13 Unconventional Wisdoms for Spiritual Living

Timeless Words, Empowering Lives

1) “The Obstacle is the Path.” — Zen Proverb

If the opening in the earth’s surface within the geyser basin were wide and unencumbered, the hot water underneath would not have the force necessary to spurt up in a majestic plume. It is only the resistance set up by the narrow cone that enables the beauty of the geyser to be created!

2) When You are Unaware of Your Own Goodness, It Shines All the More.

“The wise embrace the One, and set an example to all. Not putting on a display, they shine forth. Not justifying themselves, they are distinguished. Not boasting, they receive recognition. Not bragging, they never falter … Be really whole, and all things will come to you … A truly good man is not aware of his goodness, and is therefore good. A foolish man tries to be good, and is therefore not good.” — - Lao Tze, Chinese Philosopher

3) We Know God Best in the Moment When We Look Away from Him and Face the World.

“Let God alone if need be … It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover that God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know whom I mean.” — — — Henry David Thoreau, Naturalist, Writer, Poet, Philosopher, Transcendentalist

4) Solitude Reveals Something More Grand Than Man.

“It is very dissipating to be with people too much. Ah! I need solitude! I have come forth to this hill at sunset to see the forms of the mountains in the horizon — to behold and commune with something grander than man. Their mere distance … is an infinite encouragement.” - Henry David Thoreau, Naturalist, Writer, Poet, Philosopher, Transcendentalist

5) The Dissolving of a Hundred Thousand Aspects of Ego is Needed to Fully Know Enlightenment.

“You and I;

You should wish to have a hundred thousand sets

of moth wings,

So you could burn them away

one set a night”.

- Rumi, 13th-century Persian Poet, Faqih, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi Mystic

6) Enlightenment is a Perpetual Series of Astonishments.

“I do not know who I am. I am in astounding lucid confusion. I am not a Christian, I am not a Jew, I am not a Zoroastrian, and I am not even a Muslim”. “I am in astounding lucid confusion”. “Because the universe is reinvented in every second, real divine life is a perpetual series of astonishments which goes on right until the ‘last moment’ and beyond.” — — — Rumi, 13th-century Persian Poet, Faqih, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi Mystic

The enlightened mind doesn’t have the answers. It isn’t omniscient in any sense that the ego understands by ‘omniscient.’ It isn’t a hyper-sophisticated computer. It is an infinitely responsive and loving instrument capable of infinite lucid expansion. Enlightenment isn’t a fixed state. Enlightenment is the knowledge that there is no such thing as a fixed state, that all places are placeless, that the possibilities of transformation in God are endless.

7) The Mountains Will Only Have a Voice if We Ask Them to Speak to Us.

“It is very important that we be connected to the elements as a human race. As a Native person, I am connected to these elements, because I can hear their voices. I hear all their songs and everything else. I’m asking each thing to continue on in a good way. I have to do something so that all of the elements continue on … For example, I bless the mountain … I ask the Mountain to continue to have a voice, to have songs … If the mountain doesn’t have a voice, then we as a people are not going to have a voice pretty quick. All the living things are not going to have any voice, because the mountain is where the voice comes from. The mountain is where the people are, the little people up there, the mountain people, as we call them, or the rock people — they’re up there listening to us. They’re the ones we have to pray to; they’re the ones who take care of the mountain … We have to ask what’s out there, the rocks, the land, the living things, to unite together; everything has to work together. Long ago, the land, the mountains, used to have more voice, a clearer voice, clearer than what it is today. The land, the rocks, they used to continue to tell us over and over again to take care of them and to ask us to do those things. But today, we’re lost, and I think it’s the reason we’re not concerned with anything; we just look at a mountain as if it’s just there, nothing more. But the mountain’s got a life to it. Everything’s got a spirit; the mountain’s got a spirit, and all the living things on the mountain have got a spirit . . . One of the reasons why their voice is not clear and loud anymore is because we haven’t been taking care of them.” — — Corbin Harney, Shoshone Indian Elder

8) The Spiritual Journey is a Spiral Descending into the Depths of Our Union with God.

