The Way Forward

“Duality, then, is informed by the oppositions that meet at this threshold. I would argue that an authentic life is a life that is aware of and willing to engage its own oppositions…. Sometimes, people who are very vociferous and moralistic are people who have erased the tug of opposition from their lives. They have little sense of the otherness that suffuses and surrounds them. Thus, they can allow themselves all kinds of moral platitudes and even moral judgments of others. It is lonely sometimes to hear them talk because, in their certainty, you can hear the hollow echo of a life only half-lived….One of the greatest duties of post-modern culture at the end of this millennium is to try to bring the personal and the communal, the individual and the universal, together.”

John O’Donohue in a talk delivered for “The Open Mind” published in Walking in Wonder by John Quinn and John O’Donohue


The eye with which God sees me
is the same eye with which I see God.
God’s eye and my eye are one eye.
One seeing, one knowing, one loving.”

Meister Eckhart

There is a space of potential presence where we can reside in peace with another even if we cannot be with them in any other place: in God’s eye. I think this space is akin to O’Donohue’s “threshold.”

Photo Credit: https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E1%BA%ADp_tin:Yin_and_Yang_symbol.svg

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