We’re continuing our reading from Love Never Faileth, Easwaran’s commentary on St. Augustine’s “Entering Into Joy”. Check out the background to this theme from last week. If you ever miss a week you can always check the Archive page to revisit any of the previous weeks’ content.
In last week’s reading, Easwaran described the benefit to our personal relationships when we can break free from our likes and dislikes. He also talked about the hard work that is involved with re-routing our energy on the internal highway of the mind. Next, he tells us how to do it: using the inspirational passages we meditate on.
How do you use passages to deepen your practice?
Have you used other passages in God Makes the Rivers to Flow to build your willpower and loosen likes and dislikes?
The excerpt below is from Love Never Faileth, by Eknath Easwaran.
We can call this long process character rebuilding. Our first character in this life has been inherited: prefabricated, if you like, for the most part by negative conditioning. In this, I am grieved to admit, most of us have precious little say. Now it is our job to rebuild our character, almost from the foundation up. The priceless advice of the mystics is that inside, at the core of our being, we already have a Resident Architect, and that our first task – in which they are more than willing to help us – is to come up with an appropriate set of blueprints.
When we meditate on passages which bear the imprint of these pure minds’ experiences of God, we find that their words are like the working drawings a contractor follows. “Let the scriptures be the countenance of God,” Augustine advises. “Look into the scriptures, the eyes of your heart on its heart.” This is exactly what we are doing in meditation when we give all our concentration to the words of an inspirational passage like this one from Augustine: we sink gradually into the heart of the author’s experience until we see through his or her eyes. At the end of this book I give a list of such passages** from scripture and the mystical giants of the Christian tradition. They make perfect blueprints for this job of character rebuilding.
**Note: We’re not listing the exact list Easwaran describes in the book – the Christian passages are listed here and you can use the “filter by type” button on the passages page to find passages from the other major faith traditions.