Teaching, Living, and Learning: RAYS OF THE SUN

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

RAYS OF THE SUN

(written in October, 2002)

One-ness is the hardest mystery to understand, but it is also the most important. “Never two, but one” – that’s the grand truth that I must contemplate as I go about my teaching today. My scholars and colleagues and I are not separate from each other. We are not separate, distinct physical beings engaged in a struggle to get and protect. That’s the universally accepted belief, but it’s simply not true. Today, all that will be happening is the unfoldment of thought in the present moment. Each present moment, a thought will be causing everything to happen. For convenience sake, we call it “my” thought or “Jimmy’s” thought or “Anna’s” thought, but it’s all really just thought in an infinite universe of thought. That’s why the sun is a good comparison. In my classroom today, the infinite sun of Thought (sometimes called God) will be shining, and my scholars and I will be the rays of that sun. There won’t be many separate suns – just the rays of the one infinite sun.

MP3 File

No comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

I found this quote (below) in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. She's describing Fanny Price's home at Mansfield, but the words exactly remind me of the atmosphere I try to maintain in my classroom:
" ... no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence, was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance; everybody's feelings were consulted."

...........

The following quote is from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I would like my classroom to be like Dr. Strong's school:

"Dr. Strong's was an excellent school...It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honor and good faith of the [students], and an avowed intention to rely on their possession of these qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which worked wonders. We all felt that we had a share in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity."

If I replaced "agent" with "teacher", this passage from a short story might, I hope, describe me in my classroom:
"The agent spent his days in following what seemed to many observers to be only a dull routine, but all his steadiness of purpose, all his simple intentness, all his gifts of strategy and powers of foresight, and of turning an interruption into an opportunity, were brought to bear upon this dull routine with a keen pleasure."
-- from "The Gray Mills of Farley" by Sarah Orne Jewett