This is a guest post by Andrew Cort.

In more primitive cultures, a sacred ‘presence’ was part of one’s normal experience. The gods of Homer’s Greece, for example, were part of everyone’s daily life. The sharp difference that we ascribe to secular matters and sacred matters would make no sense to a Shaman. In the Garden of Eden, God walked about and spoke to the inhabitants. He spoke with Abraham and Moses. He sent His messenger to speak to Mary, and then sent His own son into the world. In these times and cultures, people were immersed in the sacred, and felt a direct participation with higher levels of existence. “During the last three or four centuries, however,” notes Douglas Sloan, “this participatory awareness of a meaningful world has dimmed almost to the point of extinction.”

At the same time, something very positive has emerged in its place: the modern development and strengthening of individual selfhood. We experience the self’s relationship to the world in a very different way than did our ancestors. We have a far greater sense of personal identity, separate from others and detached from nature. We demand and expect personal freedom and full opportunity for personal achievement.

But modern individuals in a scientific and technological world are no longer sustained by a living and sacred world. We find ourselves grounded instead in the ‘onlooker’ viewpoint of science, in which we analyze nature and find ways to make her do our bidding. And we endure the psychological consequences of holding to this position — alienation, fragmentation, loss of meaning.

Must this be the inevitable outcome of the modern experiment in individualization? Is the apex of this endeavor merely the bleak realization that the individual is alone in a senseless, violent and absurd universe? Or is it possible to remain a free and rational ‘self’, and still be connected to a living web of mutuality and authentic spiritual meaning?

What do you think? Can we unite material life with spiritual life, in such a way that neither domain overwhelms or erodes the other?

Andrew Cort is an author, teacher, attorney, and doctor of chiropractic. His writings encompass Spirituality, Interfaith Religion, Science, Mythology, Education, Healing, and how these all fit together with contemporary culture. His most recent book is SYMBOLS, MEANING, AND THE SACRED QUEST: Spiritual Awakening in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Stories . Visit Andrew and contact him at www.Spirituality-and-Religion.com.

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“Real love is not an escape from loneliness, the real love is an overflowing aloneness. One is so happy in being alone that one would like to share — happiness always wants to share. It is too much, it cannot be contained; like the flower cannot contain its fragrance, it has to be released.” Osho

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The Butterfly

by Nikos Kazantzakis

I remember one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the back of a tree just as a butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited awhile, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened; the butterfly started slowly crawling out, and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath, in vain.

It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand.

That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience. For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.

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Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine,
or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo.
In doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself.
Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn.

Basho

The beauty of trees,
the softness of the air,
the fragrance of the grass,
speaks to me.

The summit of the mountain,
the thunder of the sky,
the rhythm of the sea,
speaks to me.

The faintness of the stars,
the freshness of the morning,
the dew drop on the flower,
speaks to me.

The strength of fire,
The taste of the sun,
And the life that never goes away,
They speak to me.

And my heart soars.

~Chief Dan George

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and talk alms of those who work for joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half our hunger.

~Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)

Fall Song

by Mary Oliver

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries – roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

~ Derek Walcott ~

 

The Swan

by Mary Oliver

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul likes down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

~Rumi