Quotes about Communion

To make love is to become like this infant again.  We grope with our mouths toward the body of another being, whom we trust, who takes us in her arms.  We rock together with this loved one.  We move beyond speech.  Our bodies move past all the controls we have learned.  We cry out in ecstasy, in feeling.  We are back in a natural world before culture tried to erase our experience of nature.  In this world, to touch another is to express love; there is no idea apart from feeling, and no feeling which does not ring through our bodies and our souls at once.

True communication is communion―the realization of oneness, which is love.

The purified, integrated mind, so perfected in its own understanding, lives in close communion with the soul radiance so that light becomes the constant companion of the mind.

We are taught to take the bread
into our bodies
as proof of Jesus's body...

Suddenly, we are wed
and I am just as surprised as you
that marriage has become our bread...

Look. I don't know what
would help me believe
that we have become sacred...

If that was Easter
then the church was full
as we stood against the wall

praying for an empty pew.
If that was Easter
then I rose that morning

in love with you
though I rise every morning
from the water, more or less

in love with you.
If that was Easter
then you were asked

to be the Eucharistic minister.
If that was Easter
then you surprised me

by placing salmon on my tongue.
Then I surprised you
by swallowing it whole.

Amen, amen, amen.

And if, as I pass,
I should look you in the eye,
do not be afraid: I want
only to glimpse the emptiness
at the center of your heart,
I want to reach for you
because I know,
as you do, we might never have met.

Maybe people share their secret selves with me because they sense it won't make me feel uncomfortable.  Quite the contrary.  I always feel like I've experienced a miracle when it happens.  I guess, because to me, to reveal one's true self, one's spirit self, is to reveal God.

What if a man cannot be made to say anything?

How do you learn his hidden nature?

I sit in front of him in silence,
and set up a ladder made of patience,
and if in his presence a language from beyond joy
and beyond grief begins to pour from MY chest,
I know that his soul is as deep and bright
as the star Canopus rising over Yemen.
And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm
of words sweeping down, I know HIM from what I say,
and how I say it, because there is a window open
between us, mixing the night air of our beings.

We meet at this appointed time,
but the text says, 'Lovers pray constantly'

Once a day, once a week, five times an hour,
is not enough.  Fish like we are
need the ocean around us!

Do camel bells say, 'Let's meet back here Thursday night?'
Ridiculous!  They jingle
together continuously,
talking while the camel walks.

Many things must be left unsaid, because it's late,
but whatever conversation we haven't had tonight,
we'll have tomorrow.

A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one's husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.

Out beyond ideas of
wrong-doing and right-doing
There is a field
I'll meet you there
 
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase,
each other
doesn't make any sense.

Friend, there's a window that opens from heart to heart, and there are ways of closing it completely, not a needle's eye of access.  Open or shut; both ways are sometimes appropriate.

The Path to Union

By means of Invocation, the being awakens,
and awakening becomes fullness.

By means of balancing, fullness becomes
internal wholeness.

By virtue of exteriorized attention, internal
wholeness becomes Communion.

By virtue of self-forgetfulness, Communion
becomes Union.

Call forth the sacredness of the earth now, the holiness of the living, breathing planet and breathe with the earth, blessing and being blessed as the light of the earth flows to you and as the light of your own heart flows to the beloved earth. There is a partnership, a communion between you and the land, between the land and you. This runs deep beneath the streets, deep beneath the buildings, deep throughout and beneath the seas. The earth is sacred. The earth is our mother; we must take care of her.

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.

Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls!

When listening to another person, don't just listen with your mind, listen with your whole body. Feel the energy field of your inner body as you listen.That takes attention away from thinking and creates a still space that enables you to truly listen without the mind interfering. You are giving the other person space - space to be. It is the most precious gift you can give. Most people don't know how to listen because the major part of listening is taken up by thinking. They pay more attention to that than what the other person is saying, and none at all to what really matters: the Being of the other person underneath the words and the mind. Of course you cannot feel someone else's Being except through your own. This is the beginning of the realization of oneness, which is love. At the deepest level of Being, you are one with all that.

Most human relationships consist mainly of minds interacting with each other, not of human beings communicating, being in communion. No relationship can thrive in that way, and that is why there is so much conflict in relationships. When the mind is running your life, conflict, strife, and problems are inevitable. Being in touch with your inner body creates a clear space of no-mind within which the relationship can flower.

There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk.

KW:  Fred's first criticism had to do with the four drives of any holon.  In SES, I listed these as agency (horizontal individuation) and communion (horizontal linking), and self-transcendence (vertically moving up) and self-dissolution (vertically moving down).  Fred pointed out that the first three drives were, correctly, the healthy version of those drives; but for the fourth drive, I had incorrectly given the pathological version of the descending drive.  The healthy downward drive -- the drive of the higher to embrace and enfold the lower, which I call agape or compassion, or what might be called self-immanence (the dialectical opposite of self-transcendence) -- I actually gave as thanatos, which is not the embrace of the lower by the higher but the dissolution or regression of the higher to the lower.  When it came to vertically moving upward, I had correctly given that as Eros or self-transcendence, seeking out higher and wider wholeness.  The pathological version of Eros is phobos, which is not the transcendence of the lower but the repression of the lower.  But when it came to vertically moving downward, instead of giving the healthy agape -- where the higher embraces, enfolds, and "loves" the lower, as a molecule embraces its atoms -- I inadvertantly gave the pathological thanatos, where the higher merely dissolves into the lower, dies or decomposes (e.g., the molecules dissipate into their constitutive atoms).  So the four drives should be agency and communion, and self-transcendence and self-immanence (not self-dissolution).

This is a brilliant criticism, and of the hundreds of thousands of people who went over those ideas, only Fred spotted it.  (Incidentally, I still sometimes list the fourth drive as self-dissolution, simply because that is so much easier to understand in an introductory statement.  But my actual position should now be clear, thanks to Fred...