What All The World's A-Seeking: The Vital Law of True Life, True Greatness Power and HappinessTrine, Ralph Waldo
Religion
What All The World's A-Seeking: The Vital Law of True Life, True Greatness Power and Happiness
Trine, Ralph Waldo
Character; Christian life; Conduct of life
It is the attitude of the child that is necessary before we can enter
into the kingdom of heaven. As it was said, "Except ye become as little
children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven." For we then
realize that of ourselves we can do nothing, but that it is only as we
realize that it is the Divine life and power working within us, and it
is only as we open ourselves that it may work through us, that we are or
can do anything. It is thus that the simple life, which is essentially
the life of the greatest enjoyment and the greatest attainment, is
entered upon.
In the Orient the people as a class take far more time in the quiet, in
the silence, than we take. Some of them carry this possibly to as great
an extreme as we carry the opposite, with the result that they do not
actualize and objectify in the outer life the things they dream in the
inner life. We give so much time to the activities of the outer life
that we do not take sufficient time in the quiet to form in the inner,
spiritual thought-life the ideals and the conditions that we would have
actualized and manifested in the outer life. The result is that we take
life in a kind of haphazard way, taking it as it comes, thinking not
very much about it until, perhaps, pushed by some bitter experiences,
instead of moulding it, through the agency of the inner forces, exactly
as we would have it. We need to strike the happy balance between the
custom in this respect of the Eastern and Western worlds, and go to the
extreme of neither the one nor the other. This alone will give the ideal
life; and it is the ideal life only that is the thoroughly satisfactory
life. In the Orient there are many who are day after day sitting in the
quiet, meditating, contemplating, idealizing, with their eyes focused on
their stomach in spiritual revery, while through lack of outer
activities, in their stomachs they are actually starving. In this
Western world, men and women, in the rush and activity of our accustomed
life, are running hither and thither, with no centre, no foundation upon
which to stand, nothing to which they can anchor their lives, because
they do not take sufficient time to come into the realization of what
the centre, of what the reality of their lives is.
If the Oriental would do his contemplating, and then get up and do his
work, he would be in a better condition; he would be living a more
normal and satisfactory life. If we in the Occident would take more time
from the rush and activity of life for contemplation, for meditation,
for idealization, for becoming acquainted with our real selves, and then
go about our work manifesting the powers of our real selves, we would be
far better off, because we would be living a more natural, a more normal
life. To find one's centre, to become centred in the Infinite, is the
first great essential of every satisfactory life; and then to go out,
thinking, speaking, working, loving, living, from this centre.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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