John O'Donohue

For the ancient Celts, the invisible world was always with them - the great unknown from which they came and a source of eternal wonder in their lives. Through prayer, teaches O'Donohue, we can enter this immensity and escape the psychological prisons we create or ourselves.

On the Beauty of Prayer and Liberation from the Prisons in Which We Choose to Live

The Invisible World

Laura Mei

One of the worst prisons inside of us is the prison that we call fear. Fear is a force of falsification. It is not about the truth. It kills beauty, and it makes people anxious and worried. We need to be very cautious at the frontiers of our invisible world — cautious that we don't allow everything in because there are a lot of fears which, if you let them come in, will convert your inner invisible world into one big, empty jail. Fear destroys hope; it holds us back from possibility. It makes us blind, and blindness is poverty, because if you're blind to the giftedness of your inner world then you're living in an impoverished, bare, hopeless place. I always feel that the presence within us which transfigures our blindness is the imagination. If your imagination is awake then you're not blind, because the gifts that your imagination brings you will be gifts that you can behold. Many people have such beautiful gifts around them but they can't see them because their imagination has become a prisoner locked away in some forgotten inner corner.

The beautiful thing about humans is that there's no map for the human heart. This is one of the lovely things about the divine imagination. That, in creating us, the great spirit did actually produce an incredible masterpiece. Each human body — not to speak of each human soul — is an incredibly sophisticated, subtle, open-ended and endless work of art. If we see our bodies as finished and fixed, and we just see ourselves as empirical objects in the world, then we have completely missed the sense of the wild threshold that we are. The magic thing about the divine imagination, despite the contradictions and the difficulties that are in our lives, is that the divine imagination bestowed upon each soul, mind, and body an endless freedom when we came into this wild universe. There was no kit to accompany us; there was no rule book, no special agenda, no program. Every human is born without a map, without a program, and without any of that external caging that we have become so addicted to. Where all the difficulty starts is when we begin to shape our own maps for our lives. This is at the root of our most sinister creations which are the prisons that we start create for ourselves and inside which we live off.

If you have an infused sense of wonder, then your wonder is able to transfigure that which is unknown within you and around you, and it will take away the anonymity, the distance, and the separation which the unknown always makes the vulnerable and fragile human creature experience. Wonder makes the unknown interesting, attractive, and miraculous and that's why when wonder awakens in your life, it is the lovely subtle presence that is always at the threshold of your heart, transfiguring the anonymous into the intimate. When your heart is alive with wonder, you are ready to receive the hidden affinity and kinship that awaits you and welcomes you at the heart of that which is unknown within you and around you. Wonder is actually an expression of the longing, the fire of longing, that burns in the warmth of the human heart and any individual that awakens to their lives are inevitably caught up in the trawl of wonder.

The Invisible World On the Beauty of Prayer and Liberation from the Prisons in Which We Choose to Live

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