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Make straight the way of the Lord;: An anthology of the philosophical writings of Lanza del Vasto
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Hardcover
Published January 1, 1974
About the author
Lanza del Vasto
51 books7 followersGiuseppe Giovanni Lanza del Vasto è stato un filosofo, poeta e scrittore italiano. La sua personalità eccezionale riunisce caratteristiche disparate: poeta, scrittore, filosofo, pensatore religioso con una forte vena mistica, ma anche patriarca fondatore di comunità rurali sul modello di quelle gandhiane e attivista nonviolento contro la guerra d'Algeria o gli armamenti nucleari.
Source: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanza_de...
Source: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanza_de...
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February 3, 2015
The book is rich in lessons, given it is a compilation of works by Lanza del Vasto, from 1943 to 1973, it is a product of its time with the aura of World War II clear and present in its commentary, plus reference to the Latin Mass.
In 1936, Lanza left Europe for India, then returned to France to train a small band of followers to make a stand for justice and for truth (Return to the Source).
Toward the end of WWII, Lanza formed a select group that worked in Paris, and in 1948, the first rural Community of the Ark was set up at an estate at Tournier, a nonsectarian order. “The aim of manual labor is not only to obtain one’s daily bread by pure means, but to bring about an inner harmony of body and soul.
Nonviolence: It is always a question of inner preparation and strength.
Honesty requires me to put you on your guard as far as possible against illusion, disappointment, and misunderstanding.
You will need somebody by your side to guide and watch over you, encourage you or teach you moderation at the right moment, someone respectful of the originality in every many. And you will need the warmth of friendship.
These things cannot be put into words. They can only be transmitted by living example or by bringing the searcher to discover their truth by himself, within himself.
The real subject of all these talks is silence.
Our business is ‘to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.’
The dominant purpose of our teaching is to unify life, and its fundamental character is to form a living unity.
The predominant attitude in this world is one of self-ignorance, a state of forgetfulness of the soul, or inattention, constant indifference, the turning of the mind toward profit, and a claiming and attempt to dominate the outside world, both people and things.
Conversion (or the reversal of what sin has reversed, in other words, setting upright again) consists in coming out of the world, coming back into oneself. Above all, paying attention to that self.
The natural result of self-knowledge is detachment from worldly goods and respect for the freedom of others.
The very essence of Original Sin is to pluck the fruit for oneself. This is the ‘sin against the spirit.’
In a certain sense, self-possession must precede self-giving, for one cannot give what one does not have. But the self should be possessed solely in order to give. Dispossession should never be absent from all our efforts to acquire self-possession.
At every step, the attitude of release is combined with its opposite. Like all effort, spiritual effort is accompanied by tension, which fortifies and unites the center, hardens it, and separates it from the rest. Death will ensue if tension is not accompanied by relaxation, a readiness to give and to receive.
Do not help others. Help them to help themselves.
The road is difficult not because of its roughness or its steepness, but because of its narrowness.
It was not until the insanity of today that science was allowed (with what complacency, with what irresponsibility and criminal foolishness!) to spread destruction and yield its deadly fruit.
Knowing is a manner of being born, of coming to life, and all life is hidden. There is no creature alive that does not hide and keep secret the principle that makes it live. If truth is to be living truth, its center must be deep, hidden or contained in a form which alone appears. Truth itself does not appear. The more precious and profound a truth is, the more secret and sacred it must be held.
The Sin, the biting of the fruit, the biting into the Fruit of Knowledge
Respect for the dignity of knowledge makes it a sacrilege to turn knowledge upside down.
In ancient times, to practice mathematics and physics as we do was held an abomination. Mathematics was a spiritual exercise for Plato and the Hindus ~ the facets of supreme unity. It is not a science of calculation: it is not for the use of the merchant or the gunner or the technician.
A further reason for hiding and keeping silent is that whoever is seeking for truth loves truth, and whoever loves abstains from making a vulgar show of the object of his love. He abstains from cutting it up, and putting it together again for sport or in the hope of gain. He wants the object of his love to be clad in beauty. Beauty is the splendor of truth.
