19 March 2024

People ask me how I have the time to meditate five hours daily. I point out that the average American watches four and a half hours of TV a day. And I don't have a TV.
To be alive necessitates injustice. My living requires other things – animal, vegetable, mineral – to die. My bourgeois satisfactions require others to live without. My over-consumption steals from planet and from future generations. The ethical life is simply one that strives to minimise injustice.
The best thing you can do for the planet is to stay home.
energy   spirit   softness
if you are not in love with these
then I would prefer not to know you
loving is becoming

18 March 2024

Prayer is the lifting of heart to God, or, put another way, prayer is the loving of God.
When I was a teenager I loved browsing through the National Geographic magazine in the public library. I remember one occasion looking at a pull-out photograph of the Amazon rainforest in which two European explorers gazed proudly at the camera. As I studied the picture I suddenly became aware of numerous smaller native tribes people standing amongst the trees. I hadn't noticed them before, not because they were camoflaged but because they looked part of the scene; they didn't stand out as something alien or other; they belonged there. And whereas the Europeans seemed to come out of the photo towards me, the natives literally receded into the trees. In fact they looked exactly like the trees – as though they had extruded up from the Earth beneath their feet. At the time I was struck by how insignificant and primitive the natives looked compared to the civilized Europeans. But now, my work, which is my day, everyday, aspires to become as those natives. As naked and as natural as they.
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
nothing quite as painful as the truth
and if it doesn't hurt then it's trivial
the spiritual life is a life of occasional glimmers
spiritual work has absolutely nothing to do with concentrating the mind to get what you want and everything to do with humbly offering the heart to God
Spiritual work is negative, reductive, subtractive. Peeling away layer after layer after layer until one arrives at pure naked essence. As close to God as we are likely to get.
I must leave Ireland and create in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race!
if the work is about getting your own way then it has no spiritual content
listen not to hear but to connect

17 March 2024

always turning the spotlight back on the self
exposing its insidious presence at every level