Birth in Beauty

Wednesday night I participated in a session of deep spiritual sharing. I came home and naturally tuned in to comments on the Presidential debate, which had just taken place. A person needs to keep abreast of events, right? Well, in one way, yes; in another way, no! What we need to keep abreast of, is our deepest self. Before tuning in to anything else, let's make sure we're in tune with that. 

This is the paradoxical Sufi advice that we should "die before we die." That is, we should see the world and our life from a perspective that fully understands how short, how evanescent is the life that we're living. We have X minutes or hours remaining to us. How can we best employ those minutes or hours? When I think about my situation in that way—when I "meditate on my bones," as Buddhists recommend—my feeling about my life changes dramatically. I care less about "current events," and much more about sharing what I think is deepest and potentially most valuable, within me. About "giving birth," as Plato puts it in the Symposium, to whatever is truly beautiful. Nothing else is even remotely as important as this.