Truth is the most precious thing there is, and whoever would acquire it must suffer in order to feel and savor its worth. … must sweat blood and tears to reach and enter it,must be ready to give up all he has.
Ignorance also hides...
Sharing a secret is a real possibility of union…
The problem arises, of how open one should be, how secret one should be?
The Church has a catechism and a moral code to all and sundry, but it has its theology and its secret language, Latin…
We carry this error concerning the self in us.
And we give sin the name of original error so as to connect it with the sin of the same name, an offense against the Tree of Knowledge.
The catechism teaches us that man is a creature formed of a body and a soul. However, body and soul present themselves to us as a person.
The body is the plumb line that fathoms the whole of creation, its measure and its key, since the body is the only object in the world that we experience from the outside and the inside at the same time. It is therefore the way by which we can enter the inside of everything.
He is no longer his simple self; he represents what he wants to be, can be, must be. And the basic reason for this is not vanity but an immense aspiration toward wholeness of being. The person is not, it represent. It does not lie, it represents. It represents the truth concerning the nature of man, a dual man, for man is a path and a possibility.
Representing is effective magic, a religious obligation, a spiritual exercise, and the first of all duties.
Indeed, there can be no direction and no transformation for man if he has not fixed his aim, or if that aim is void of being and form, or if he does not keep his aim, its being, and form constantly in mind.
Man’s aim, its being, and form are divinity.
At the summit and center of the people, the Priest and the King (in the beginning, one and the same), they represent divinity, and all their life is feast, rite and ceremony; that is to say, not wealth and pleasure, but representation.
The person can be divine, diabolical, or vain. It becomes diabolical as soon as a man believe in it, as soon as he believes in his own person. Satan was Lucifer, the bearer of light, and took himself for the Light, for which he was cast headlong down.
The person serves as a sign. It should be a reminder of the human dignity to all other men. We should respect it in ourselves only for this reason. Because of its purpose, we should never humiliate it in ourselves or in others, since it is a reminder and a representation of Godhead.
Persons are rare in this world, and precious. If you chance to meet a person, don’t let him go without trying to make a friend of him. Friendships are made between persons. A person is a man who creates a work of art of the personage I was talking about; who uses his person to communicate with other men and express himself; who accomplishes the very difficult and delicate task of composing his person from expressions he has learned and attitudes he has imitated. He succeeds in making a whole which is beautiful, balanced, original, and of worth.
The tragedy of the person, whatever its dignity and the perfection it attains, is that it must die, die moreover without leaving a trace behind; and also, that it is right that it should die.
Wisdom, like simple good manners, has always taught that the person should efface itself. Mystics of all times have cried, “I am nothing!”
It is not because they have affirmed or developed their persons, or cultivated, educated, adorned, or exalted them. On the contrary, it is because they have emptied them.
If the role of the person is to signify that which surpasses it, here is glorious fulfillment: the person becomes a spirit.
LOOK WITHIN
If thoughtlessness is a disease of the spirit, how can one cure oneself of it, unless by attention, inward attention?
Etymology of persona: sonare -- to sound, per - through. The person? That through which a meaning sounds.
Staying alone with oneself for a whole hour looking into one’s inner darkness cannot be the first step. It is too difficult. It has to be approached gradually. The first step will be to brave the contrary current of attachment, the contrary wind of letting oneself be carried away, the winds of dispersion or total dissipation, the state of nonbeing.
Six: 6 times a day: 3 times in the morning and 3 times in the afternoon, be still. Stop!
Relax. For 30 seconds every 2 hours, stop! Hold yourself straight. Breathe deeply. Draw your sense inward. Suspend yourself before the inner dark, the inner void. And even if nothing happens, you will have broken the chain of haste. Say to yourself: I am recalling myself, I am taking myself back. That is all. Recollect yourself. Gather up all the shreds of oneself that were dispersed and answer as Abraham answered God’s call: “Present.” (Adsum!) Here I am
Recall or self-recollection is the first step toward self-knowledge or awareness.
We spend our lives turning our backs upon ourselves. We have eyes, thoughts, and feelings only for other things.
How could I know, how could I love someone on whom I always turn my back?
