The most valuable aspect of friendship, literature, and every spontaneous, and unexpected, furrawn is that strangers slowly pull away the veil of anonymity. Conversations providing insight into our psychology is a banality, but meditation is the root of all conversations. When we converse deeply, honestly, and without distractions we are listening to ourselves just as much as we are taking in the words of the other person. A higher life comes from carrying these conversations, or dialogues, into our private life; we must be able to listen in order for us to change. My aunt said, “God speaks in whispers”, at the tender age of seven I sat outside and listened to the world happening around me.
I heard nothing but the wind pulling the trees, cars honking and the people inside waving, dogs barking, basketballs bouncing as kids laughed and joked on their way to the park. However, there was no burning bush, no angel came from the sky, there was no thunders, lightning flashes, or the sound of the horn and the mountain smoking. I heard nothing, but my own breathe. I am under the impression that everything I heard was God. With maturation I was able to understand that we hear the world in solitude. Through silence we are being guided towards a higher life. In order to embrace change we must learn to walk this world with as little noise as possible. Henry David Thoreau speaks on love and listening to our inner voice saying:
Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude. It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover what God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know what I mean.
Through our habits we reveal our desires, and one must use discipline to shift their life. Our habits can either stunt our growth or elevate our lives. We change through allowing our newer selves to blossom, for holding onto our old selves damages our perception of the present. We are forever being renewed, reborn, and remade through the habits that elevate us. Our habits are the root of our problems, and with diligence, bravery, and patience we can solve them. We must create wisdom through acting on the knowledge of practices that enhance our spiritual growth. Henry David Thoreau speaks on love and about the revelation of habits saying:
Accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves. The mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. The outward is only the outside of that which is within. Men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by them; they are their true clothes.
We are giving loyalty to illusions. The illusions produced by our minds and those produced by the state. We are obligated to walk down the path of enlightenment and overcome every degenerative through, every fear that consumes our bodies, and every doubt that causes rigor-mortis. These illusions are damaging and dangerous, for we sit under the same moon as the greatest men and women to every pick up a pen, to every place their feet into the earth, and to ever decide they will carve something out of this life. Change comes from the pursuit of something greater than ourselves. Henry David Thoreau teaches us the importance of pursuing a path saying:
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to our progress. I say let your affairs be as two or three, not a hundred or a thousand. And keep your accounts on your thumb nail. Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. Things do not change; we change.
“Probe the earth to see where your main roots run,” Thoreau advises. “Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.” Yet he is quick to point out that he cannot live up to all his own ideals. “These things I say; other things I do,” he confesses. “I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.”
These letters make it plain that he could in fact be a warm and attentive friend. A wonderful book that is filled with Henry David Thoreau perspective On Love. Follow this essay up with Henry Millers opinions of the purpose of marriage.
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