The Virtuous Power of Patience

Over the years, I have come to appreciate that patience is not simply a way of quietly and inactively waiting for something to happen. My current conclusion is that patience is the ability to hold a focused fiery intent over a span of time with joyful expectancy and absolute certainty of success while at the same time being totally detached from the outcome and free from any irritation that may be caused by the actual time it takes to come about. The Martial Arts practitioner Bruce Lee explained it in the following way: “Patience is not passive, on the contrary, it is concentrated strength.”

Practicing patience requires being actively present in the here and now and holding a clear directed purpose inside a potent space of possibility that allows for the emergence of that which is intended in ‘right timing’. St. Augustine declared that: “Patience is the companion of wisdom and that through patience we wait for things we do not see.”

The ability to be patient in a detached, yet engaged manner, is conditioned and colored by our particular relationship with time and space. The ancient Greeks used two different words for time: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos refers to quantitative, linear, clock time that moves inexorably forward in seconds and hours. It is what I call ‘tick-tock time’ that can easily result in us feeling impatient because something is taking far too long when compared to the length of time we believe it should be taking.

Kairos, on the other hand, describes a qualitative, opportune, or “deep” time – the measure of cycles and seasons that flow and make up the rhythmic pulse of the soul on Earth. Kairos offers a natural cycle of nourishment and development that innately knows the exact right moment for an action or event to happen. Kairos has more breathing room. Quoting St. Augustine again, “Time is simply that in which to find God.”

A memorable lesson in patience and ‘timing’ occurred back in the early 1970s while farming in the west of Sweden with Mother Nature as my wise tutor. During that first summer on the land, I delighted that it only took thirty days from the time of sowing radish seeds to the time when they appeared in our salad bowl. The following spring, I sowed some parsnip and went about my business, expecting to see signs of life within a couple of weeks. After a month nothing had appeared and I started to wonder if this was a bad batch of seeds. After five weeks, I became quite anxious and impatient and decided to gently dig in the soil to check on progress. Alas, nothing was to be seen.

Then one morning, six weeks from the original sowing, I saw the first tips of the parsnips pushing their way up through the soil, and I got the message. What I have come to realize is that although there may be an absence of signs of outer activity in the garden or the group, there is always something vital happening beneath the surface. The seed is quickened in the darkness and pressure of the soil before emerging into the light of day as a tender shoot.

Correspondingly, the seed ideas that individuals and groups wrestle with take time to stew and mature within the psychological soil of daily life before presenting themselves as concretized expressions. For me, patience is a deep knowing that all will be revealed as soon as the right receptive conditions for revelation are in place. It also depends on how we view life. Are we waiting to reach some distant goal that lies at the end of a long, challenging and winding road or is what we are patiently waiting for already here – temporarily obscured by veils of ignorance, or ‘unknowing’, from our sight and touch?

There appear to be two distinct ways of perceiving our sojourn on Earth. One is that the goal is very far away and involves an arduous journey to reach it and the other is that the goal is an ever-present state of being that simply needs the right conditions and inner orientation for it to precipitate and manifest in the here and now.

The former is more akin to our western understanding of life as mirrored by Parsifal’s undertaking of a seemingly endless quest in search of the Holy Grail while the latter exemplifies an Eastern view of life as the inevitable flowering from within of the Lotus of our Sovereign Self that occurs naturally, season by season, as we detach from, and disidentify, with the not-self.

The following quote from Alice Bailey’s book ‘Telepathy and the Etheric Vehicle’ addresses this apparent conundrum and offers a potentially liberating insight into the dynamic process of evolution in which we are all engaged.

“One point you all need to grasp is that the progressing disciple does not move into new fields or areas of awareness, like a steady marching forward from one plane to another (as the visual symbols of the theosophical literature would indicate). What must be grasped is that all that IS is ever present.

What we are concerned with is the constant awakening to that which eternally IS, and to what is ever present in the environment but of which the subject is unaware, owing to short-sightedness. The aim must be to overcome the undue concentration upon the foreground of daily life which characterizes most people, the intense preoccupation with the interior states or moods of the lower self which characterizes the spiritually minded people and the aspirants, and the imperviousness or lack of sensitivity which characterizes the mass of men.

The Kingdom of God is present on Earth today and forever has been, but only a few, relatively speaking, are aware of its signs and manifestations.”

It was through many years of intimately working with Nature that the two aforementioned and seemingly differing viewpoints finally met and merged to become complementary aspects in my own life journey. I could summarize what those years of farming taught me by saying that inside the heart of every seed, lives a promise waiting for the right conditions.

It is only when this seed is brought into contact with the soil in right timing that the vision of “what is to be” takes shape and presents itself outwardly for all to see. Seeds and ideas are very similar, for they both represent possibilities that will be made manifest only through a conscious act of planting and nurturing. In this way, the promise in the seed is already with us and yet, it takes time through the seasons and cycles of unfolding and the creation of conducive conditions for this inner promise to be fulfilled and revealed.

Anyone of us who has observed a garden in spring knows very well that a plant only just in leaf will go on to produce flowers and bear fruit. In its secret center – although invisible to the human eye – the plant is already nurturing the embryo of these later stages. Maybe the same process is in play with us, and mere outer appearances are no true indication of the gifts and qualities lying dormant inside our hearts and minds waiting for the right moment to appear. Patience is thus a necessary nutrient in the fecund field of daily life for the inner promise of our essential nature to be sown, grown and outwardly shown.

Patience is rewarding. So, while working in a group setting, I do not worry when we encounter a period when nothing seems to be happening because I know that something is building on some unseen level. It is only a matter of time and right conditions that will cause the invisible to become visible. Whenever I sit with my colleagues or clients and the room suddenly goes silent, I let the silence build and resist the temptation to jump in and “make something happen.” The silence is the pregnant pause before the birth, and my role is to patiently and expectantly “hold the energetic space” that forms the psychological atmosphere in which the group operates and from which the answers will be generated if given the opportunity.

One of the Universal Principles we work with here at Meditation Mount asks us to practice patience at a deeply personal level. This is the Principle of Essential Divinity which invites us to consider that we are each vital and intimate aspects of the Creator and asserts that a divine spark of the One Fire lives at the core of our essential nature as the Sovereign Self. Each of us is thus a sacred fractal of the One Life seeking to be revealed as we are graciously held inside the arms of unconditional love, compassion and boundless patience by “the One in Whom we live and move and have our being.”

Viewed in this way, each one of us is a microcosm of the macrocosm having an intimate and unbroken relationship with Deity and all manifested forms of the One Life through the fact of ‘essential similarity’. Perhaps the most challenging exercise in patience is towards ourselves and others as the inner promise slowly takes shape and seeks to build an earthly vehicle that can do justice to the intrinsic truth, goodness and beauty of our Essential Self. This process of revelation takes lifetimes and innumerable cycles of growth to achieve and during the whole of this evolutionary process our trust and faith in life is constantly tested.

Patience as a powerful Presence is neither fast or slow. It is an eternal rhythmic pulsing of Life that guarantees the inner promise will ultimately find outer expression. The birthing of our sovereign Self and the building of a more enlightened society require a high degree of patience and persistent striving from all of us for the dream to be realized in time, space and substance.

Michael Lindfield

Board President

Meditation Mount