You will always see our egoist busy with other people, clinging to them with all his strength and all his weight because he needs them to occupy him, to amuse and entertain him, to while away his boredom, to use for any purpose they may serve, but above all to avoid having to face the dullest and dourest of all the people he has no time for: himself.
Woe until him who loves another more than himself! The passionate and the perverted all do so. They even love their own destruction. They love the loss of themselves. Each man kills himself in this kind of love.
“It is not for love of one’s friend that one loves one’s friend, nor for love of one’s spouse that one loves one’s spouse, nor for love of one’s son that one loves one’s son, but the love of the Self.” Upanishad
For one loves one’s neighbor not for his charm as Other, nor out of attachment to oneself, but for love of God.
Now there is Other in me, and Self in others. Loving is recognizing oneself in others by grace of the Self.
The cause of all evil is that Self and Other are everywhere mixed, except in God who is One, Unique and the Same.
The Self or Same is therefore in itself love, and every sin against it is a sin against love.
THE MUSTARD SEED
The Word is no longer compared to grain of wheat, but to an exciting spicy seed. And it is said that this seed is the tiniest of all, yet will grow into one of the greatest of herbs and become a tree, so that the birds of the air will come and lodge in its branches.
It is even more important than the stars it resembles, but in whose mighty, luminous mass there is perhaps not a spark of the essence called life and awareness.
ATTENTION
All work is useless for the salvation of the soul until the day of conversion. Conversion begins by turning the attention, by focusing it on the Self.
Seize the Self as a pure and simple inner unity.
This hub, this kernel, this center, this point ‘smaller in the heart than the germ in a grain of millet, bigger than all these worlds’ (Shandilya), this secret hearth, this den of darkness, this tight knot is the strait gate and the narrow path to initiation, and inner attention is the first step on that path.
That is the reason for recall.
Recall should be practiced in its 3 forms: the interrogative, the negative, and the affirmative: Ask yourself: Who is I? Say to yourself: I am not my body, I am not my image, I am not the thought in my mind at the moment. Say to yourself: I am recalling myself.
Do it at least 3 times during the forenoon, and 3 times in the afternoon and evening, and as it becomes easier to do, do it more often.
A perpetual exercise: concentrate your attention on yourself in action. Pay attention to yourself doing what you are doing.
Respect and regard are words which mean looking at. To respect is to look at with the heart. Respect is shown by thoughtfulness or consideration. Regard implies protection, conservation, and distance. For seeing, there must be distinction and distance. For love, likewise. It takes two to love. ‘Thou, the first word of love,’ say the Egyptians. In muddle, attachment, and mixture, no regard, no clarity is possible.
Modesty, decency, and discretion are the finer forms of respect.
Respect is the barest justice due to every human being.
Rhythm and Harmony
Next to respect for others and respect for oneself comes respect for things and the order of things. Put cleanliness and beauty into the surroundings in which you live, receive your friends and bring up your children. Your home reflects you and in turn, reflects upon you.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance. (Eccles 3:4)
Don’t muddle everything by untimely agitation and cogitation.
Whoever can say “I was wrong” can right his course.
Music is wiser than philosophy.
The whole of the outer world rises and falls in rhythm like the waves of the sea, and the law of creation of rhythm.
Relaxation in Action
The remedy for the loss of half our life and strength is in the art of relaxation. Good manners teach it. Nothing coarse or vulgar can pass the threshold of holiness.
Breathing
Life is a fragile gift of inestimable price put into your hands free.
how you hold yourself
how you breathe
what you eat
whether you are strained and tense, or kind and serene
what you do to join with the source of life and resist the weight of death
Food
Take food that strengthens, refreshes and leaves the head clean.
Fast 1 day a week, only drinking water and carrying on daily work, as usual.
Speech
Sanskrit, Hebrew, Egyptian, and Chinese - sacred language existed before the world did, and served for its creation.
“And God said, let there by Light; and there was Light.” By speaking, he created.
The Second Person of the Trinity: the Word, or Logos
The relationship between the First and the Second Person is that as between Thought and Word
Light reflected is still light. Lumen de lumine. Light of light.
