What is this longing, this feeling that there is something to be found, something that is more important than anything, that will fill life with meaning and reveal the hidden essence of things? What is it that’s sensed as if there was a secret treasure that has somehow been veiled from our eyes? It is called by many names, and because it is beyond names and words, whatever word works for you will serve – whether it’s Truth, God, Source, Reality, or some other name. The name that turns your attention to what is highest is itself a sacred vehicle; and whichever word is used, it is the actuality that matters. In reading the reflections that follow, please keep that in mind.
– Shanti
From Loren Eiseley, in his book The Unexpected Universe:
“Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember, or has gotten wrong. Implied in this is our feeling that life demands an answer from us, that an essential part of man is his struggle to remember the meaning of the message with which he has been entrusted, that we are, in fact, message carriers. We are not what we seem. We have had a further instruction.”
From James Finley, interviewed at Beliefnet.com and from his book Christian Meditation:
“God has made the human heart in such a way that only God will do. And the God-given longing for God is fulfilled in a oneness with God in which nothing short of that oneness is enough. There’s a kind of deep, sincere ache within the heart. It prays, and the prayer actually intensifies or deepens a longing for oneness with God beyond the words of the prayer and also beyond the emotions and the feelings that can come up in the consolations of prayer. Nothing is enough; only God is enough. And that’s the mystical quest really, that’s the contemplative theme.”
…
“To practice meditation as an act of religious faith is to open ourselves to the endlessly reassuring realization that our very being and the very being of everyone and everything around us is the generosity of God. For God is creating us in the present moment, loving us into being, such that our very presence in the present moment is the manifested presence of God. We meditate that we might awaken to this unitive mystery, not just in meditation, but in every moment of our lives.”
From Swami Vivekananda:
“…the Absolute Truth is only one. Therefore we need not fight with others when we find they are telling something about religion which is not exactly according to our view of it. We ought to remember that both of us may be true, though apparently contradictors. There may be millions of radii converging towards the same centre in the sun. The further they are from the centre, the greater is the distance between any two. But as they all meet at the centre, all difference vanishes. There is such a centre, which is the absolute goal of mankind.”
