Messenger of the Heart: The Book of Angelus Silesius, with observations by the ancient Zen masters (Spiritual Masters)
This is not a book for speed-reading! Each verse and every quotation from the Eastern Masters deserves being pondered in the heart. A few minutes of "pointed mindfulness" add more to our life-experience than several years of rushing while sleepwalking. For meditation takes place "across the line called time," in the timeless. If I did not think this to be a necessary book, I would not have written it. Necessary for whom? For my friends and companions on the Way, whether I have met them or not. For all those who in the noise of our time feel a new need for inwardness. For all who may share my delight in discovering a Western Zen poet, who expresses in the traditional language of our own culture what we are apt to believe only the enlightened ones of the East have attained. For in this Western Zen poet I found a bridge between the essential insights of East and West. Such a bridge is proof—ever needed again—that although human beings from the East and the West may!  differ in many things, they share the Inner Light, the Buddha Nature— to paraphrase Hui Neng. If I had another hundred years to live, I would postpone finishing this book. But alas, I don’t have another century, at most a few years, one, or two, or ten. This book is essentially a translation of a little book I re-discovered while browsing in a secondhand bookshop in Copenhagen on a stopover during my third trip to Japan. Its title: Der Cherubinische Wandersmann (The Cherubinic Wanderer). Its author: the seventeenth century mystical poet Angelus Silesius, who lived in a century of upheavals, wars, and revolutions, a time of religious conflict, almost as troubled as ours.