Helen Palmer and the Enneagram

Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment. It dethrones the ego from the center of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of the selfishness that holds us back from an experience of the sacred. And it gives us ecstasy, broadening our perspectives and giving us a larger, enhanced vision.

Permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew. They would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be.

Silent, the quiet calm at the heart of nature, carries, or even hides, the presence of the Divine. Cloaked in stillness, the Way, the Divine One dwells, always available to us through our surrender. All we need do is dispose ourselves to listening intently. This intent listening is the essence of meditation. If we lean our ear toward the stillness, the outer quiet, it will lead us into the realization of the Presence around us, within us, and beyond us.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

Too many of us panic in the dark. We don’t understand that it’s a holy dark and that the idea is to surrender to it and journey through to real light.

Stories are how we learn. The progenitors of the world’s religions understood this, handing down our great myths and legends from generation to generation.