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PRACTICE:    

Connect with outer and inner harmony.

Dear Friends,

In one of the groups I have been taking I set practical exercises to be performed during the week.  One of the exercises that was set last week was being aware how love and reason work together.  Here are three of the responses that arose out of what was observed:

When I’m in the present and do not bring in any thoughts of past and future, then I find reason is clearer to me and love comes naturally through an uncontaminated lense.

When I allow love to flow I become more reasonable and tolerant at the same time.

I noticed that when love and reason work together I meet situations openly and find the right things to say and do.

All of this is talking about finding the natural measure and that natural measure can only be achieved in the here and now.

That’s why it’s so important to live in the present, and living in the present is a very good reason for running the Now Day and the Now Course which follows from it.  It would be lovely to see as many of you attending either one or the other or both.

With my very best regards, William

THE NATURAL MEASURE

In the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius he makes this beautiful statement:

The soul attains her perfectly rounded form when she is neither straining out after something nor shrinking back; neither disseminating herself piecemeal nor yet sinking down in collapse but is bathed in a radiance which reveals to her the world and herself in their true colours.         

Think of this statement in the light of the young woman's observation made in last week’s email:

I've had a stressful week.  The landlord was due to arrive this morning about the flat.  I am involved in politics and had to organise a gig.

Yesterday I went out to lunch and just sat down and ate a salad.  The taste was incredible!  All I had to do was taste.  The sense of taste got me there.  Previously through all the stress I kept trying to get there myself.  I tried to think reflectively.  Nothing worked, but then it just happened.  I had no regrets about what went before, but then I knew everything would be achieved. Even now I can see the orange cloth, the trees outside the window - all so clear and detailed.

What was happening when she was experiencing stress?  She was in the terms that Marcus Aurelius is putting it: straining out and shrinking back.  What are we doing when we experience stress?  Much the same?  But notice the change that took place when she simply sat and ate a salad.  The world was revealed in their true colours: even now I can see the orange cloth.

What happens when contact is made?  The world is revealed in its true colours.  Why do you think that Cézanne could paint landscape with the quiet intensity that made him so valued as an artist if something of this truth had not revealed itself to him?  So much so in fact, that this, as he claims, was the real reason for painting.  Painting was a tool by which to make that contact.

But Marcus Aurelius doesn't stop there.  He is not just talking about the true colours of the outer world.  He is also talking about the truth of our inner world, a world which he claims is bathed in a radiance which reveals true colour.

We may consider what he says in a number of ways.  There is undoubtedly that within us which appreciates the beauty of colour and form.  It has already been claimed in these emails that we wouldn't be able to appreciate outer beauty if the inner wasn't already in place ready to rise in response.  We may also say that this outer world in all its vastness is being perceived from within through this instrument of mind.  It is by this miraculous mechanism we have been given that we appreciate the wonder of the world.  It appears out there, but in truth all of it is being seen within.  These are the words of the great physicist, Sir Arthur Eddington.  He is speaking of our appreciation of the physical world:

Some influence from it [the physical world] plays on the extremity of the nerve, starting a series of physical and chemical changes which are propagated along the nerve to a brain-cell; there the mystery happens, and an image or sensation arises in the mind which cannot purport to resemble the stimulus which excites it.  Everything known about the material world must in one way or another have been inferred from these stimuli transmitted along the nerves.  It is an astonishing feat of deciphering that we should have been able to infer an orderly scheme of natural knowledge from such indirect communication.

He goes on to make the observation, which, although obvious, is often overlooked:

The mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience; all else is remote inference.

The mind through some continuous miracle is not only capable of witnessing the outside world but is also able to appreciate its beauty, its harmony, its perfect precision.  The mind is capable of recognising all these eternal qualities because it is also part of the natural world, a natural world in which these qualities find a central place.  Some even claim that these powers are the source of the natural world.

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