Read Thurman’s prayer, below, also captured in the video of Thurman in the Woods (see BB, Module 03), and then answer his his questions as a way of clarifying who you are and where you’re headed. You don’t have to answer each of his prayerful questions, but that might be good as a way of conducting this “thought experiment.” Those answers, taken together, thought Thurman, would disclose to us “who we really are.”
“My heart an altar; thy love the flame. The patience of unanswered prayer. The dimness of the soul removed. It is good once again to gather in the quietness and to center down in stillness. The streets of our minds are so filled with traffic. Our spirits are so crowded with conflicting noises that it is wonderful to be quiet and to see if in the quietness we cannot sense some order in our lives, some specific sense of direction, something that will tend to structure our confusion so that we may understand its character. In the quietness we may look at ourselves, the kinds of people we are. What are the kinds of things that we are doing, and why are we doing them? What is the whole point of our functioning? Where are we trying to go? What is it that we are meaning by what we do, and what is the point of our kind of living? Where do we put the emphasis in our lives? Or each may make it very personal: Where do I put the emphasis in my life? What am I after? Where are my values placed? To what end am I making my peculiar kind of sacrifice? What is it that I love most in life? What is it that I despise most in life? To what am I true, and why am I true to it? Who am I anyway? Who am I, and what am I doing? And as we listen, is all we get the jangling echo of our own confusion and chaos? Or is there something more, some deeper note that we have not heard before because we have not been still enough to listen? To listen, until all the sounds are defined. To listen, until we are quiet enough to hear the whisper in the heart. And what does it say to us? What does it say?”
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