Krishnamurti: Before speaking, ask yourself whether what you have to say is true, charitable, and timely.
Haste
As soon as we take the smallest step into the business world, we are hunted and persecuted from morning till evening by hurry and fear of being late.
Let us not waste our time hurrying
Meditation
I remain in my place watching my body run.
The purpose of meditation is the conversion of the intelligence, the senses, and the imagination; their reversal toward the inside so that they enter the inexplicable, invisible, essential living unity that is the true “I.”
The aspiration:
to know yourself
to love your neighbor
to serve God
These 3 things are one. You need to acquire the strength, calm, and clarity required for them.
Flood yourself with darkness to receive the Light, pure and perfect darkness untroubled by false lights. Your night will see not star so long as it is blinded by elecric bulbs. So turn out your lights if you want to contemplate.
Face the north. Around dawn. Perfectly relaxed.
Become dense and deep, not sublime and airy.
Love, and do what you will - St. Augustine
The Pure in Heart, the Peacemakers, and the Persecuted.
Peacemakers make peace. Out of nothing, out of disorder, create it as God created the world from nothing, molded it in the mass from chaos.
A peacemaker rids himself and all around him of pride, curiosity, ambition, greed, and also of laziness and fear, someone who “sows love where there is hate.”
Humility
One cannot want to be humble. One can only force oneself to speak with modesty, which is clever, and so one lapses into hypocrisy.
Judge the tree by its fruit: war sedition, massacre, captivity, oppression and ruin.
IN HEBREW, THERE ARE NO ABSTRACT WORDS. ROCK MEANS PRINCIPLE. DIG AND YOU WILL FIND ROCK, THE PRINCIPLE, THE FOUNDATION.
When you have found rock, you can build your house upon it, and neither the flood of daily events nor the torrents of your own passions will prevail against it.
JUDGE NOT
This precept comes immediately after “Love thine enemies and be merciful. Judge not.
Judging is breaking away and setting oneself above. One cannot judge things from below. Consequently, whoever judges sets himself up as superior to the person he is judging. Our fellow man is in fact, our equal.
If you love them which love you and do good to them which do good to you, what do ye more than others?
Quid faceretis amplius?
God’s abundance overflows into the creature, His immensity enclosed in a particular point, is the soul, and the purpose and destiny of the soul are increase of the divine infinity hidden within her substance like a tiny seed. Therefore the soul can say -- must say -- “I, the infinitely small, magnify the Infinitely Great.”
What must we recall?
Recall yourselves
Bring yourself the you that always wants to go and fritter itself away outside. Bring it back into its place, collect yourself.
Next to prayer and meditation, singing is the happiest of returns to the obvious, to the source, to the garden of childhood. It is Paradise Regained. At its origin, it is a powerful invocation of the essential, a search for purity, pacification, and inner union, a search for the Presence.
Don’t be distracted by listeners. Sign as if you were alone.
FASTING
Fasting is an exercise that consists above all in not thinking about your fast, just as chastity consists in not thinking about sex.
Remember the hungry people of this world.
Whoever fasts becomes transparent.
Others become transparent to him.
Their suffering enters him and he is defenseless against it.
So take care to stop up your senses by eating well if you don’t want to be devoured by charity.
KEEP QUIET
Be silent much in order to have something to say worth hearing. But again be silent to hear yourself.
If you speak of your love, you love with your lips only.
COLD
So, step by step, go as far as possible toward nakedness, which alone is sound and holy, so that your whole body becomes your countenance.
Cover yourself only to meditate, read, write, or sleep.
SICKNESS
If you fall ill, treat the illness by showers and sweating: give it a jolt lest, being at ease, it stay with you.
Fast, drink water, and wait. Help your illness to pass by not thinking of it.
There is only one cure for all diseases: patience.
If your time has come, die with good grace.
Nothing is more vain than to want to put off the hour that will come all the same.
And nothing is more vulgar than to insist.
KEEP STILL
Such is our need to flee our own presence that the most convenient attitude becomes torture after 2 minutes.
There, do nothing other than doing nothing.
Do it perfectly.
TIME AND LIFE
Don’t waste your time earning your living.
