Hymns to an unknown God : awakening the spirit in everyday life by Keen Sam

Author:Keen, Sam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mind, body, spirit: mysticism & self-awareness, Psychology, Inspirational, Men's Studies - General, Spirituality - General, Social Science / Men's Studies, Spiritual life
Publisher: New York : Bantam Books
Published: 1995-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

copalians, don't shake theii assi I down and get dirty," and

Methodists ad as it they, like the God oi theii Official Discipline, should be "without body, parts 01 passions

B) contrast, as
thin Darb) Noel. m\ professoi oi comparative religions at Harvard, always reminded ns "Primitive religion is not believed It is danced" Most Eastern religions have developed martial arts— jujitsu, kung fu, aikido, tai chi—thai keep the body-spirit lithe and teach the faithful to resist evil in a nonviolent mannei

From tunc CO tunc. I have practiced formal sitting meditation and

have dabbled in martial arts. But my most fruitful moving meditation has always been the long walk.

Walking is an essential discipline or thought and spirit. My soul is a traveler afoot in the world. Like Aristotle (whose school was called Peripatetic, after the covered walkway along which he strolled while teaching), I cannot think clearly if I remain too long sedentary. I believe Nietzsche only slightly overstated the case when, coming across a passage in which Flaubert wrote, "One can only think and write when one is seated," he replied, "There I have caught you, you nihilist! The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value." I also suspect Immanuel Kant might have been able to follow The Critique of Pure Reason with an Ode to Ecstasy, had he devia'ed from his habit of taking only a single walk along the same path at the same time each day.

For me, sitting meditation, like repentance, is work that requires a sizable amount of concentration, soul-searching, and willpower. Walking, by contrast, is pure grace, an effortless art that produces surprising moments of spontaneous self-transcendence.

When I walk, my mind leaps ahead, skips steps, and presents me with images and ideas out of nowhere. With surprising regularity the thoughts that come to me when I am in a long hike in the hills contain the breakthrough insights I have not been able to reach after weeks of hard intellectual or emotional work. The solutions to my problems alwavs arrive from elsewhere.

Walking re-minds me that my Being is becoming. I'm always going, never arriving. I am no static substance. I have no identity that will not be lost and found and lost again. We once thought that matter was solid and static; we now know "it" to be moving patterns. Substance is

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