and object,

Beyond all cerebral thinking,

Unconceptualizable and Unverbalizable,

Dwelling in silence.

I long to experience the nameless,

Incomprehensible being,

As Moses did at the Burning Bush,

Burning and never consumed,

A Higher consciousness,

Before which I can only bow in silence and reverence,

Glimpsing indescribably suchness and eternal mystery.

 

~ Anonymous

   from the Oxford Book of Prayer

August 20, 1998

Those who desire to understand,

who are looking to find that which is eternal,

without beginning and end,

will walk together with greater intensity,

will be a danger to everything which is unessential,

to unrealities, to shadows.

 

They will concentrate,

they will become the flame,

because they understand…

~ Jiddhu Krishnamurti

August 21, 1998

Mind is the creator of everything.
You should therefore guide it to create only good.
If you cling to a certain thought with dynamic will power,
It finally assumes a tangible outward form.
When you are able to employ your will for constructive purposes,
You become the controller of you destiny.

~ Paramahansa Yogananda

August 22, 1998

We forget sometimes that there are saints living among us.
When we meet them, we are reminded,
not just of the presence of pure divinity right here on earth,
but also of our own potential,
and of the responsibility we have to try to live up to it ~
for our own sakes and for the very future of this planet.

~ Deepak Chopra

August 23, 1998

He who binds himself to a joy

Doth the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in Eternity’s sun rise.

 

~ William Blake

August 24, 1998

At the still point of the turning world…

Neither from nor towards;

At the still point, there the dance is.

~ T.S. Elliot

August 25, 1998

The conclusion is always the same;
Love is the most powerful and still
the most unknown energy of the world.

~ Pierre Teihard de Chardin

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