Tag: meditation
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Prosousia: The Isness That Faces Toward Us
There are moments in contemplative life when language itself seems to lean forward, offering a new word for an old and living truth. Such a word, for me, is prosousia. I offer it here not as a scholarly coinage but as a quiet, practical name for the relational God who attends to us—who turns toward…
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Benesentia: the Felt-Presence of Blessing
A new word arrived recently—though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it emerged. In the midst of quiet contemplation, I was attending to the subtle textures of the heart, listening for resonant syllables that seemed to rise from stillness while in contemplative dialogue. Then, serendipitously, I noticed the word had emerged in…
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Some Thoughts on Sadhana
Prior to my opening in 2001, I had no spiritual practice whatsoever, no routines or rituals to channel and direct my efforts, only a naked aspiration and desire honed from months in the deserts of western North America 15 years earlier. In the months and first years after the opening experience, the force and extent…
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The effects of becoming civilized: attentional biases
Very few people escape the attention rigidifying impact of our immediate familial and broadly social education. This educational process is heavily weighted toward specific attention biases. A preponderance of our educational resource is spent on intellectual development. This entails, with gradually greater subtlety and specificity, the singling out, or in my language, narrow focusing upon…
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Rasa: The Essence of Delight in Existence and Art | Aurobindo
Some considerations when musing on joy….attachment versus detachment. For who could live or breathe if there were not this delight of existence as the ether in which we dwell?From Delight all these beings are born, by Delight they exist and grow, to Delight they return. Taittiriya Upanishad, II. 7; III. 6. For the universal soul…
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Talking about Meditation by Feeling
There is a lack of an appropriate word in the English language to denote the voluntary action of generating an internal feeling within oneself independently of external stimuli. This becomes a particular problem when we are forced to revert to words like “imagine” or “visualize” almost exclusively to describe or convey meditative exercises. Even feeling-type…