And so meditation rests on the wager that if you can simply break the tyranny of your ordinary awareness, the rest will begin to unfold itself. At first when you begin a practice of meditation, it feels like a place you go to. You may think of it as “my inner sanctuary” or “my place apart with God.” But as the practice becomes more and more established in you so that this inner sanctuary begins to flow out into your life, it becomes more and more a place you come from.

No one, of course, had foreseen that the first annual Eagle Island Wisdom School would follow so closely on the heels of the events of September 11, but in its shadow our time together was imbued with a newfound sense of purpose that what we were doing was no longer merely a spiritual luxury but a prophetic first step toward the recovery of a vision of human purpose badly eclipsed-and desperately needed-in the Western world.

What the theologian shrinks from, the poet grasps intuitively.

What Jesus is saying here, powerfully and clearly, is that if you do the work of transforming your being, moving beyond the egoic mind, then you become a living spirit.

We all live with this terrible, heartbreaking hypocrisy in Christianity, when the teaching finally leaves us in th dust. How do we die before we die? How do we love our neighbors as ourselves? How do we bridge the gap between what we believe and what we can actually live?

Somehow when the heart becomes single, the rest will follow.

When the field of vision has been unified, the inner being comes to rest, and that inner peaceableness flows into the outer world is harmony and compassion.

Jesus never asked anyone to form a church, ordain priests, develop elaborate rituals and institutional cultures, and splinter into denominations. His two great requests were that we “love one another as I have loved you” and that we share bread and wine together as an open channel of that interabiding love.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you will kill you.

It’s very, very simple. You sit, either in a chair or on a prayer stool or mat, and allow your heart to open toward that invisible but always present Origin of all that exists.