The Lost Art of Thinking

We all think. Right? Wrong. Few of us really think. Thinking is a lost Art.

The Art of Thinking requires the ability to permit the mind to come fully into focus on something, to search for the essence of that something. It could be a thought, a feeling, an experience, or an object. By contemplating that thought, feeling, experience, or object profoundly, the secrets of the universe open up to us.

Yet here is the Zen of Thinking. Before we can fill our mind with the contemplated "thing", we need to completely empty our mind. That is extremely difficult! The practice of Yoga and Meditation has honed the science of emptying the mind to an art. The benefit of emptying the mind is that we also release ourselves from the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and experiences that actually block our ability to think. The Zen is that the beginning of the Art of Thinking is no thinking!

Once we have emptied our mind, then we are ready to fully contemplate. Paulo Coelho wrote: "All you have to do is contemplate a simple grain of sand, and you will see in it all the marvels of creation." That quote is famous for a reason. Because it is true. When we fully contemplate even a grain of sand, we peer into the way the universe is created. We contemplate the interconnectedness of creation. We ponder the beyond creation, the spiritual reality. We loft our mind into the divine. Now that is Thinking! Fully contemplating any creation of God liberates our mind and spirit.

Shakespeare portrayed Hamlet contemplating Yorick's skull. A human skull more readily has a thought provoking power than a grain of sand, especially if the skull belonged to someone we knew. We naturally drift into a contemplation of the impermanence of life on earth and reflections on the life after death. Indeed, I think that it would be true to say that the beginning of wisdom comes from the contemplation of death. We quickly come to the thought, is this all there is or is there more after death? We begin to ponder the spiritual.

You see, it is when we ponder the spiritual that our thinking is put to the real test. Can we contemplate from what we see to what we can't see? That is where the power of the mind and the Art of Thinking rises to its fully glory. Only with the mind can we fully comprehend the spiritual reality. Anyone who denies eternal spiritual reality will be a cynical Hamlet contemplating Yorick's skull. The person who embraces the spiritual reality with their mind finds liberation from cynicism.

The power of the mind, the Art of Thinking, becomes energized with the realm of feeling. There can be no profound thought without feeling. Reality is feeling and the essence of a thing contemplated can only be grasped through feeling. That is why art, music, and mathematics have such a profound sway upon the thinking person. We can grasp truth through art, music, and mathematics that can never be grasped logically. All truth has at its core ecstasy or joy.

We have the ability, and the responsibility, to discover the truth through practicing the Art of Thinking. The ability to find and recognize the truth. Ah, yes, there is the rub! What is truth?

³⁷"You are a king, then!" said Pilate.
Jesus answered, "You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me."

³⁸"What is truth?" Pilate asked. With this he went out again to the Jews and said, "I find no basis for a charge against him. John 18:37-38 (New International Version)

Pilate said there is no way to know truth so don't bother. Jesus said the truth is within us, that the Kingdom of God is within us. Jesus taught us to have confidence in ourselves, in our ability to know the truth.

One of the key reasons we have lost the Art of Thinking is that we have lost the confidence that we are capable of discovering what is true. We feel that we need something or someone to help us understand, to tell us what to believe, to tell us what is true.

Well, here is the secret. We possess the power to know the nature of things by exercising the power of our minds to think. That's the secret. Think. We can only understand the nature of life, the purpose of life, through the naked power of the mind. We can only understand by practicing the Art of Thinking.

Finding the Source of Love

What is love? Isn't it amazing that the most important thing in the world is the least understood?

We are better acquainted with the absence of love, or the misuse of love, or the betrayal of love than we are love resplendent. Then what is the problem? Why do we have so much difficulty experiencing spectacular love?

The key question is: Where does love come from? That is an extremely baffling and confusing question. Does love come from somewhere or someone else? Actually, both are true. Love comes, ultimately from everything and everyone. Yet if we seek to make that our sole source of love, we will live a life of constant disappointment. What if the people around me are incapable of giving me the love I need? What if nature becomes hostile rather than beautiful, evoking fear rather than radiating love? We become bereft and forlorn.

Although love comes from everything and everyone, the only source of love that we can count on is from ourselves. Only when we find the source of love from within ourselves can we find a constant source not dependent upon other people and things. But that becomes a hall of mirrors, too!


We have a lot of stuff going on within ourselves that interferes with our experience of the well-spring of love deep within us. The most difficult thing to control in the universe is our mind. Our mind constantly seeks to find the course of least resistance, to find a place where there is no pain and only comfort resides. Our mind tries to create an image of ourselves that makes us happy and avoids pain. We often end up living life in an illusion rather than tapping into the well-spring of love that constantly flows deep within our soul.

Love comes from the deepest well-spring of our soul. Yet, if we stop there, we have still stopped short. If we look for love only in the depths of our soul, only in ourself, we are trying to fix on a moving point. If we look for love only within ourself, we have stopped just short of the real source of love.

