Excerpt from William Samuel's unpublished private journals

The Little Joys

What I have said about savoring the little joy and being faithful to the little illumination is truly a diamond beyond, to me, over the years, this is more valuable, more gold than Fort Knox and in South Africa and in these hills of California as yet unfound...more valuable.

Let me say it again if I can, approaching it from the other direction. For years, I looked for illumination. I read all the fanciful books about what illumination is supposed to be, some great, dynamic, grandiose explosion, a popping explosion that would allow one to see the world in new light.

Oh, at one point in my affairs I had one but it was long after this and I could see that the long long look for the big explosion was all that precluded my awareness of the little ones going on continually all over the place. And incidentally, the adversity of metaphysics, the inside is the outside, so the little is really the big and the big is the infinitesimal, the great grandiose is not so marvelous as the beauty right here, right here, the little joys.

Give me the little ones, give me the small swirl of blossoms blowing in the wind, or light shining from a short leafed beetle pine as it glistens or the light through the wings of one of your monarch butterflies, or the lovely smile of someone who smiles in friendship, or someone touching our shoulder to say thank you. Those are the little ones, they are the big ones and all that you have to do to see that this is true is, the next time something comes up that puts a lump in your throat and allows the anguish to subside for a minute, all you’ve got to do to see that it's true is to cherish it for a minute. Stop for a minute. Look at it and thank it and watch it grow...

I tell you, we come back home to simplicity, to a gentle childlike simplicity. It is already spread over the whole face of the earth. We come back home to a gentleness of God presence that doesn’t have to be consciously known, that doesn’t have to be articulated with a lot of words and doesn’t have to be lived in any special set way, no pattern of praying, no pattern of going to church, no pattern of meditating, it’s a simplicity infinitely more simple than that, it’s a listening, a listening, of being, a listening to the still small voice within, to the divine imprint within which is present right here, right now to this awareness that listens, that is present here as surely as it’s present to the little birdlings out there that are ricocheting around on this April day and making nests every year, intuitively making nests, instinctively doing it, listening to the divine imprint with no knowledge whatever of what the nest is for. But ultimately, it will hold an egg. The divine imprint is already here as the awareness we are. The God imprint is all that’s real here and the Child is here right now doing nothing wrong, guilty as nothing, having made no mistakes. And that Child is the awareness, the awareness that listens to these words, not the possessor of the awareness of these words, not the owner of awareness but the awareness itself that listens, the life that listens.

If you would like further guidance in understanding any of William Samuel's work based on Self discovery - you are welcome to contact me, Sandy Jones -- samuelandfriends@gmail.com - Ojai, California -