Is Life Slipping Through Your Fingers? Allow Yourself To Contemplate On A Daily Basis

An oriental story tells of a painter whom an emperor, seduced by his legendary fame, commissioned to decorate one of the walls of his palace with a dragon. The painter shut himself up in the room where that wall stood and sat down in front of it in a contemplative attitude, doing nothing.

Time passed (weeks, months, years) and the emperor began to get impatient until one day, suddenly, the artist got up and with a few strokes he drew the figure of a dragon as perfect as it had never been seen.

When asked why it had taken him that eternity to do something so apparently simple, he replied that it was not until it had been, thanks to the power of his contemplation, that the dragon himself had not dared to draw it.

A painting the result of technique alone, he argued, was such a great insult to the liveliness of a true dragon that it, upon finding out, would have taken revenge by devouring whoever had diminished it in that way.

On the contrary, a dragon emanated from the heart and soul, a dragon understood from within him, would sooner or later spread its wings and end up taking its executor to the heaven of the immortals.

To the amazement of the members of the court, on whose faces grimaces of mockery and skepticism predominated, as soon as he had finished pronouncing these words the dragon on the wall began to break away from it, sowing debris, screams of terror and chaos the place, until he was completely free of his marble prison, he bent down so that the painter sat on his back and clung to his scaly neck, and he flew away in the direction of infinity.

What is contemplation

Contemplating is staying still and concentrated until the object of contemplation tells you its secrets and shows you the way in and out of its inner labyrinths.

Stay still and focused until the gorillas (remember primatologist Dian Fossey and the movie Gorillas in the Mist ?) Get used to it.

Remain still and concentrated until the divinity, whatever it is, decides to make you a participant in its mysteries. Stay still and focused until the problem (mathematical or metaphysical, personal or pure everyday logistics) solves itself on the blackboard of your intelligence.

Remain still and concentrated until the light makes its way into the sea of ​​darkness and becomes an accomplice of that darkness that it crosses in search of knowledge or self-knowledge. Contemplating is learning to show attention and interest in something or someone without rushing that attention and interest prematurely.

Multiple ways of contemplating

So the first thing is to have the will to calm down, to appease, to be where you are. That is why many, throughout history, have shut themselves up in propitious places (the convent, the desert, the secluded cave) and have joined contemplative orders that facilitated that calm way and without worldly distractions of relating to immediate reality. and with the beyond the real.

But it is not necessary to go that far: to contemplate and enjoy the benefits of contemplation, it is enough, for a few minutes a day, to immerse yourself in a sunset, savor a cup of tea, wear comfortable clothes, recite some verses or a mantra by heart. or a proverbial phrase.

Squint the eyes and the rest of the senses so that they do not interfere with the viewer’s journey towards the contemplated, adopt a balanced state of mind and as detached as possible from any merely material matter, and accept during that period of time enthusiastically and unconditionally what is, what is, the totality of what is here and now.

Contemplating is also considering and valuing

The etymology of the verb “contemplate” speaks of “looking carefully at a delimited space”, of doing it in company (or taking others into account) and of adopting that spontaneous sacred attitude that comes to one when looking at the sky.

In addition, contemplating refers to values (to value with justice what comes into contact with our thought and to act accordingly), to the act of bringing the outside in and of finding a suitable place in one’s soul, of harmoniously involving others. all the senses, to learn without violence (the viewer does not conquer but rather apprehends because he does not want to dominate the object of his contemplation but to metabolize it) and to temper the gaze so that neither its extreme cold nor its extreme heat consume what is being looked at.

From mysticism to day to day

Contemplation is a religious ideal (the soul that is absorbed in the divine to deserve to participate in its essence) and a philosophical one (the mind that concentrates on an aspect of reality until it opens itself to it) that can be transferred to the daily life.

Silence, meditation, serenity, attention or detachment serve to improve our relationship with ourselves and with the world, usually so dispersed and accelerated, in a meaningful, effective and lasting way.

If one surrenders to contemplation, even dragons, as we saw what happened to that Chinese painter with whom we started, will entrust their existence to one and also, as soon as we are lucky, they will transport us to one of the innumerable infinities that human beings have at our disposal.