Inside of you, is a still point, what Thomas Merton called point vierge, accessed by:

Attention,
Breath
Subtle sensations in your body.

It is free your Enneagram pattern, the collective shadow in which you’re swimming, free of the hurt, pain, rejection, loss of control and person:

The first chirps of the waking birds marked the point vierge of the dawn
under a sky as yet without real light.
A moment of awe and inexpressible innocence,
when the Father/Mother in perfect silence, opens their eyes
They speak to him not with fluent song, .
but with an Awakening question.
In their dawn state.
their state at the point vierge.

.
Their condition asks if it is time for them to “be”?
He answers, yes.
.

Then they, one by one, wake up, and become birds.
They manifest themselves as birds beginning to sing.
Presently they will be fully themselves and even in fly.

Meanwhile, the most wonderful moment of the day is that
when Creation in its innocence acts permission
to “be” once again,
as did on the 1st morning that ever was.

.

All wisdom seeks to collect itself and manifest itself
at that blind, sweet point.
Human wisdom does not succeed.
For we have fallen into self mastery and cannot ask
permission of anyone.
We face our mornings as humans of undaunted purpose.
We know that time and we dictate the terms.
We know what time it is.

.

For the birds, there is not a time that they tell.
But the virgin point between darkness and light,
Between non being and being.

.

So they wake; first the cat, birds and cardinals.
Later the song sparrows and the wrens.
Last of all the doves and the crows.

.

Here is an unspeakable secret; Paradise is all around us
and we do not understand.
It is wide open. The sword is taken away,
but we do not know it;
we are off onto his farm and another
to her merchandise.
Lights on. Clocks ticking. Thermostats working. Stoves
cooking.
Electric shavers, filling radios with static.

“Wisdom” cries of the dawn deacon, but we do not attend.

Thomas Merton, A Book of Hours

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