The real source of love is beyond ourself. Yet the only way to find that love beyond ourself is by going through ourself. That is extremely tricky! Yet the goal is well worth the struggle. If we succeed in finding the source of love through our mind and heart, yet beyond them, we enter into the infinite source and creator of love, God. We discover God within ourselves as the portal to the infinite God who is love.


God is the source of love and the creator of love. Only when our love is set firm in God's love within ourself yet beyond ourself will we find the power to love others in a way that transforms them, that transforms ourselves.

Real love, true love, love that originates in God within and beyond us, is a revolutionary force, a creative force. When we tap into that love, we become someone who is able to love others even if we are not loved in return. We become people who can forgive those who have offended us, who have scorned our love, who have disrespected our person.

Forgiveness is the most difficult of all acts, especially when someone has violated our trust, our love, our pride. Finding the power to forgive those who have violated us is only possible when we receive our love from beyond ourself in God. During a time of violent and hateful struggle in India between Hindu and Muslim, Gandhi meet with a Hindu man who had just killed a Muslim child. He had killed him out of rage for the murder of his son by a Muslim. The Hindu sought Gandhi's help to find a way out of his torment. Gandhi told him to find a Muslim boy whose parents had been killed in the rioting and raise the boy as his own.

Surely that advice rates right up there with Solomon's judgment in the dispute between two women who both claimed the same baby. He ordered the baby cut in two, and half given to each. The mother who begged for the baby's life, asking Solomon to give it to the other, proved the real mother. Real love is the willingness to lose the person rather than see them die. (1 Kings 3:26)



Giving up your life for another is the highest form of love. As Jesus said, "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13) It is no coincidence that the Medal of Honor is given to soldiers who throw themselves on a hand grenade to save his fellow. Measure that against the act of strapping a bomb under your clothing to blow up women, children, elderly, and youth in a crowded market place.

Most of us count on others to feel love; our parents, our brothers and sisters, our children, our friends. If some how they do not show us love, we feel unloved, we become depressed and angry or withdrawn. Most violent crimes are between people who know each other, often because one feels unloved or their love has been violated.

Yet, when we know the truth, that love comes from within ourself, even beyond ourself, rather than from others, we focus on our power to love rather than on being loved. We understand that the greatest transforming power in the world is love. We realize that we possess the power to transform others and ourselves through the power of love. Rather than
victims who are unloved, we are champions of love who change the world around us through that power.

All You Need Is Love

North Korea tested a nuclear bomb and a few missiles. They revoked the truce in place since 1953. Nuclear war on the Korean peninsula is looming. Pakistan has counter attacked the Taliban, holding them off for the time being from conquering Islamabad and capturing its nuclear arsenal. Iran marches steadily and rapidly toward creating its own nuclear missiles. Israel has pledged to strike before that happens. Sure sounds like Armageddon to me.

The nuclear drama is taking place with the backdrop of a world wide global depression. The world's governments have been acting quickly to avert a complete meltdown of the financial institutions. Whether we will or not remains to be seen.

The Swine Flu has sent fear through the world's communities. WHO rang the alarm bell. It had the appearance of a false alarm, bringing criticism upon its leaders who assure us a pandemic will happen.

What in the world is happening? Are we witnessing the end of the world? No. Just the approach of the end of history. Many have designated 2012 as the year history ends.

What does that mean, the end of history? It sure sounds a lot like the end of the world. The end of history denotes a monumental turning point in our communal life on the earth. Some have called it dooms day and others the beginning of the Kingdom of God.

In either case, the end of history is a turning point. We face several enormous challenges before 2012. How we deal with them will determine whether we experience an apocalypse or a step over the threshold into the kingdom of God.

The central challenge is whether or not we can love one another. I know, that sounds a lot like the hippie slogan of the 1960s. Yet it really does come down to that. Can we love, forgive, and embrace one another? Can we live in peace in mutual prosperity, community, and mutual love?

We are at a turning point, a decisive moment of history. We have in our hands the power to turn the earth into a cinder or into a Garden of Eden. We have the ability to herald the angels of peace or the angels of destruction. Everything is in our hands. Love. "All you need is love" as the Beatles sang.

Who are the children of peace? The children of peace are the children of God. Who are the children of God? The children of God are the followers of Krishna, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-tzu, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the Baihai Báb, Joseph Smith, Sun Myung Moon, and on and on. All true religious leaders teach love of God and love of each other. We have teachings enough to live in peace if each of us takes the religious teachings we hold dear and live them.

North Korea poses an especially difficult challenge. A communist atheistic totalitarian dictatorship on the verge of possessing a quiver full of nuclear arrows, love may not be enough to disarm them. The united world community may have to devastate North Korea before it harms its neighbors.

One way or another, when we celebrate the new year 2012, we will have crossed the threshold of a new history, the era of cooperation among the nations and religions of the world. That will not come automatically. We will have decades of struggle to see a coming together of the children of God of all stripes. God and the angelic world will help. They have decided that there is no turning back. We will see the Kingdom of God on the earth, even if we have to experience nuclear war, plague, and famine along the way.