Weil 3

Dear All,
 
Today we parceled out the universe into pieces – things like the mineral world, the spiritual world, plants, animals, space, stars, humans, water – and we each took turns representing one such piece to a dyadic partner.  This was a first step on the way to allowing each human to represent the world as a whole for us, and for each of us to present the world as a whole to all whom we meet.  Not the world or the universe abstractly, but actually:  its vastness and specificity; its moisture and aridity; its gold, red, green, translucent, blue; its thunderous life and its enormous, suggestive silence.
 
“To be in the world as the world,” is one of David Spangler’s slogans. 
 
She/He “means the world” to me, we say.
 
“To see the world in a grain of sand,” is William Blake’s version of this microcosmic thought, where even a mineral (grain of sand) can present all.
 
“Think globally but act locally,” makes the point politically.
 
“A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide.”  -- Emerson    Yes, and all the pines and sea urchins abide there too.
 
And here is the note Simone Weil wrote to herself in her Notebooks:
 
Ceremony: I – who am the whole universe! – am, nevertheless, a part.  And other people too are parts.  They exist as I do.  As much.  Neither more, nor less.
 
We took this as our central meditation.  The aim was to experience the validity of her assertion, and so to have both our own existence and the existence of others intensified.  As she writes on the same page of her Notebooks:
 
Good and Evil.  Reality.  That which gives more reality to beings and things is good.  That which takes it away from them is evil.
 
 
Our meditation next week will be to find what gives more or less reality to beings and things.
 
all blessings to all,

Michael