The Enlightening Pleasure of Writing by Hand

Time slows. Space expands. Silence blooms.

Dear Living Dark reader,

Consider this a micro-post. It’s something that surfaced today during the very early hours when, as sometimes happens, my regular morning act of sitting in meditation for half an hour or so was replaced by the spontaneous decision to extend my private reading and writing time. I was reading and annotating a book—The Awareness of Self-Discovery, by the late American spiritual teacher/writer William Samuels—and was focused on this passage from a personal letter that Samuels wrote to a friend and inquirer on the subject of not being disturbed by appearances and the shapes they assume, since you and I are the absolute Being and Awareness in which they all arise:

We do not do away with the images we do not like: we do not alter them to fit a prescribed picture....We see them as they are—just sights being sights.

Every form is Isness being form, Isness is the value—not the image-form out there! So we learn to stand before every picture nmoved, our equanimity undisturbe…