A Sense of Presence - Howard Thurman

 The true purpose of all spiritual disciplines is to clear away
whatever may block our awareness of that which [some call]
God in us...

It will be in order to suggest certain simple aids to this end.

One of these is the practice of silence , or quiet.
As a child I was accustomed to spend many hours alone in
my rowboat, fishing along the river, when there was no sound
save the lapping of the waves against the boat.

There were times when it seemed as if the earth and the river
and the sky and I were one beat of the same pulse.  It was a
time of watching and waiting for what I did not know -
yet I always knew.

There would come a moment when beyond the single pulse
beat there was a sense of Presence which seemed always
to speak to me.  My response to the sense of Presence 
always had the quality of personal communion.

There was no voice.  There was no image.
There was no vision.

There was God.

Howard Thurman

from Disciplines of the Spirit

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

Personal Note:  I shy away from using the word "God"
in my own experiences now because it holds religious
connotations from the religion of my childhood
 that I no longer relate to.  I use names now that don't hold
  identifications with the word, such as "The Mystery",
"The Beloved", "The Ineffable", "The Sacred" etc. 
I especially like the words The Silence, or The Quiet
as representations of what I experience when I sit in silence
Encountering the deep Silence of Being for me feels like
encountering "God", like "personal communion."

I bask in The Sacred Silence, absorbed, feeling the sense
of Presence, of something vaster than an image of "God"
that I hold in my mind; something which is ever-
present, and personal...  The Deep Silence within is the
Heart of Being, "The Mystery", The Ineffable" - my refuge.

_/\_

Namaste

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Sound of The Genuine - Howard Thurman

There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for
the sound of the genuine in yourself.  And if you cannot hear it,
you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching,
and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that
you had never been born...

You are the only you that has ever lived;
your idiom [your unique signature]  is the only idiom of its
kind in all of existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the
genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the
ends of strings that somebody else pulls...

There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of
the genuine in yourself, and sometimes there is so much traffic going
on in your minds, so many different kinds of signals, so many vast
impulses floating through your organism that go back thousands of
generations, long before you were even a thought in the mind of
creation, and you are buffeted by these, and in the midst of all of this
you have got to find out.....Who you are...  How the sound of
the genuine come through to you...

The sound of the genuine is flowing through you.  Don't be deceived
and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams,
your ambitions, so that you don't hear the sound of the genuine in you,
because that is the only true guide that you will ever have, and if you
don't have that you don't have a thing.

You may be famous.  You may be whatever the other ideals are which
are part of this generation, but you know you don't have the foggiest
notion of who you are, where you are going, what you want.
Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in
yourself.

Now there is something in everybody that waits and listens for the
sound of the genuine in other people.  And it is so easy to say that
anybody who looks like him or her, anybody who acts as this person
acts, can't hear any sound of the genuine.  I must wait and listen for
the sound of the genuine in you.  I must wait.  For if I cannot hear it,
then in my scheme of things, you are not even present.  And everybody
wants to feel that everybody else knows that she is there.

There is something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine
in your mother, in your father, in the people you can't stand, and if
you had the power you would wipe them out.  But instinctively you
know that if you wipe them out, you go with them.  So you fight for
your own life by finding some way to get along with them without
killing them.

There is something in you that waits and listens for the sound of the
genuine in other people.  And if you can't hear it, then you are
reduced by that much.  If I were to ask you what is the thing that you
desire most in life, you would say a lot of things off the top of your
 head, most of which you wouldn't believe but you would think that
you were saying the things that I thought you ought to think
 that you should say.

But I think that if you were stripped of whatever there is in you that is
literal and irreducible, and you tried to answer that question, the
answer may be something like this: I want to feel completely
vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely
 secure... [i.e. to be my Authentic Self].

This is what you look for in your children [if] you have them, this is
what you look for in your husband if you get one.  That I can run the
risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my
vulnerability will not step on me.  That I can feel secure in my
 awareness of the active presence of my own [uniqueness].

So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill.  It doesn't
matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife.  I'm secure
because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself and having learned
to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough, to hear the
sound of the genuine in you.

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if I hear the sound
of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come
up in you.  So that when I look at myself through your eyes having
made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall
that separates and divides will disappear and we will become as one,
because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.

Howard Thurman

from a 1980 commencement speech at Spelman College

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

"Don't ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come
alive, and go do it.  Because what the world needs is people
who have come alive..."

Howard Thurman

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
The inside of a large earthenware pot
digitally colored...

The Code of Authentic Living - Joan C. King

Physics teaches us that, at its essence, everything is energy.
We are beings of energy.  A mysterious life force, made up of
the Source Energy that reverberates within each molecule is
in every cell of the body.

Source Energy animates every living being and [is] eternally
creative, ever seeking new dimensions, relentlessly pursuing
new expressions...

Source Energy is our link to the creative energies of the
Universe.  We thrive when our actions and interactions are
aligned with the energy that animates and sustains our cells.

Out of the Source Energy of the Void, the energy that powers all
creation, the energy that resonates within our cells, something
new is being born at every transition in life...  A new reality is
unfolding from the field of possibility.  At moments of transition,
the vortex of creative energy that is our life force is activated.
Its waves carry the blueprint that informs every new aspect of
our lives.  If we surrender to the vortex of energy Cellular Wisdom
will direct us on a path that leads to emerging new dimensions of
our lives...

We cannot find this energy in our minds, because our thoughts
are not our actual experience.

Any journey within leads, paradoxically, to heightened awareness
of the expansive energy which permeates all life.  The energy
that we encounter when we look inside ourselves is the same
energy that guides the movement of the heavenly spheres - the
stars, galaxies, universes.  Each living being has a characteristic
profile of energy frequencies expressed within his or her body, but
our spirits are not confined by physical limits.  Our individual
energies pulse in and out of the sea of all energy...  When we tap
into that confluence of energy we arise renewed, knowing that
the energies in our bodies are moving within the harmonies of
vast cosmic music.  There's nothing that you have to do to earn
the presence of Cellular Wisdom [i.e. Source Energy], for it is
nothing less than the essence of who you are.

Joan C. King
From - The Code of Authentic Living

~

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for
the sound of the genuine in yourself.  It is the only true guide
you will ever have.  And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your
life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

Howard Thurman

~

Photo - Vortex Art
Mystic Meandering
2012