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Listening to the musical legacy of Abbess St. Hildegard von Bigen, 12th Century mystic, writer, diplomat and counselor to Bishops, Kings and Popes. Beautiful.
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Spiritual development is the birthright of every man and woman … the world as a whole tends to neglect and forget the knowledge of how to pursue and live a spiritual life. (Emphasis added.)
Thomas Keating, in The Heart of the World
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Can there be wisdom and leadership without a spiritual component to one’s life? No.
We are more than intellect. We are spiritual beings. Denying this, we are left less intelligent, less human and less healthy – flat and without insight necessary to make wise decisions on complex matters – or any matter.
Contemplation is the way to spiritual development for a contemplative life and life itself is a spiritual experience.
Contemplation leads to the full experience of the human experience. In mass culture or any culture, contemplation requires that one lift himself or herself above the fray of mundane existence which so often captures us moment to moment, hour to hour, day after day – year after year.
Yes, attending to the demands of the world keeps the Christian from the mystery of Christ and the timeless message of the Gospel, and from knowing our self.
There is no full development of the human person without contemplation, no self-examination either – and hence no fullness of being, of human being.
In contemplation, the self is examined and understanding follows, and one is no longer trapped by the errors, follies, divisions, temptations and corruptions of the mundane world and the voices of its most vocal members.
Indeed, does contemplation not require the voiceless silence of solitude! Yes, in contemplation there is a silent respite from all that interrupts our healthy, full development and greatest state of being.
In contemplation, God is real and immanent and those who are disoriented are no longer free to be housed within us. Free – free at last. Thank God Almighty “free at last.”
Shalom.
We cannot reach faith by reasoning … We can prepare for it by reflection, by longing for it, and by pleading for it. But it can only come as a gift. Once it has been given , life assumes a new direction.
Thomas Keating, in The Heart of the World
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You have heard it said that “seeing is believing” but I say it is precisely the opposite: believing is seeing.
Yes, look around you. Listen to what you hear. Are those who command public attention offering anything rooted in faith? The likely answer is “no.”
In what they say what do they see? In what they say what do they believe?
So why would you listen to those who do not believe? Who showing no faith, possessing no convincing insight seek that you might follow them? Advance their ideas, fetishes, fanciful fictions? Who lacking belief cannot see?
I have never been particularly prone to be a follower. Neither have I been bound to the plain of reason alone. No, life evolves in each of us as lessons, challenges, setbacks, sufferings, betrayals and unexpected insights and gifts. My point? We are called to the path of belief by all that happens to us, all that we encounter and observe, feel and decipher in the good and the bad.
In my life believing has given me sight, the capacity to see in depth, in dimension that allows for faith to be known and experienced, for confidence to fortify, and patience to be supplied to all things. And this sight has given me the capacity to think far more creatively and act more wisely and decisively than one might expect. In this, fear is dispatched and opportunity takes its place.
The wise and cunning person is the faithful person, so too the insightful and decisive one in our midst. Humility is present in them just as calm is. The best among us put ourselves to the good task, the good objective – not for themselves but for others, strangers, those yet to be born and those already gone.
The self-serving neither see nor believe but oh, they talk incessantly and many among us foolishly listen. I have never been one of the foolish listeners. In this I have tamed being alone quite easily and enjoyed the fruits of belief as faith has grown.
Shalom.
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
Aristotle
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Throwing money at institutional “education” has set us back in that last five or six decades. Yes, education of the mind and not the heart presents us with not whole people but slivers of indoctrination – in our case … with small-mined ideologues, life un-examined.
The heart. The heart. The heart. We are more than a brain – which is but a secondary organ. People survive brain injuries, no one survives without a heart.
Wonder why you see the sights and hear the sounds you hear in contemporary media and culture? We have poured dubious ideas into college students but little to reveal what Aristotle knew 300 years before Christ.
Great damage is done by those who have not done the work of understanding who they are and what the purpose of a lived life is. When we neglect the mystery and truths about mortal life, when we ignore what has been complied on this subject in the last 2500 years and in many cultures all along that time line – we are far less “educated” than we reckon.
Such is the cause of the nonsense we see daily … of the foolishness and hostility of those who vie to lead this nation, influence others, advocate all manner of mischief.
Best you see where we are and how we have missed the mark very substantially. And better yet – best we are to listen critically and discount all those whose sing-song rhetoric does not witness in the speaker wisdom of a life fully lived and the humility and calm that such experience generates.
Shalom.
“How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action?”
Arthur Schopenhauer, in On the Foundations of Morality
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This is precisely the kind of question that is not asked by individuals in America today. It is precisely the sort of question in which we are of a very desperate need.
Its absence is the product of our failed education system – especially university education and makes its absence in a secular culture that denies God in favor of “trivial pursuits.”
Yes, what we concentrate on does not seek the feel and understanding of the mystery that this implicit in this question and others of its ilk.
I give you one such distraction that is our preoccupation. It is “equality.”