Earn your time: save your life.
CONTROL OF THE BODY
Keep your body constantly on the move so as to put its anxiety off the track.
WATCHFULNESS
What else are anger, pride, gluttony, lust, sloth, and all the others but distraction, lack of heed to the essential?
Heedlessness entails all the rest.
Heed to anything whatever saves everything and saves from everything. It is the only saving grace, the only way out from anxiety, disorder, and perdition.
In 1936, Lanza left Europe for India, then returned to France to train a small band of followers to make a stand for justice and for truth (Return to the Source).
Toward the end of WWII, Lanza formed a select group that worked in Paris, and in 1948, the first rural Community of the Ark was set up at an estate at Tournier, a nonsectarian order. “The aim of manual labor is not only to obtain one’s daily bread by pure means, but to bring about an inner harmony of body and soul.
Nonviolence: It is always a question of inner preparation and strength.
Honesty requires me to put you on your guard as far as possible against illusion, disappointment, and misunderstanding.
You will need somebody by your side to guide and watch over you, encourage you or teach you moderation at the right moment, someone respectful of the originality in every many. And you will need the warmth of friendship.
These things cannot be put into words. They can only be transmitted by living example or by bringing the searcher to discover their truth by himself, within himself.
The real subject of all these talks is silence.
Our business is ‘to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.’
The dominant purpose of our teaching is to unify life, and its fundamental character is to form a living unity.
The predominant attitude in this world is one of self-ignorance, a state of forgetfulness of the soul, or inattention, constant indifference, the turning of the mind toward profit, and a claiming and attempt to dominate the outside world, both people and things.
Conversion (or the reversal of what sin has reversed, in other words, setting upright again) consists in coming out of the world, coming back into oneself. Above all, paying attention to that self.
The natural result of self-knowledge is detachment from worldly goods and respect for the freedom of others.
The very essence of Original Sin is to pluck the fruit for oneself. This is the ‘sin against the spirit.’
In a certain sense, self-possession must precede self-giving, for one cannot give what one does not have. But the self should be possessed solely in order to give. Dispossession should never be absent from all our efforts to acquire self-possession.
At every step, the attitude of release is combined with its opposite. Like all effort, spiritual effort is accompanied by tension, which fortifies and unites the center, hardens it, and separates it from the rest. Death will ensue if tension is not accompanied by relaxation, a readiness to give and to receive.
Do not help others. Help them to help themselves.
The road is difficult not because of its roughness or its steepness, but because of its narrowness.
It was not until the insanity of today that science was allowed (with what complacency, with what irresponsibility and criminal foolishness!) to spread destruction and yield its deadly fruit.
Knowing is a manner of being born, of coming to life, and all life is hidden. There is no creature alive that does not hide and keep secret the principle that makes it live. If truth is to be living truth, its center must be deep, hidden or contained in a form which alone appears. Truth itself does not appear. The more precious and profound a truth is, the more secret and sacred it must be held.
The Sin, the biting of the fruit, the biting into the Fruit of Knowledge
Respect for the dignity of knowledge makes it a sacrilege to turn knowledge upside down.
In ancient times, to practice mathematics and physics as we do was held an abomination. Mathematics was a spiritual exercise for Plato and the Hindus ~ the facets of supreme unity. It is not a science of calculation: it is not for the use of the merchant or the gunner or the technician.
A further reason for hiding and keeping silent is that whoever is seeking for truth loves truth, and whoever loves abstains from making a vulgar show of the object of his love. He abstains from cutting it up, and putting it together again for sport or in the hope of gain. He wants the object of his love to be clad in beauty. Beauty is the splendor of truth.
Truth is the most precious thing there is, and whoever would acquire it must suffer in order to feel and savor its worth. … must sweat blood and tears to reach and enter it,must be ready to give up all he has.
Ignorance also hides...
Sharing a secret is a real possibility of union…
The problem arises, of how open one should be, how secret one should be?
The Church has a catechism and a moral code to all and sundry, but it has its theology and its secret language, Latin…
We carry this error concerning the self in us.
