I now turn to a *subjective* consideration that belongs here; yet I can give even less distinctness to it than to the objective consideration just discussed, for I shall be able to express it only by image and simile. Why is our consciousness brighter and more distinct the farther it reaches outwards, so that its greatest clearness lies in sense perception, which already half belongs to things outside us; and, on the other hand, becomes more obscure as we go inwards, and leads, when followed to its innermost recesses, into a darkness in which all knowledge ceases? Because, I say, consciousness presupposes *individuality*; but this belongs to the mere phenomenon, since, as the plurality of the homogeneous, it is conditioned by the forms of the phenomenon, time and space. On the other hand, our inner nature has its root in what is no longer phenomenon but thing-in-itself, to which therefore the forms of the phenomenon do not reach; and in this way, the chief conditions of individuality are wanting, and distinct consciousness ceases therewith. In this root-point of existence the difference of beings ceases, just as that of the radii of a sphere ceases at the centre. As in the sphere the surface is produced by the radii ending and breaking off, so consciousness is possible only where the true inner being runs out into the phenomenon. Through the forms of the phenomenon separate individuality becomes possible, and on this individuality rests consciousness, which is on this account confined to phenomena. Therefore everything distinct and really intelligible in our consciousness always lies only outwards on this surface on the sphere. But as soon as we withdraw entirely from this, consciousness forsakes us―in sleep, in death, and to a certain extent also in magnetic or magic activity; for all these lead through the centre. But just because distinct consciousness, as being conditioned by the surface of the sphere, is not directed towards the centre, it recognizes other individuals certainly as of the same kind, but not as identical, which, however, they are in themselves. Immortality of the individual could be compared to the flying off at a tangent of a point on the surface; but immortality, by virtue of the eternity of the true inner being of the whole phenomenon, is comparable to the return of that point on the radius to the centre, whose mere extension is the surface. The will as thing-in-itself is entire and undivided in every being, just as the centre is an integral part of every radius; whereas the peripheral end of this radius is in the most rapid revolution with the surface that represents time and its content, the other end at the centre where eternity lies, remains in profoundest peace, because the centre is the point whose rising half is no different from the sinking half. Therefore, it is said also in the *Bhagavad-Gita*: *Haud distributum animantibus, et quasi distributum tamen insidens, animantiumque sustentaculum id cognoscendum, edax et rursus genitale* (xiii, 16, trans. Schlegel) [Undivided it dwells in beings, and yet as it were divided; it is to be known as the sustainer, annihilator, and producer of beings]. Here, of course, we fall into mystical and metaphorical language, but it is the only language in which anything can be said about this wholly transcendent theme."―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, pp. 325-326
These are the three stages of enlightenment, the three glimpses of satori. 1. The first stage enlightenment:A Glimpse of the WholeThe first stage of enlightenment is short glimpse from faraway of the whole. It is a short glimpse of being. The first stage of enlightenment is when, for the first time, for a single moment the mind is not functioning. The ordinary ego is still present at the first stage of enlightenment, but you experience for a short while that there is something beyond the ego. There is a gap, a silence and emptiness, where there is not thought between you and existence. You and existence meet and merge for a moment. And for the first time the seed, the thirst and longing, for enlightenment, the meeting between you and existence, will grow in your heart. 2. The second stage of enlightenment:Silence, Relaxation, Togetherness, Inner BeingThe second stage of enlightenment is a new order, a harmony, from within, which comes from the inner being. It is the quality of freedom.The inner chaos has disappeared and a new silence, relaxation and togetherness has arisen.Your own wisdom from within has arisen.A subtle ego is still present in the second stage of enlightenment. The Hindus has three names for the ego:1. Ahamkar, which is the ordinary ego.2. Asmita, which is the quality of Am-ness, of no ego. It is a very silent ego, not aggreessive, but it is still a subtle ego.3. Atma, the third word is Atma, when the Am-ness is also lost. This is what Buddha callas no-self, pure being.In the second stage of enlightenment you become capable of being in the inner being, in the gap, in the meditative quality within, in the silence and emptiness.For hours, for days, you can remain in the gap, in utter aloneness, in God. Still you need effort to remain in the gap, and if you drop the effort, the gap will disappear. Love, meditation and prayer becomes the way to increase the effort in the search for God. Then the second stage becomes a more conscious effort. Now you know the way, you now the direction. 3. The third stage of enlightenment: Ocean, Wholeness, No-self, Pure beingAt the third stage of enlightenment, at the third step of Satori, our individual river flowing silently, suddenly reaches to the Ocean and becomes one with the Ocean.At the third Satori, the ego is lost, and there is Atma, pure being. You are, but without any boundaries. The river has become the Ocean, the Whole.It has become a vast emptiness, just like the pure sky. The third stage of enlightenment happens when you have become capable of finding the inner being, the meditative quality within, the gap, the inner silence and emptiness, so that it becomes a natural quality. You can find the gap whenever you want.This is what tantra callas Mahamudra, the great orgasm, what Buddha calls Nirvana, what Lao Tzu calls Tao and what Jesus calls the kingdom of God.You have found the door to God. You have come home.
If I say your voice is an amber waterfall in which I yearn to burn each day, if you eat my mouth like a mystical rose with powers of healing and damnation, If I confess that your body is the only civilization I long to experience… would it mean that we are close to knowing something about love?
