JOY To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous; to have allowed ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear - the dropping away of the anxious worried self, felt like a thankful death itself: a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness itself and the vulnerability of joy’s imminent loss, felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of the ocean, the sky, of two people dancing at sunset- and from nowhere, a sudden surge from the unknown tide now filling our lives - I was here and you were here - and together we made a world. Excerpt from ‘JOY’ From CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. © David Whyte

After reading the transcript of last Wednesday's meeting the following words written by Franciscus van Assisi (1181-1226) came to mind. "Give me the courage to change the things I can change. Give me the wisdom to accept the things I can not change. Give me insight to recognize the difference between the two." This insight is the awareness of the realization of contraction, expansion and the gapless gap in between them. This realization is applicable for a self and no-self, duality and non-duality, past and future, object and subject, outside and inside, life and death, light and darkness, nothing and everything... As a human being we are never fully in the gapless gap, that's impossible. When a sperm cell and an egg merge, expansion and contraction are set in motion. Every heartbeat and every breath has an expansion and a contraction. Our perception is also a contraction and expansion. Who is doing the perception? There is nobody doing anything in between the duality that we experience in so many fields of our experience. If you can experience the everlasting fleeting present moment 'you' will be able to see the beauty of the fractal of life. You will see the self and you will see the no-self without time playing a role. The gapless gap is the continuation of the flow of life regardless of what you do or don't do. That doesn't mean that you don't have to do anything, it means that by seeing the self for what it really is you see the joy and beauty of the never ending fractal. Everyone sees the everlasting fleeting present moment from their 'own' perspective of a 'self'. The pitfall of the self is believing it is a separate entity living on this beautiful planet we call earth. With what I think, wright or do I can influence the perspective of another self but with the wisdom and insight of oneness I realize that by changing my perspective or perception and having a dialogue about it with 'other selves', like we are doing right now, we can make a difference in the 'reality' we perceive in our social world. So yes we need courage, wisdom and insight to be able to see that there is no difference between you and me.