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| Contemplatives for the Spiritual Journey
Readings for Tuesday, March 18, 2008
(Readings Selected by El Senor Del Joven)
A Reflection From The Buddhist Tradition:
"As long as the followers of the way hold regular and frequent assemblies, they may be expected to prosper and not decline. As long as they meet in harmony,
break-up in harmony, and carry on their business in harmony, they may be expected to prosper and not decline.
As long as they do not authorize what has not been authorized already, and do not abolish what has been authorized, but proceed according to what has been authorized by the rules of training;
As long as they honor, respect, revere and salute the elders (Like Ricardo and Andre) of long standing who are long ordained, fathers and leader of the order;
As long as they do not fall prey to desires which arise in them and lead to rebirth; as long as they are devoted to forest lodging;
As long as they preserve their personal mindfulness, so that in the future the good whom are among their companions will come to them, and those who have already come will feel at ease with them, they may be expected to prosper and not decline."
-Adapted from the Mahaparinibbana Sutta
A Reflection From The Tao:
“The quality of the leader determines the quality of the organization.
A leader who lacks intelligence, virtue, and experience cannot hope for success. In any conflict the circumstances affect the outcome. Good leaders can succeed in adverse conditions, bad leaders can lose in favorable conditions. Therefore, good leaders constantly strive to perfect themselves, lest their shortcomings mar their endeavors. When all other factors are equal, it is the character of the leader that determines the outcome.
- Deng Ming-Dao: “Everyday Tao”
A Reflection From The Christian Tradition:
It is becoming clearer every day that one person’s work is naturally interrelated with the work of others. More than ever, work is work with others and work for others. Nearly all work is a matter of doing something for someone else.
In Fact, Pope John Paul II went to daring lengths in asserting that the modern business practice process “throws practical light on a truth about the person which Christianity has constantly affirmed.” That truth is this: God made the human person to work in community and to cooperate freely with other persons, for the sake of other persons.
Michael Novak, Business as a Calling
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Contemplatives for the Spiritual Journey
Readings for Tuesday, March 4, 2008
(Readings Selected by Kathleen)
A reading from the Buddhist tradition:
All the spiritual teachers of humanity have told us the same thing, that the purpose of life on earth is to achieve union with our fundamental, enlightened nature…There is only one way to do this, and that is to undertake the spiritual journey, with all the ardor and intelligence, courage and resolve for transformation that we can muster…
Life, as the Buddha told us, is as brief as a lightning flash; yet as Wordsworth said, “the world is too much with us: getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” It is that laying waste of our powers, that betrayal of our essence, that abandonment of the miraculous chance that this life, the natural bardo, gives us of knowing and embodying our enlightened nature, that is perhaps the most heartbreaking thing about human life. What the masters are essentially telling us is to stop fooling ourselves: What will we have learned, if at the moment of death we do not know who we really are? As the Tibetan Book of the Dead says:
With mind far off, not thinking of death’s coming,
Performing these meaningless activities,
Returning empty-handed now would be complete confusion;
The need is recognition, the spiritual teachings,
So why not practice the path of wisdom at this very moment?
From the mouths of the saints come these words:
If you do not keep your master’s teaching in your heart
Will you not become your own deceiver?
-Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
A reading from the Muslim tradition:
The master said there is one thing in this world which must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but were not to forget this, there would be no cause to worry, while if you remembered, performed and attended to everything else, but forgot that one thing, you would in fact have done nothing whatsoever. It is as if a king had sent you to a country to carry out one special, specific task. You go to the country and you perform a hundred other tasks, but if you have not performed the task you were sent for, it is as if you have performed nothing at all. So man has come into the world for a particular task, and that is his purpose. If he doesn’t perform it, he will have done nothing.
From: Rumi, Table Talk
A reading from the Christian tradition:
Every person, in the course of her life, must build—starting with the natural territory of her own self—a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. She makes her own soul throughout all her earthly days; and at the same time she collaborates in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time it narrowly determines, the perspectives of her individual achievement: the completing of the world.
From: Pierre Teilhard deChardin, The Divine Milieu
Contemplatives for the Spiritual Journey
Readings for Tuesday, February 28, 2008
(Readings Selected by Ron)
A
Reflection from the Hindu Tradition
In the midst of the cave of
the heart,
In the form of the I, in
form of the Self,
Unique and solitary,
Brahman’s glory shines
Directly from Himself on
Himself.
Penetrate deep within,
Your thought piercing to its
source,
Your mind having plunged
into itself,
With breath and sense held
close in the
Depths, your whole self
fixed in yourself,
And there, simply BE!
Sri Ganarati Sastri
A
Reflection from The Christian Tradition
The all-important aim in
Christian meditation is to allow God’s mysterious and silent presence within us
to become more and more not only a reality, but the reality in our lives; to
let it become that reality which gives meaning and shape and purpose to
everything we do; to everything we are.
Dom John Main
Word Into Silence
A
Reflection from The Orthodox Tradition
To pray is to descend with
the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord-
ever-present, all-seeing, within you.
Bishop Theophone the Recluse
The Art of Prayer; An
Orthodox Anthology
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