YOU told me that you attended a Quaker meeting and as I remember, that they sat in silence and seemed to be thinking. I said in effect that they were not thinking but emptying themselves. I found a very good description of the practice and copy it on the other side. I do not use the phrase "spiritual reality" but prefer "the reality behind appearances."
In meeting for worship, we consciously decide to enter worship, clear our minds of extraneous thoughts, compose our restless bodies, and concentrate with our whole mind on the problem of discovering spiritual reality. In this process a number of important elements enter us. First we adopt an attitude of openness; we become uninhibited receivers, not passive but tuned and concentrated. Secondly, we adopt the frame of mind that sees us as a part of a larger scheme and tries to see examples of this in nature, and our relations with others.
William D. Lotspeich, Friends Journal, Sept. 1, 1962
Remember what the Bhagavad Gita says: Work for the work's sake and not for the fruits.
It is wonderful of you, and fortunate, too, that you get something out of the Yin and Yang concept. It approaches reality by a method very different from ours, but very helpful and suggestive.
As to impartial love—the primary injunction is "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Of course, you do not love yourself with the ordinary meaning which we give to the word 'love', but you do love yourself, feel reverence, in view of your potentiality of becoming an infinitely small part of the whole. That is the way to love other people, whether you like them or not. As a matter of fact, the other man is really a part of you, whether you like it or not. "No man is an island." In other words, we are made what we are physically not only by what the race has experienced in its long history, but also by the spirit of the times. One phase of it is inherent in Buber's idea of 'I and Thou'. This is a little hard to understand, but even Bronson Alcott has said that egotists cannot converse, but talk only to themselves. But, as you say, everything depends upon attention and attitude. As the Hindus say, "those who worship the Devas, come to the Devas."
The difference between animal mentality and human mentality is that the human mind can not only react to each impression but can put two and two together and recogmize that each separate incident is only part of a whole. The struggle is, of course, not only to recogmize this mentally but, as you say, to feel it in yourself. When it comes to remembering this necessity I call attention to the suggestion of William James, who said that every day we ought to do something that we do not want to do, just to develop the ability to struggle with a real obstacle when we meet it, as we are sure to do. I believe that the whole of life is this struggle. We must do our little bit, but we must not feel pessimistic and try to hasten matters because that is simply a human attempt to hasten prematurely the coming of the Kingdom of God and, in fact, an attempt to eliminate the struggle which is life. All each of us has to do is meet the facts of life so that we may be able to empty ourselves and let something which is really more than ourself, or at least, a self which we cannot humanly realize, come in.
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