There Are Many Rafts
Whenever God means to make a man great, he always breaks him first.
~ Charles Spurgeon
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My teachings are a raft, meant to help you cross over the river. Once you reach the other shore, set the raft down and go on with your life.
~ Buddha
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Jung taught me that you must always watch what your body does when you don’t understand an analysand. Your body often tells you what’s the matter.
~ Marie-Louise von Franz
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My daughter used to wake my toddler granddaughter each morning and ask her about her dreams. She had a magical way about her, and wanted to connect with the magic of her daughter Mika. The thought of these two beautiful creatures lying in bed together sharing their dreams made my heart and the hearts of all my ancestors thump.
~ Laura Lentz
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Spirituality is the tuning of the heart. One can obtain it neither by study nor by piety.
~ Hazrat Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan
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What an irony it is that these living beings whose shade we sit in,
whose fruit we eat, whose limbs we climb, whose roots we water, to
whom most of us rarely give a second thought, are so poorly
understood.
~ Jim Robbins — The Man Who Planted Trees
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There are many ironies in the way we live, but the central one is the mistuned heart. Everything else comes out of that, our disconnection from nature, our distance from our own bodies and therefore from each other, our separation by race, beliefs and culture, and our fear of what’s inside us.
Our world is crisscrossed by barriers we’re not supposed to traverse because of our fears of ‘the other.’ It’s very hard for one variety of humans to overcome their certainty that they are superior and more correct in their humanness than other groups of humans. But it’s a question of heart-centered intelligence.
It’s easy to persuade a human being whose heart is undeveloped to fear difference. How much insight is lost because of our failure to venture outside of our mental parameters? How much of our humanity is lost to the world because of our unconscious indifference to nature? How shocked would we be if we could see our own cruelty for once?
We live within a modern society that considers it only right and proper to consume the natural world for profit, the quicker the better. The logic of personal profit leaves out the laws of nature, unfortunately, creating suffering and sickness further down the line as a result.
We may not see the connection because it happens somewhat slowly, but if we actually wanted to see it we would. The fact is we don’t want to see it because we are reaping short term profits from the situation as it is. We don’t want to face the moral and practical considerations of the truth.
A culture whose denizens live from the neck up is disconnected from the body and from wisdom of the heart. The implications for the planet, for the earth and its children, are dire. A culture that has taken a distance from heart and body wisdom is a loose cannon rolling around on the cosmic deck. None of us wants to contribute to this giant shipwreck but we are dragged into it just by being an upstanding citizen.
Will the culture have to be broken for the same reason individuals have to be broken, so that it recognizes its falseness and cures it at the heart level? That sounds catastrophic, but is there another way? Can we gradually transition to a culture of wisdom and reintegration into the sacred web of life? How would that happen?
I do think it’s true that people are starting to wake up, but the inertia and resistance of the old ways have deep roots and a long history. Those of us who have even an inkling of the stakes are needed to lend a hand.
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Volume five of my series Meditations on Living is now published on Amazon. If you read it, please leave a review.
Here are three reviews of my writing:
David Price has become one of my favorite writers once I discovered his work on the Medium site a few years ago. I’m amazed at how he continually is able to spark my consciousness with thoughts, ideas and observations of our world and the range of possibilities in the human experience. The best way to sum it up might be to say that through his words and images, Mr Price has a knack for providing rich sustenance for the human soul.
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Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition
A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.
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This book encourages in the true sense of that word as no other I have known the creative process in oneself as spiritual necessity. David Price’s writing is beautifully alive, articulate, kind. The form is prose; the feel is poetic, flowing, metaphoric. There is not a dry line in it. I heartily recommend it to anyone who longs to crack the shell around their own creativity, to become more sensitive, creative, and alive themselves.
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Plus this comment:
There is something about your writing, an ineffable quality I can’t quite place. It’s brilliant.
— Shain Thomas
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It is this version:
