Take your donkey and climb
This is the great adventure and the great discovery. No one can do it for us.
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Our greatest journey is not the pilgrimage to the Holy lands but the trek from transient to Eternal - crossing the abyss within us to scale the mountain.
The way offers no reprieve. No shortcuts, no paved roads, no flights, no fancy carriages, no smooth escalators to take you to the summit.
It’s difficult and unyielding. The only path is by the slow, persistent plodding of a donkey through steep inclines, dark nights and bitter winter storms.
Our baggage must be light - only bare essentials, no worldly distractions. Carry too much and we’ll never reach the summit. The weight will drag us down, drain the donkey’s strength, and halt our journey altogether.
Then we’ll face a choice: cast all unnecessary wants and press forward, or turn back, and never apprehend the Truth.
The choice is yours.
Lessons from Juan Mascaró
We must climb using words to abandon it at the end. The poet knows well that if poetry takes us away from a lower reality of daily life it is only to lead us to the vision of a higher Reality even in this daily life, where limitations give way for the poet to the joy of liberation.
Only the Eternal in us leads us to the Eternal.
Those who don’t know argue. Those who know are silent. Thus when the sage of the Upanishads is pressed for a definition of God, he remains silent, meaning that God is silence. When asked again to express God in words, he says: ‘Neti Neti’, ‘Not this, not this’; but when pressed for a positive explanation he utters the sublimely simple words ‘Tat Tvam Asi’, ‘Thou art That’.
The path is made by walking. One of the messages of the Upanishads is that the Spirit can only be known through union with Him, and not through mere learning.
The greatest commandment is to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself. This is why the greatest prayers of men have always been prayers for light and love. We cannot buy light and love in the market place of men; but they are given us to ‘without money and without price'.
Reason leads to the door where only love can enter. The Truth of the Spirit is not found by the arguing of philosophical or metaphysical questions.
Understand that God is in contemplation, we are in meditation. According to the mystics, it is important to know in prayer the difference between meditation and contemplation: meditation is a movement of thought limited within a circle, but in contemplation, there is a silence of thought.
Take your donkey and climb. This is the great adventure and the great discovery. No one can do it for us. Until we have reached the top of the mountain we cannot see in full glory the view that lies beyond; but glimpses of light illumine our path to the mountain.
Till next week,
Peace!
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