Cooking is the art of making all kinds of produce edible,
delicious even, that would otherwise be indigestible or bland
if you did not take care to clean them, cook them and season them.
And it is the same with happiness.
Happiness is the result of a whole process of inner cooking.
Life's good moments do not present themselves spontaneously,
and you do not pick them the way you pick a ripe fruit
from a tree on your way by.
You must learn to work on each situation,
particularly on the difficult, painful ones,
adding elements from your spirit and your soul -
elements of divine wisdom and love.
In the same way that light will not come in your windows
all the while
you don't open the curtains,
it also cannot enter your head if you keep
your inner "curtains" closed.
Light is powerful enough to move worlds,
it's true,
but what it cannot do is draw back a curtain to come in.
You
must do this yourself by dissipating all the opaque layers
you have
accumulated inside you.
As soon as you draw the curtains open, the
light floods into your room,
that is, into your head, your mind.
From the pearl oyster we can learn
that we must endeavor to learn to smooth out our difficulties and irritations
by surrounding them with softness and light.
Don't ask for life to be sweet and smooth.
A mountaineer would never reach the top
if the face of the mountain was smooth.
Life itself is a tissue of threads...a mass of interwoven threads.
You could say that everything that exists consists of threads.
A magic wand is a thread, a wire...
that is what a magic wand is, a fuse wire...
the function of a magic wand is to close the energy circuit
so that energy can flow from one world to another...
the only true magic wand is this living link
which allows the current to flow between the two worlds...
What really matters is to climb mountains symbolically.
The highest mountains are inside us
and we must constantly climb up to breathe the pure air
at the tops of these spiritual mountains
and nourish ourselves with the food that we find up there.
Consider the trapeze artist or the tightrope walker:
he maneuvers freely in the air,
free because he does not allow himself
to become distracted by extraneous elements
which would cost him his concentration
and send him hurtling to the ground.
In order to remain at the heights
you must protect your consciousness
from agitation, negative preoccupations and disruptive desires.
Only by doing so will you remain
in the regions of light and inner calm.
A decision to carry out a plan
is tantamount to setting a train on to a particular railway line.
Symbolically, the cross is a geometric figure
consisting of two lines - one vertical and one horizontal -
intersecting at right angles.
Among a number of other interpretations,
we can see it is a representation of the human being,
a synthesis of two principles:
masculine (the vertical: spirit and intellect)
and feminine (the horizontal: soul and heart).
The union of these two principles produces movement.
In effect, thought and feeling together
give birth to movement, to an act.
And when we set the cross in motion, it creates a circle, the sun,
and the more intense the movement the more luminous the sun.
The sun reunites the two principles; it is the cross in motion.
As you see, the cross is a profound symbol
and an inexhaustible subject of study.