And we give sin the name of original error so as to connect it with the sin of the same name, an offense against the Tree of Knowledge.
The catechism teaches us that man is a creature formed of a body and a soul. However, body and soul present themselves to us as a person.
The body is the plumb line that fathoms the whole of creation, its measure and its key, since the body is the only object in the world that we experience from the outside and the inside at the same time. It is therefore the way by which we can enter the inside of everything.
He is no longer his simple self; he represents what he wants to be, can be, must be. And the basic reason for this is not vanity but an immense aspiration toward wholeness of being. The person is not, it represent. It does not lie, it represents. It represents the truth concerning the nature of man, a dual man, for man is a path and a possibility.
Representing is effective magic, a religious obligation, a spiritual exercise, and the first of all duties.
Indeed, there can be no direction and no transformation for man if he has not fixed his aim, or if that aim is void of being and form, or if he does not keep his aim, its being, and form constantly in mind.
Man’s aim, its being, and form are divinity.
At the summit and center of the people, the Priest and the King (in the beginning, one and the same), they represent divinity, and all their life is feast, rite and ceremony; that is to say, not wealth and pleasure, but representation.
The person can be divine, diabolical, or vain. It becomes diabolical as soon as a man believe in it, as soon as he believes in his own person. Satan was Lucifer, the bearer of light, and took himself for the Light, for which he was cast headlong down.
The person serves as a sign. It should be a reminder of the human dignity to all other men. We should respect it in ourselves only for this reason. Because of its purpose, we should never humiliate it in ourselves or in others, since it is a reminder and a representation of Godhead.
Persons are rare in this world, and precious. If you chance to meet a person, don’t let him go without trying to make a friend of him. Friendships are made between persons. A person is a man who creates a work of art of the personage I was talking about; who uses his person to communicate with other men and express himself; who accomplishes the very difficult and delicate task of composing his person from expressions he has learned and attitudes he has imitated. He succeeds in making a whole which is beautiful, balanced, original, and of worth.
The tragedy of the person, whatever its dignity and the perfection it attains, is that it must die, die moreover without leaving a trace behind; and also, that it is right that it should die.
Wisdom, like simple good manners, has always taught that the person should efface itself. Mystics of all times have cried, “I am nothing!”
It is not because they have affirmed or developed their persons, or cultivated, educated, adorned, or exalted them. On the contrary, it is because they have emptied them.
If the role of the person is to signify that which surpasses it, here is glorious fulfillment: the person becomes a spirit.
LOOK WITHIN
If thoughtlessness is a disease of the spirit, how can one cure oneself of it, unless by attention, inward attention?
Etymology of persona: sonare -- to sound, per - through. The person? That through which a meaning sounds.
Staying alone with oneself for a whole hour looking into one’s inner darkness cannot be the first step. It is too difficult. It has to be approached gradually. The first step will be to brave the contrary current of attachment, the contrary wind of letting oneself be carried away, the winds of dispersion or total dissipation, the state of nonbeing.
Six: 6 times a day: 3 times in the morning and 3 times in the afternoon, be still. Stop!
Relax. For 30 seconds every 2 hours, stop! Hold yourself straight. Breathe deeply. Draw your sense inward. Suspend yourself before the inner dark, the inner void. And even if nothing happens, you will have broken the chain of haste. Say to yourself: I am recalling myself, I am taking myself back. That is all. Recollect yourself. Gather up all the shreds of oneself that were dispersed and answer as Abraham answered God’s call: “Present.” (Adsum!) Here I am
Recall or self-recollection is the first step toward self-knowledge or awareness.
We spend our lives turning our backs upon ourselves. We have eyes, thoughts, and feelings only for other things.
How could I know, how could I love someone on whom I always turn my back?
You will always see our egoist busy with other people, clinging to them with all his strength and all his weight because he needs them to occupy him, to amuse and entertain him, to while away his boredom, to use for any purpose they may serve, but above all to avoid having to face the dullest and dourest of all the people he has no time for: himself.
Woe until him who loves another more than himself! The passionate and the perverted all do so. They even love their own destruction. They love the loss of themselves. Each man kills himself in this kind of love.
