The haunting melody

I get a glimpse of something that is starting to happen. I hear something like this haunting strange distant flute. My feeling is like the quality of hearing such a sound. Then I look at the thing that I am doing — the building, or the window — and I ask myself: Is it in fact carrying that haunted sound, or not?

Learning to see wholeness, or self, in a thing is not unlike the process of straining one’s ears to catch that haunting tune. I look at the thing which I am making, I keep looking at it, and slowly I begin to see a spirit in the thing. I become aware of an emerging wholeness, only dimly heard at first. It is hard work to see the wholeness. But if I do work hard, don’t take the thing for granted, don’t assume that I am doing the right thing, but if I do search for the wholeness, and keep assuming that there may be more to see, if I can only strain my ears a little harder, then I can move towards it, and gradually produce it more and more.

This is the process which really produces life. I become aware of the self beyond the thing as a very faintly heard tune that I can hardly hear. I strain for it, try to listen for it, try to catch it, and then as I make the thing, as I develop the field of centers in the thing, I do my best to bring this half-heard whisper of a being out in the material.

(Pages 133-134)