The eye of the storm

Bernadette Roberts (emphasis mine):

So the storms, crises, and sufferings of life are a way of finding the Eye. When everything is going our way, we do not see the eye, and we feel no need to find it. But when everything is going against us, then we find the eye. So the avoidance of suffering and the desire to have everything go our own way runs contrary to the whole movement of our journey; it is all a wrong view. With the right view, however, one should be able to come to the state of oneness* in six or seven years—years not merely of suffering, but years of enlightenment, for right suffering is the essence of enlightenment.

The first and great commandment

Interesting quote from Bernadette Roberts' What Is Self? that I found on one of my regular reads (here and here; emphasis mine):

I saw that to follow Christ meant to have his same interior experiences and to follow the inner, not the outer, movement of his life. ... Christ’s first commandment to love God above all things is the sole key to his interior life and his experience of God. As beginners we aim for love by the practice of virtue through self-discipline, but later the practice of virtue arises automatically out of love and is not a matter of self-discipline or curbing the ego-self. So I realized the priority of coming to Christ’s own intense love of the Father; everything else, including love of neighbor, was seen as secondary.

Somehow realizing this priority is, I think, the essence of the contemplative and how he differs from a non-contemplative. The latter strives to do two things at once: to be of service to God and to this world at the same time. This is why he travels more slowly toward union with God. Though he sees no dichotomy between God and involvement in human affairs, his whole struggle is centered on bringing them together.

The contemplative, on the other hand, is sooner able to get things together because he is acutely aware of this dichotomy from the outset. Thus he follows the first commandment until it leads automatically and perforce to into the second.

This quote suggests to me that if I'm struggling with trying to figure out how to best be of service to this world, then the best tack to take is primarily one of loving God.