Who images any one person is in every measure the equal of another in very detail? No one who is thinking. Yet, we chase in all sorts of “social justice” pursuits “equality.” Likewise such a notion allows us to divide in hostility one from another. Such estrangement does great damage – separating us woman from man, and by race, religion and income.
Yet over all these separations and distractions – one stops to help another who suffers. One risks one’s life for another. We do this because we are who God made us to be in the doing of such things.
In contrast, the political climate separates us and with God in exile we grow further apart and weaker as people and as a nation.
My constant frustration is this: I see hardly anyone in public life who lives as if they ever ponder as Schopenhauer’s inquiry so clearly does.
We ought to be ashamed and less a pack of complainers and more individuals with interest in the defining questions of life that make us far better people and a stronger and more faithful nation.
Shalom.
‘No soul,’ it has been said, ‘forfeits truth willfully.’ And the same holds true for justice, self-control, kindliness, or any virtue.
Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations
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What is the truth that governs your thinking and actions?
Have you ever asked yourself this question? Given time to think about truth itself and its place in a stable and honorable existence?
Look about. Do you see those governed by ideology or the craven desire for power? Ideology – but cheap and useless notions that require no independent thought and no engagement with life’s substance and the questions and struggles that life presents.
The ideologue lives a foolish and superficial existence – a comic book foolishness that produces error and not wisdom or depth of character.
You can tell the weakness of one’s intellect when ideology displaces actual real experience and a learned understanding of recorded history and lived faith.
Truth. What is your truth? Is it more than a rote ideology that pretends to bind you with others equally uninformed and mistaken? Take no shelter is such nonsense.
Shalom.
Democrat Left and Truth – Virginia Governor Ralph Northam had himself one revealing week. First he spoke of abortion as if to endorse – infanticide (the killing of a child after the child’s birth). Then a picture surfaced in his 1984 medical school yearbook of him either dressed in a Klu Klux Klan cape and hood or in “black face” … this after defeating his opponent in his election for Governor by calling his adversary a “racist.”
Well why are we surprised? The Democrat “truth” centers on gaining and holding power. As to African-Americans the Demcrats, not the Republicans, were for years the Party of segregation and slavery. One Senate office building is named after former U.S. Senator Byrd (Democrat from West Virginia) – a former Klan officer who Hilary Clinton fondly recalls as one of her mentors.
Let’s face facts. The Democrat Party likes power – that is the truth upon which they function. They are, in many respects, utterly without shame. They now have a female candidate for President who was herself (in the age of the “Me-too” movement) a willing partner in adultery. She, without any sense of transgression, boldly calls for destroying private health insurance in favor of expanding (you guessed it) government power.
Truth? What is the truth the Democrat Party of the Left stands on? Gaining more power over private citizens, abortion extending to infanticide, abolishing private industry, subverting the sovereign rights of citizens and making them slaves of the state.
The more powerful and independent consciousness becomes, and with it conscious will, the more the unconscious is forced into the background. When this happens … the conscious structure (is) detached from the unconscious images.
Carl Jung, M.D., in Collected Works, 13 Alchemical Studies 3.
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What Carl Jung is telling us in these words is that we are less whole and more prone to function poorly and erroneously when our conscious mind and the will that flows from it is a mighty (although incomplete) power that stirs us (unbalanced though we are) in what is likely a wrong and injurious direction.
Making this plain in normal terms, if one is divorced from their unconscious realm they will operate at far less than an optimum level. I hazard to say that it appears that many a political person, professional and even pastors and others function in precisely this way.
Think about it. How many people do you know who impress you as being in their acts, discourse, thinking and disposition as possessing a whole and complete development and the stability that flows from that wholeness? My guess is: not many.
Jung comes to this from having taken a very serious look at Richard Whilhelm’s excellent book on Chinese Taoism entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower published in 1933 from which Jung began to see in a comprehensive way the form of psychic wholeness.
In short, what Whilhelm did with this discussion of Taoism is provide many of the same symbols Jung encountered in working with the dreams and fantasies of his patients. He saw in this the symbols in the psyche’s process that led to human wholeness. A most significant development!
Where does this leave us today?
Probably here: we do little to equip ourselves to understand the nature of human existence and the quest for human wholeness … and as a result in daily personal life and in the world of mass communication we are left to encounter a whole lot of people who are far from healthy development and stability. Indeed, we counter all sorts of people who push their ideas and desires without themselves possessing anything close to a wholeness that might give them modest “authority” to claim being heard and much less followed.
The moral of story: you are made for full development – and stay away from those who are far from that destination unless you want chaos, confusion and calamity.
Shalom.
Boys and girls, lads and lassies – it all comes down to the search for the Divine which requires you to come to know fully who you are … in that task you find God. Remember Christ said: pick up your Cross (the life you have been given) and follow me.
Postscript – For those with interest, I recommend Curtis D. Smith’s Jung’s Quest for Wholeness: A Religious and Historical Perspective.
