freedom

sovereignity

Reverence hasn't been chosen yet, so I'll choose it.

beauty, magic, sustenance

No, not just for one but for everyone.

Quote:

Words, sounds and so on can be a strange business. Quite apart from the fact that they can have a particular and very evocative meaning for us as a result of past life events, how we respond can depend a lot  on our frame of mind too.

When we're feeling intense and preoccupied so that it's mostly the intellect in play they can just roll over us with little affect. Other times when we're emotionally open and receiving via the heart the same word or sound or whatever can have such a  powerful impact - can trigger all sorts of emotion, and can even reduce us to tears.

That's my experience anyway.

The 'hook' or the bit that catches us, it's pretty much indescribable. Pure magic. It just is....

Now we're getting there. Perhaps it's only in silence that we can truly intuit meaning, and it's this that leads to the heart or the emotional response. A word is just a sound, and remains only that when we hear with a closed mind.

It can on the other hand in the right circumstances trigger such a depth of emotion and knowing.

You've all I'm sure heard of the the 'ah ha' moment. Of the way that a beautiful vista (classically cresting a mountain ridge to look down into a very pretty valley) can lead to our resting entirely in the moment. The intellect is stopped - is left unable to judge, comment or otherwise dismiss what's in front of it, and in the resulting silence there's nothing but the unimpeded direct experience of its 'isness'.   

Its beauty, its godliness, its aliveness, it's magic as a system supporting all forms of life, and our connection with everything can shift in this silence from (if it comes into awareness at all) an intellectual concept to something we truly experience and know.

A mind dominated by intellect and conceptual thought may in that situation see and feel nothing from the heart side - but perhaps be dominated only by the thought that here's a money making opportunity in the form of a forest and it's inhabitants ready to be exploited. Or more simply by the thought 'bloody hell, another tend miles to walk'.

This is the eye of the needle, the issue we all struggle with throughout life. We become so pre-occupied with our self interested intellectual machinations and internal dialogue (our reality tunnels) that our ability to connect with the heart, the big picture and the goodness of life is obscured. 

It perhaps illustrates the importance of bringing space and silence in our lives through meditation, prayer, practice of mindfulness and the like, and the utter futility of seeking spiritual progress through idle (if absorbing) chatter and by solely intellectual means.....