“It is not for love of one’s friend that one loves one’s friend, nor for love of one’s spouse that one loves one’s spouse, nor for love of one’s son that one loves one’s son, but the love of the Self.” Upanishad
For one loves one’s neighbor not for his charm as Other, nor out of attachment to oneself, but for love of God.
Now there is Other in me, and Self in others. Loving is recognizing oneself in others by grace of the Self.
The cause of all evil is that Self and Other are everywhere mixed, except in God who is One, Unique and the Same.
The Self or Same is therefore in itself love, and every sin against it is a sin against love.
THE MUSTARD SEED
The Word is no longer compared to grain of wheat, but to an exciting spicy seed. And it is said that this seed is the tiniest of all, yet will grow into one of the greatest of herbs and become a tree, so that the birds of the air will come and lodge in its branches.
It is even more important than the stars it resembles, but in whose mighty, luminous mass there is perhaps not a spark of the essence called life and awareness.
ATTENTION
All work is useless for the salvation of the soul until the day of conversion. Conversion begins by turning the attention, by focusing it on the Self.
Seize the Self as a pure and simple inner unity.
This hub, this kernel, this center, this point ‘smaller in the heart than the germ in a grain of millet, bigger than all these worlds’ (Shandilya), this secret hearth, this den of darkness, this tight knot is the strait gate and the narrow path to initiation, and inner attention is the first step on that path.
That is the reason for recall.
Recall should be practiced in its 3 forms: the interrogative, the negative, and the affirmative: Ask yourself: Who is I? Say to yourself: I am not my body, I am not my image, I am not the thought in my mind at the moment. Say to yourself: I am recalling myself.
Do it at least 3 times during the forenoon, and 3 times in the afternoon and evening, and as it becomes easier to do, do it more often.
A perpetual exercise: concentrate your attention on yourself in action. Pay attention to yourself doing what you are doing.
Respect and regard are words which mean looking at. To respect is to look at with the heart. Respect is shown by thoughtfulness or consideration. Regard implies protection, conservation, and distance. For seeing, there must be distinction and distance. For love, likewise. It takes two to love. ‘Thou, the first word of love,’ say the Egyptians. In muddle, attachment, and mixture, no regard, no clarity is possible.
Modesty, decency, and discretion are the finer forms of respect.
Respect is the barest justice due to every human being.
Rhythm and Harmony
Next to respect for others and respect for oneself comes respect for things and the order of things. Put cleanliness and beauty into the surroundings in which you live, receive your friends and bring up your children. Your home reflects you and in turn, reflects upon you.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance. (Eccles 3:4)
Don’t muddle everything by untimely agitation and cogitation.
Whoever can say “I was wrong” can right his course.
Music is wiser than philosophy.
The whole of the outer world rises and falls in rhythm like the waves of the sea, and the law of creation of rhythm.
Relaxation in Action
The remedy for the loss of half our life and strength is in the art of relaxation. Good manners teach it. Nothing coarse or vulgar can pass the threshold of holiness.
Breathing
Life is a fragile gift of inestimable price put into your hands free.
how you hold yourself
how you breathe
what you eat
whether you are strained and tense, or kind and serene
what you do to join with the source of life and resist the weight of death
Food
Take food that strengthens, refreshes and leaves the head clean.
Fast 1 day a week, only drinking water and carrying on daily work, as usual.
Speech
Sanskrit, Hebrew, Egyptian, and Chinese - sacred language existed before the world did, and served for its creation.
“And God said, let there by Light; and there was Light.” By speaking, he created.
The Second Person of the Trinity: the Word, or Logos
The relationship between the First and the Second Person is that as between Thought and Word
Light reflected is still light. Lumen de lumine. Light of light.
Krishnamurti: Before speaking, ask yourself whether what you have to say is true, charitable, and timely.
Haste
As soon as we take the smallest step into the business world, we are hunted and persecuted from morning till evening by hurry and fear of being late.
Let us not waste our time hurrying
Meditation
I remain in my place watching my body run.
The purpose of meditation is the conversion of the intelligence, the senses, and the imagination; their reversal toward the inside so that they enter the inexplicable, invisible, essential living unity that is the true “I.”
