Dear All,
On Tuesday we practiced I Ching, Chapter 10, “Walking with Tender Assent.” Here is the relevant passage in David Hinton’s translation:
Centered steely as a mountain in cloud, you move at the hinge of things. Walking in that potent place of sovereignty, there’s no flaw anywhere.
We brought to mind both fearful and happy instances of walking, and tried to sense into the kind of movement – not physical movement – by which we can intensify our presence at the very “hinge of things.”
We also continued our exploration into the reality of the other person, begun during our earlier Sufi zikrs.
Spiritual traditions tend to emphasize the self. We typically look down on our low or ordinary or fallen or illusory or earthly or unrealized self, and we tend to contrast it with our higher or special or resurrected or heavenly or real and realized and awakened self. Or we explode the difference between these two, Zenly. Either way, though, it’s about the self.
Another marker of personal development, however, might be the possible heightened reality of the other – the other person, say, or whatever we are focused on. We exist more intensely as we allow the other to exist more intensely.
After all, the three loaves that the person in the parable of Luke 11:5-10 gets from God (which are the three higher I’s of Steiner’s formulation) are procured for the sake of his guest, not for himself.
In coming weeks, we’ll find ways more amazedly to awaken to the reality of the other person, letting the other grow realer and realer, with Simone Weil as our guide.
It was in a letter to Joe Bousquet, a paralyzed WWI veteran and fellow philosopher, that she wrote:
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few spirits to discover that things and beings exist. Since my childhood, I have desired nothing other than to have received the full revelation of this before I die. It seems to me that you are engaged in this discovery. Letter of 13 April, 1942
L'attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité.
Il est donné à très peu d'esprits de découvrir que les choses et les êtres existent. Depuis mon enfance je ne désire pas autre chose que d'en avoir reçu avant de mourir la révélation complète. Il me semble que vous êtes engagé dans cette découverte.
all blessings to all,
Michael
