The Youtube video's ID is
yX0eAT7DNCY
Video:
A man once said "We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time."
That man was T.S. Eliot in his poem
Little Gidding, the last of four poems making up his
Four Quartets. The others are:
Burnt Norton,
East Coker, and
The Dry Salvages.
Video:
But it must be asked,
what is it that we shall find,
back at the beginning?
East Coker:
In my beginning is my end.
Video:
We come into this world filled with the
questions of what lies around us,
and from each waking breath we exhale this curiosity.
Science, mathematics, geography.
When we grow old enough, we name and gather
these pursuits into schools, ever seeking to understand more.
East Coker:
... Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
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We travel the world looking for new experiences,
pushing outwards the boundaries
of what has already been known.
And yet, for all our finding,
have we become lost?
have we lost the daring to adventure within?
East Coker:
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
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When all is stripped away and we are left bare,
what will the silence whisper?
For therin lies the beginning.
East Coker:
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.
...
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
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We are the vast uncharted wilderness.
We are the makers of history,
the spark of all fiery life,
the image bearers of the divine.
Burnt Norton:
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
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Within our each and every identity,
we contain the vastness of all human experience
and if we have the courage to go inward,
to delve into our self,
to live in the full knowledge of what we are ...
is that not the journey most rewarding?
East Coker:
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
Video:
Though life roars all around,
step into the silence that solitude brings,
and we may well hear the voice of God,
whispering, beckoning.
The Dry Salvages:
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.
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Will you come away to the mountains?
It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened,
for the way is harsh to the feet of the untraveled.
The Dry Salvages:
Fare forward.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.
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But,
will you come?
LG:
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