The aspiration:
to know yourself
to love your neighbor
to serve God
These 3 things are one. You need to acquire the strength, calm, and clarity required for them.
Flood yourself with darkness to receive the Light, pure and perfect darkness untroubled by false lights. Your night will see not star so long as it is blinded by elecric bulbs. So turn out your lights if you want to contemplate.
Face the north. Around dawn. Perfectly relaxed.
Become dense and deep, not sublime and airy.
Love, and do what you will - St. Augustine
The Pure in Heart, the Peacemakers, and the Persecuted.
Peacemakers make peace. Out of nothing, out of disorder, create it as God created the world from nothing, molded it in the mass from chaos.
A peacemaker rids himself and all around him of pride, curiosity, ambition, greed, and also of laziness and fear, someone who “sows love where there is hate.”
Humility
One cannot want to be humble. One can only force oneself to speak with modesty, which is clever, and so one lapses into hypocrisy.
Judge the tree by its fruit: war sedition, massacre, captivity, oppression and ruin.
IN HEBREW, THERE ARE NO ABSTRACT WORDS. ROCK MEANS PRINCIPLE. DIG AND YOU WILL FIND ROCK, THE PRINCIPLE, THE FOUNDATION.
When you have found rock, you can build your house upon it, and neither the flood of daily events nor the torrents of your own passions will prevail against it.
JUDGE NOT
This precept comes immediately after “Love thine enemies and be merciful. Judge not.
Judging is breaking away and setting oneself above. One cannot judge things from below. Consequently, whoever judges sets himself up as superior to the person he is judging. Our fellow man is in fact, our equal.
If you love them which love you and do good to them which do good to you, what do ye more than others?
Quid faceretis amplius?
God’s abundance overflows into the creature, His immensity enclosed in a particular point, is the soul, and the purpose and destiny of the soul are increase of the divine infinity hidden within her substance like a tiny seed. Therefore the soul can say -- must say -- “I, the infinitely small, magnify the Infinitely Great.”
What must we recall?
Recall yourselves
Bring yourself the you that always wants to go and fritter itself away outside. Bring it back into its place, collect yourself.
Next to prayer and meditation, singing is the happiest of returns to the obvious, to the source, to the garden of childhood. It is Paradise Regained. At its origin, it is a powerful invocation of the essential, a search for purity, pacification, and inner union, a search for the Presence.
Don’t be distracted by listeners. Sign as if you were alone.
FASTING
Fasting is an exercise that consists above all in not thinking about your fast, just as chastity consists in not thinking about sex.
Remember the hungry people of this world.
Whoever fasts becomes transparent.
Others become transparent to him.
Their suffering enters him and he is defenseless against it.
So take care to stop up your senses by eating well if you don’t want to be devoured by charity.
KEEP QUIET
Be silent much in order to have something to say worth hearing. But again be silent to hear yourself.
If you speak of your love, you love with your lips only.
COLD
So, step by step, go as far as possible toward nakedness, which alone is sound and holy, so that your whole body becomes your countenance.
Cover yourself only to meditate, read, write, or sleep.
SICKNESS
If you fall ill, treat the illness by showers and sweating: give it a jolt lest, being at ease, it stay with you.
Fast, drink water, and wait. Help your illness to pass by not thinking of it.
There is only one cure for all diseases: patience.
If your time has come, die with good grace.
Nothing is more vain than to want to put off the hour that will come all the same.
And nothing is more vulgar than to insist.
KEEP STILL
Such is our need to flee our own presence that the most convenient attitude becomes torture after 2 minutes.
There, do nothing other than doing nothing.
Do it perfectly.
TIME AND LIFE
Don’t waste your time earning your living.
Earn your time: save your life.
CONTROL OF THE BODY
Keep your body constantly on the move so as to put its anxiety off the track.
WATCHFULNESS
What else are anger, pride, gluttony, lust, sloth, and all the others but distraction, lack of heed to the essential?
Heedlessness entails all the rest.
Heed to anything whatever saves everything and saves from everything. It is the only saving grace, the only way out from anxiety, disorder, and perdition.
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