Rediscovering the book Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld was a special gift this month. Dag Hammarskjöld was a Swedish economist and diplomat who also served as the second Secretary General of the United Nations, from 1953 until he died in a plane crash in September 1961. He’s the only person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize after his death. Hammarskjöld was a hero of my parents (that he was Swedish was a special bonus for my parents 😉).
In a month when our Ethical Society focused on the theme of Finding Your Center, this Hammarskjöld tidbit was especially welcome.
The longest journey / Is the journey inwards. / Of those who have chosen a destiny, / Who have started upon their quest / For the source of their being.
In Ethical Culture, we talk about acting to bring out the uniqueness and best in others, and thereby in our selves.
The journey outwards, of caring for others, of acting in our relationships, is one part of the ethical journey.
The other is the journey inwards.
It may seem like selfishness to focus on an inner journey – instead, I suggest to you that centering ourselves and focusing on our inner self is an exercise in humility.
More from Dag Hammarskjöld:
To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.
In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each (person) a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses.
Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is–is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything.
The above was excerpted and modified from my talk on January 8. Video of most of my words for that Sunday program is here: YouTube If you want just the closing guided meditation (about 7 minutes), it’s here: YouTube