“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
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In order to see clearly, to examine how things work, we will have to stop our lives, slow things down, look carefully – we need to pay attention. Look. Examine. How did this happen? How does this work? How can I reverse this? We need to deconstruct the very way we perceive and rebuild it again from the ground up.
The impulse towards stillness is the central movement of the contemplative life. Out of stillness emerges, effortlessly, a subtle world of experience that provides us with new eyes to examine the world we live in.
Having new eyes provides us with an opportunity to shift our vision and how we process the information that experience offers. Deconstructing our old way of seeing is necessary to allow that experience to be witnessed in a manner that shakes up our present understanding and opens us up to the potential possibilities that are inherently there for us to examine.
– Stephen Cope