#thesearchformeaning

[parabola-magazine]

“As often as the mind is outgoing, so often it should be turned within.” —Sri Ramana Maharshi quoted under ARCS in PARABOLA, Volume X, No.3: The Body

Pictured: The Egyptian statue of Chephren (Khafre), 26th century B.C.E. Cairo Museum, Egypt. Photograph by G. Dagli Orti. The photograph was used on our cover for PARABOLA, VOL. 15:2: Attention, Summer 1990

[crashinglybeautiful]

"I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect." —Jack Kerouac’s Golden Eternity

Pictured:  Jack Kerouac, Face of the Buddha, 1958 Pencil on paper.

[parabola-magazine]

“Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond; too arrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have its way. It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition; for the process involves a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of the gramaphone within. Those who do this, discover that they have lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world of morning-glory: where every tit-mouse is a celestial messenger, and every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of life.”

—Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism, 1915

Pictured: Odilon Redon, The Spring (Le Printemps), Tempera on canvas, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia

Our Spring 2017 Issue: “The Search for Meaning” is now available in bookstores and online. Visit us at https://parabola.org/

[parabola-magazine]

"We have subtle subconscious faculties we are not using. Beyond the limited analytic intellect is a vast realm of mind that includes psychic and extrasensory abilities; intuition; wisdom; a sense of unity; aesthetic, qualitative and creative faculties; and image-forming and symbolic capacities. Though these faculties are many, we give them a single name with some justification for they are working best when they are in concert. They comprise a mind, moreover, in spontaneous connection to the cosmic mind. This total mind we call 'heart.'” 

—Kabir Helminski quoted in "The Way of the Heart," by Cynthia Bourgeault in our Spring 2017 Issue: “The Search for Meaning” now available in bookstores and online.

Pictured: ”The Weighing of the Heart” from the Book of the Dead of Ani. c. 1300 B.C. British Museum

[parabola-magazine]

"American materialism has affected the spiritual path deeply—manifesting in seeking magical states, instant gratification, and a shallow, results-driven spirituality. Genuine search places us in the eye of the tiger. It is raw and an anathema to our ego. It demands rigor and discipline, and the striving towards impartial self-observation which brings in its train a certain kind of suffering and discomfort. Genuine spiritual growth is fundamentally transformative, not merely a rearrangement of our personalities or an increased ability to meet the demands of life. It is learning to serve a different master, our search for higher consciousness and for the awakening of conscience, and placing our ego or our conditioned personality in a secondary, not primary, role." —David Ulrich

From a compendium to our latest Spring Issue: The Search for Meaning. If you enjoy this piece, consider subscribing at http://parabola.org/

Visit David Ulrich’s extraordinary photography portfolio on our website as well.

Photograph by David Ulrich, Night Blooming Cereus, Honolulu 2015

[parabola-magazine]

“To find out the true meaning of happiness, we must explore the river of self-knowledge....Is there a source to a stream? Every drop of water from the beginning to the end makes a river. To imagine that we will find happiness at the source is mistaken. It is to be found where you are on the river of self-knowledge.” —Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti, (HarperOne, 1995) Our Summer 2017 Issue, HAPPINESS is now on newsstands and online! Subscribe now! Photograph by Julia Caesar Unsplash.com

[grushenko]

“Vocation to Solitude — To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls up on that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars… to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into the bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of life into a living and vigilant silence.” —Thomas Merton from "Thoughts In Solitude" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956). Pictured: Odilon Redon, Silence, 1900, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, NY, USA @parabolamagazine #silence #TheSearchForMeaning #ThomasMerton #spiritualpractice https://www.instagram.com/p/B12t7JbhQhr/?igshid=c5qt4gu242s0

[romero-molina-blog]

#Repost @parabolamagazine with @get_repost ・・・ "We clutter the earth with our inventions, never dreaming that possibly they are unnecessary - or disadvantageous. We devise astounding means of communication, but do we communicate with one another? We move our bodies to and fro at incredible speeds, but do we really leave the spot we started from? Mentally, morally, spiritually, we are fettered. What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning?" —Henry Miller, "The World of Sex," (Penguin Modern Classics, first published in 1940) #parabolammagazine #themiraculous #henrymiller #TheSearchForMeaning