I know that many people are feeling worried, anxious and unsettled these days. The world can be a scary place, and human beings are fragile organisms, vulnerable to all kinds of pain and painful circumstances. We naturally seek security, comfort and control, and in search of this, we often turn to addictive pleasures, comforting beliefs and obsessive thinking, none of which really deliver the well-being and the certainty for which we long…

Sometimes it eludes us and the darkness overtakes us, but if we stop and allow everything to be just as it is, if we tune in to the stillness at the very heart of our being, our apparently separate self may dissolve into the boundless aware presence that we truly are. We may discover that the “me” who seems to be suffering, or alternately “getting it” and “losing it,” is nothing more than a mirage, and that the darkness has no actual substance…

We can get very lost in trying to figure this all out mentally, trying to understand it, grasp it, get control of it, and so on. But the essence of this so-called awakening is very, very, very simple. It’s not complicated, mysterious or exotic. It doesn’t require years of training and study. It’s not in the future or the past.

It’s right here in the sounds of rain, the taste of tea, the dazzling light sparkling on the still bare branches, the aware presence beholding it all, the openness of being. It’s nothing other than this one bottomless, centerless moment that is what we are, this wholeness that has no outside or inside, this presence that is most intimate, closer than close, and at the same time, boundless and all-inclusive…

Perhaps this is what the world needs more than anything else—human beings waking up from the powerful hypnotic trance of ideology, division and apparent separation, waking up to the wholeness and the unconditional love that is at the heart of our being. It may seem that we are small and insignificant, and that this kind of devotion to presence can’t possibly affect the world at large. But we’re actually not small. Each and every drop contains and affects the whole.

Joan Tollifson, from her Substack

Sometimes the darkness does overtake us, even at the best of times; and this is not the best of times, as the news media delight to remind us. (You can’t blame them: it’s in their perfectly understandable commercial interest to keep our hearts in our mouths.)

Of course the trouble is that one feels so helpless; there is little or nothing one can do, practically, and absent a convincing doctrine of supernatural intervention, it doesn’t seem to make sense to pray – though this may actually be the heart’s instinct, interestingly enough. But practice, once one stops telling oneself that it is useless, is in fact anything but useless, as Tollifson explains. The world’s idea of “useful” ain’t necessarily so. We are told that a president or his sidekick “matter”; a naval rating, a junior librarian, a pensioner in a retirement community, don’t matter at all. It isn’t true.

Each of us is a human being; each of us is a precious and only life; each of us “contains and affects the whole” just as much as any other. There is no such thing as an insignificant person. Waking up from the nightmare sleep of either/or, left/right, right/wrong; waking up to the bright ground of what is, to the inextinguishable love at the very heart of being itself… Maybe, after all, “[m]ore things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of…”* or by something very like contemplative prayer, at any rate.

*Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King