1. Silence is the starting point
Silence is the starting point, even if it is a small clearing in forests of commotion. Because that is where a new understanding may emerge, and expand and seep into everything. Silence is not a matter of with or without words, but of halting, and stepping back, and vacating an open space in the midst of the chatter -- familiar opinions, and patterns of speech and reaction, and everything that declares and knows -- and listening: Here new voices might be heard, a new beginning might begin here.
2. You are not inside yourself
This is one point to consider: that you are much more than yourself. You extend far beyond the walls of the perimeter which you think is you. For although your perimeter separates itself from the rest and erects walls and declares itself the center, nevertheless out there, beyond what seems like your boundaries, there is much more of yourself.
And this is a second point: that you don't have to stay inside your perimeter. There are understandings that can open an opening in the walls, and awaken parts of you that lay dormant outside, so that they would take part in greater horizons of reality, which cannot be seen from inside your perimeter. And if you long for those understandings and seek them, then this is called phil-sophia.
And this is a third point: that what lies outside your perimeter is not what is inside it. Beyond the walls you won't find more of the same psychological mechanisms and processes and more facts of the familiar kind. Facts are nothing but facts -- arbitrary and mute and neutral. But out there is an altogether different world-order, based on dimensions of intensity: a dimension of presence, and of plenitude, and of reality, and eventually even of light and the uplifting, which is to say, Lu.
3. The power of understanding
When a bubble of understanding rises in you and opens a clearing in your perimeter, and you listen, then you realize that what elevates this moment is not what the words are saying but where they are coming from; that what penetrated your perimeter was not some hidden message but a presence. Because what a new understanding brings to you is not bits of information but a presence from beyond your walls. And this is how it makes itself present -- by speaking through you and by inspiring an intensity in you. And you cannot understand it if you only listen to the meaning of the words it is saying.
4. A Sophical moment
A sophical moment is an opening point: a new understanding loosens a stone in the walls of your perimeter and opens an opening. That is an invitation. It contains not just words and information, but the energy of inspiration that rises into you from the hidden fountains of your being. For its task is to open a doorway in your stonewall and invite you to step outside, even for a brief moment, beyond yourself to a broader reality.
5. Plenitude is not from you
Plenitude is from reality. What it gives you, if you can open yourself to receive it, is not pleasure or self-gratification, but the wakefulness that spreads through your being and that sometimes looks from the outside as love or serenity or power. Because plenitude is not of your psychology, as are satisfaction and curiosity and anger. Plenitude is not from you.
6. To recognize that you are with a larger reality
The spirit of psychology tempts us to think that we are inside ourselves, that the understandings we understand are personal interpretations we have created in our private minds. We have adopted this message, and adjusted our ways to it.
An inner revolution is needed to dissolve the image of a private enclosure and to realize that you are out there in life, that the meanings you sense in your mind are conversations between you and the voices of reality -- voices that speak in you their questions, listen to your answers and respond, wonder with you, and raise understandings in you.
This requires you to recognize -- not just theoretically but concretely -- that the voices in you are not merely your subjective invention. They are not like the personal images that your imagination weaves out of itself. It is not up to you to invent them out of nothing, or modify them according to your private whim. They speak from a larger life, they belong to horizons wider than the constricted perimeter which you call 'myself.' The mechanism called your psychology -- just like the tongue in your mouth and the vocal cords in your throat -- is only the tool through which they speak.
This is a real inner revolution -- to recognize that you are with a larger reality.
7. You are with everything
You are with every voice in the world, with everything there is to say, with everything to understand. Because you are with all the voices in the world.
You are from everything in the world, from every death and every life, from every truth and every lie. Because you are from all the fountains there are.
You are in everything there is, and everything is in you. But you always forget it, being so confined in your perimeter.
And if there is a moment of recollection, then it comes when you no longer belong to your perimeter, but to every fountains, to every voice there is.
8. An altogether different reality
That which lies outside your perimeter is not what lies inside it. It is made of an altogether different stuff. It cannot be imported into you, it cannot be translated into your ideas. But you can go out of your walls and join the movement it inspires like a dancer in a sacred dance.
9. Clearing
When you push back your self, when you contract your psychology, when a little clearing opens up in the midst of the labyrinth of your psychological mechanisms and patterns and processes, then something completely new may appear in this opening, like a new life, a new reality no longer shaped by your mechanisms and patterns and processes.
10. Underground wisdoms
Sometimes, when a free space opens up in you, and the ground is clear and the mind stands back quietly, then you can find inside things you have never imagined: strange words and wild understandings and unfamiliar visions and calls moved by unknown powers, like foreign lives that have nothing to do with your life, like underground roots that do not seem connected to the person who is you. Down at the roots there are wisdoms that have never risen to your surface, and voices that have not yet reached you.
11. The voices at the root of your perimeter
'Voices' means that you are not the creator of your universe, that it is not you who has composed the language of your thoughts and hopes and pleasures and frustrations, not you who has created the coordinates of your reality, and what you have perhaps created is only a twig on a branch, on a small tree, in a forest that had existed long before you. 'Voices' means that the sources of your familiar perimeter are not in you.
You can dwell in your perimeter and enjoy it and toil to improve it and make it cozy and successful. But you can also listen to the voices that are creating your perimeter, and search for the sources from which they have come and the many languages they speak and the many other lands they are still creating. This is called philo-sophia.
12. Listen
There are fountains in you that can speak but yet do not speak, fountains of life and of love and of powers and understanding. Sometimes they appear in your dreams and fantasies and thoughts and yearnings. Listen.
13. Listening before it is too late
A voice has life and energies and powers, because it comes from a fountain of realness: A reality has spoken it, revealing itself to the listener. But a voice can also die when severed from its source, when it turns into a mere abstraction, a fossil left behind after life has gone by. And then no amount of listening can grasp the living reality that once spoke.
