Читать книгу News from the Kingdom of God - David Breeden - Страница 15

Jesus said:

If leaders say, “Look, the Dance of the Sacred is in the sky!”

Then notice how the birds get there before you.

If they say, “Look, the Dance of the Sacred is in the sea!”

Then notice how the fish get there before you.

No—the Dance of the Sacred is both within you and without you.

When you know yourself, then you will be known,

And you will see that you are a child of the one.

However, if you do not know yourself,

Then you live in poverty,

And you are the poverty.

Meditation

In the Gospel According to Mark the location and meaning of the “Kingdom of God” or Dance of the Sacred is not clear. Is it a state of mind? A function of enlightened consciousness? Is it what is known in Buddhism as the “one-mind point of view”? Is it a group of words designed to express the inexpressible? Perhaps. The kingdom is found through self-examination. The method of this self-examination follows the mystic path. As Gershon Winkler says of the Kabbalah,

No wisdom comes to us when we are filled with it. Wisdom only comes when we are void of it, when we have hollowed out a clear space in our selves, and created room for experience and for what experience teaches us. (48)

In Christian mysticism this process is called kenosis, “emptying.” Buddhist thought sums the ideas up in two terms in an “eightfold path” toward enlightenment: right (or “proper” ) understanding and right mindfulness.