“The spiritual journey might be compared to descending a spiral staircase, moving from the superficial layers of the false self to up above, toward the reality of union with God in the depths. As we progress toward the center where God actually is waiting for us, we are naturally going to feel that we are getting worse. This warns us that the spiritual journey is not a success story or a career move. It is rather a series of humiliations of the false self. It is experienced as diminutions of the false self with the value system and worldview that we built up so painstakingly as defenses to cope with the emotional pain of early life … The spiral staircase is a combination of the horizontal and vertical … As we descend toward our center, we encounter difficulties again because there is a circular structure to the spiral staircase and hence horizontally, we seem to meet the same old problem. But vertically we are now dealing with it on a deeper, more mature level . . . By leading us gradually (the way human things work), through growth in trust and humility, we are able to make an ever deeper surrender of ourselves to God. In this way we reach a new level of interior freedom, a deeper purity of heart, and an ever increasing union with the Spirit … What happens when we come to the bottom of the spiral staircase and fully access the divine presence? It will be a great surprise and not like anything we expected”. — — — — — — — — Thomas Keating, Trappist Monk

9) The Light of Love Guides Us Within the Night of Faith.

One dark night,

Fired with love’s urgent longings

Aha, the sheer grace!

I went out unseen,

My house being now all stilled …

With no other light to guide me

Than the one that burned in my heart;

This guided me

More surely than the light of noon

To where He waited for me

- Him I knew so well -

In a place where None appeared;

O guiding night! …

O night that has united

The Lover with His beloved,

Transforming the beloved

in her Lover.

- St. John of the Cross, Catholic priest, Mystic, Carmelite Friar

10) In Offering Thanks, We Give Ourselves, and That is a Greater Gift Than the Original Present.

“The interdependence of gratefulness is truly mutual. The receiver of the gift depends on the giver. Obviously so. But the circle of gratefulness is incomplete until the giver of the gift becomes the receiver: a receiver of thanks. When we give thanks, we give something greater than the gift we received, whatever it was. The greatest gift one can give is thanksgiving. In giving gifts, we give what we can spare, but in giving thanks we give ourselves.” — — — — — - David Steindl-Rast, Benedictine Monk

11) Desire is an Endless “Tremoring Vibration” that is a Fulfilling End in Itself.

“ ‘What if desire were to desire something other than objects?’ The Tantric masters then wondered. If desire were simply the incandescence that gives us the feeling of being alive, were intensity, were the tremoring vibration that carries us, then it would be absurd to allow it to be consumed by objects and to lose it once we possess the object or realize we cannot attain it. This profound movement of desire is life itself, and this tremoring is the one that all yoginis and yogis experience, precisely because they remain in the incandescence of desire without rendering it dependent upon the object … Here, we allow our desire to blossom out over all objects. When our desire occupies all of space, the absence of one object goes totally unnoticed, because the flow of our awareness remains free to come into contact with thousands of others. In the tantric sadhana, there is a particular practice wherein the yogi sees the world as desire. Everything — a leaf falling from a tree, the sky, the snow, the water he drinks, his food — desires him. Each contact with reality becomes a celebration of the universality of desire. Fixation on a single object thus ceases to exist.” — — — — — — — — — -- Daniel Odier “Delacorta”, Writer

12) Beauty Disdains to Annihilate Us.

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure. And we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.” — - Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet and Novelist

Beauty is a desire that can never be satisfied as long as we view ourselves as separate from the beauty for which we long. If we allow ourselves to sit with the discomfort caused by unfulfilled desire, we will find that beauty serenely becomes a mirror that is able to reveal to us the endless riches of our own desire. When we really look into our desire, we see that it is simply the way in which beautiful things are able to appreciate themselves within that very longing. At the same time, we also realize that beautiful things are simply a crystallization of our longing. In both instances, we find to our great delight that we are already united to the things we desire!

13) Becoming One with Nature.

“You cannot feel yourself outdoors; plain, sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel. You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.” — — - John Muir, naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, botanist, zoologist, glaciologist