“Contemplation liberates us from the seeds of violence in our own heart, especially from our individual and social compulsions to find someone to blame for the ills that befall us – such compulsions do nothing but keep us bent over ourselves, blind to what constitutes a human.”
- Martin Laird, “An Ocean of Light”
Laird writes that contemplation, and the lifestyle leading to it and flowing from it, asks but a single question:
“What does kindness look like at any given moment.”
Using the metaphor of cluttering and decluttering as a way of considering how contemplation works, Laird writes that the human problem is that our minds are deeply cluttered.
“The metaphor allows us to look at the contemplative process of liberation from a point of view other than that of acquiring something we think we do not have and therefore must come up with a strategy to acquire, possess and control.
Think of a bright and spacious room whose polished wooded floor is covered with mounds of clutter of whatever sort. The practice of contemplation gradually declutters our minds, gradually revealing the brightly polished floor – the radiant core of all – that we did not realize was already there…”
Imagining clutter and the process of decluttering (release, letting be, letting go, non-clinging) brings certain topics crucial to the practice of contemplation to the forefront of our being.
Embracing the poetic beauty of life and all that surrounds us advances decluttering. Through the poetic, we seek to recognize and celebrate the essence of the essential of what really is.
Laird quotes mystic Thaddeus of Vitnovnica: “If our thoughts are kind, peaceful, and quiet, turned only toward good, then we also influence ourselves and radiate peace all around us – in our family, the whole country, everywhere. This is true not only here on earth, but in the cosmos as well.”
Archbishop Rowan Williams declared contemplation “a deeply revolutionary matter.”
Explicit in these thoughts is the idea that we need not seek what we already have and have always had since our first human breath. The polished wooded floor of our being is the foundation that the living already stand upon.
Revelations arrive with grace in the silence of contemplation.
Be still and know.