did Gautama / Buddha set a timer when he sat for meditation?
did Jesus have an agenda when he went to the desert to pray and feel the breeze? after all, the ancients thought the breeze was the ‘holy spirit,’ Yahweh!
did Sweet Lady J say, ‘tonight we only have a couple minutes to tell stories because there are more important things to do?’
did Samuel and the ‘misfits’ that became the biblical prophets have a length of time they allowed themselves to feel the ecstatic vibe with their naked bodies on the mountain and the wild wind? after all, the Hebrew word we translate as ‘prophet’ actually means ‘ecstatic’ in Hebrew!
did 2nd Isaiah — likely a woman — have to stop the poems from coming from her wild ways of experiencing God — even as Mother! in the Bible! — because she had more important things to do as she and her fellow citizens were exiled in Babylon?
did Rumi have a schedule for how long he looked in Shams’ eyes each day, for how long he would meditate and feel God (Love, as Rumi names God), for how long he would whirl and dance between meditations?
did Muhammed tell God to stop speaking the poems that became the Quran because he had something else more important to do?
did the first people in the Indus River Valley to get blissed out by watching the river — the people said to have created ‘yoga’ — decide to create a life-plan for themselves to achieve all their goals?
. . . perhaps the coronavirus stay-at-home orders are our opportunity to get out of our schedules and time-constraints and five-year plans, our worn-out ways of being, to delight in new ways forward . . . not only for ourselves . . . for the future of humanity on this amazing planet . . . you too?
— Brian Shircliff
