All action is meaningless without devotion. All gain in reality comes through Grace - not one's own action.
A practice to do while reading the next section:
Keep the mind quiet. Breathe a breath. Watch it. Be thankful for it. Love. Let the breath of love and thankfulness grow as you read the following. Be-ing great-full of Grace, can you make your own life? Breathe in thank-full-ness and love . Breathe out love in Grace.
(Sometimes a "key" to get started breathing love is to consider something, anything at all, from which you get the feeling of love. After that feeling gets stronger by concentration, let the "starter" go, and focus solely on the feeling. Then let the feeling grow. Remember, the heart is more than just an organ of the body").
| "Grace is one thing and effort is another. The prophets did not achieve the station of prophethood through effort; they found that good fortune through grace. However, God's Will requires that whoever achieves prophethood live out his life in striving and virtue. " - Rumi
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| "A single mote of grace's shadow is better than a thousand efforts of the obedient servant",... - Rumi .......... |
If one were to consider the value of meditation, it is not in the practice of sitting or doing in a limited time or space. It is rather in the extension of that meditation or practice to all things in life at all times. Through meditations of a short nature, these practices begin to expand, to consume the dross of human frailties until one can come to be human again.
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"What is important in meditation is the quality of the mind and the heart. It is not what you achieve, or what you say you attain, but rather the quality of a mind that is innocent and vulnerable. Through negation there is the positive state. Merely to gather, or to live in, experience, denies the purity of meditation. Meditation is not a means
to an end. It is both the means and the end. The mind can never be made innocent through experience. It is the negation of experience that brings about that positive state of innocent. Meditation is the ending of the thought, not by the meditator, for the meditator is the meditation. If there is no meditation, then you are like a blind man in a world of great beauty, light, and color.
Wander by the seashore and let this meditative quality come upon you. If it does, don't pursue it. What you pursue will be the memory of what it was - and what was is the death of what is. Or when you wander among the hills, let everything tell you the beauty and the pain of life, so that you awaken to your own sorrow and to the ending of it. Meditation is the root, the plant, the flower and the fruit. It is words that divide the fruit, the flower, the plant, and the root. In this separation action does not bring about goodness: virtue is the total perception." - Krishnamurti
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