It was almost a mystical experience. I do not know how else to put it. My mind outran time as he neared, and it was as though I had an eternity to ponder the approach of this man who was my brother. His garments were filthy, his face blackened, the stump of his right arm raised, gesturing anywhere. The great beast that he rode was striped, black and red, with a wild red mane and tail. But it really was a horse, and its eyes rolled and there was foam at its mouth and its breathing was painful to hear. I saw then that he wore his blade slung across his back, for its haft protruded high above his right shoulder. Still slowing, eyes fixed upon me, he departed the road, bearing slightly toward my left, jerked the reins once and released them, keeping control of the horse with his knees. His left hand went up in a salute-like movement that passed above his head and seized the hilt of his weapon. It came free without a sound, describing a beautiful arc above him and coming to rest in a lethal position out from his left shoulder and slanting back, like a single wing of dull steel with a minuscule line of edge that gleamed like a filament of mirror. The picture he presented was burned into my mind with a kind of magnificence, a certain splendor that was strangely moving. The blade was a long, scythe like affair that I had seen him use before. Only then we had stood as allies against a mutual foe I had begun to believe unbeatable. Benedict had proved otherwise that night. Now that I saw it raised against me I was overwhelmed with a sense of my own mortality, which I had never experienced before in this fashion. It was as though a layer had been stripped from the world and I had a sudden, full understanding of death itself.
...You see I believe in that stuff to: yoga and mystical powers. I once knew a man who could kill himself on command. Can you believe that? . . . Why do you laugh? . . . Believe it! By will of his own mind, he could make his heart stop beating for good' My neighbor poised and looked seriously at me, searching in my eyes. '...You laugh!' he repeated once more… 'You laugh, but he was a master at it! He could commit suicide at his own will!' Indeed, hearty laughter streamed through my nose. 'Could he do it perpetually?' I asked. 'Perpetually...?' My neighbor rubbed his waxy chin. 'I mean, is he still able to do it?' 'I’m not sure I understand.' 'Well? Then is he dead…?!'My neighbor's puzzled face slowly began to transform into a look of realization. 'But sir,' he said, 'Of course he’s dead! I mean to say... this man could kill himself on command, you see. And you don’t come back from the dead!' The two of us found ourselves crossing to the door so I could let my visitor out. I slapped him with friendliness on the shoulder. 'No, you don’t come back from the dead,' I agreed.
Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist.Pink dragonflies fall from the airand become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks.The rainbows that dangle upon this mist: shatter. Like the smile of a child separatedfrom his mother’s milk for the very first time.--from poem Blood and Blossoms
Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.
Close your eyes. Meditate on your love. This is God.
Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ.
It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. So many things have been shown so to me on these banks, so much light has illumined me by reflection here where the water comes down, that I can hardly believe that this grace never flags, that the pouring from ever-renewable sources is endless, impartial, and free.
Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.
He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting.
The fundamentalists of every faith remain blind to the truth that the “sigh within the prayer is the same in the heart of the Christian, the Muslim, and the Jew.” I have seen this unity with my eyes, heard it with my ears, felt it with all my being.
the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
Let it be stated clearly that mysticism is an a-rational type of experience, and in some degree common to all men.It is an intuitive, self-evident, self-recognized knowledge which comes fitfully to man. It should not be confounded with the instinctive and immediate knowledge possessed by animals and used by them in their adaptations to environment.The average man seldom pays enough attention to his slight mystical experiences to profit or learn from them. Yet his need for them is evidenced by his incessant seeking for the thrills, sensations, uplifts, and so on, which he organizes for himself in so many ways--the religious way being only one of them. In fact, the failure of religion--in the West, at any rate--to teach true mysticism, and its overlaying of the deeply mystic nature of its teachings with a pseudo-rationalism and an unsound historicity may be the root cause for driving people to seek for things greater than they feel their individual selves to be in the many sensation-giving activities in the world today.
It is better to be foolish than a dilettante.
Relationships are used by the darkness to keep people revolving around the ego’s demands. For a moment, people see the light of the divine in each other. They run to it and then quickly forget the light they once saw as their fears reclaim their consciousness. Thus begins the ongoing battle to protect one’s own ‘rights’, in case they be forgotten or betrayed. The tally of what is owed is counted, the guilt of perceived wrong doings is cast upon the other, one’s freedom must be paid as the price for ‘love’, and it is only in short periods of peace when all of this is forgotten. Those moments are the precious windows of the Soul.
Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men´s eyes, because they know -or think they know- some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.
A sex worker deserves a billion times more respect, than the mystical fraudsters of the society, such as astrologers, psychics and tarot card readers.
Changing the spelling of one's name to ensure success, performing rituals for good luck, wearing colored gem stones for success in business – all these fall into the same category of psychological reinforcement. Hence, emerged the blood-sucking professions of astrology, palmistry, vastushastra, numerology etc. The very existence of these fraudulent professions is predicated on the fear and anxiety of vulnerable masses. Thus, a person’s superstitious beliefs become the tool of exploitation in the hands of ruthless fraudsters.
It is all about the trade of ignorance. And India is such a bronze-age nation that is filled with these trades (astrology, palm reading, vastushashtra and others).
Common people tend to term any kind of bizarre phenomenon as “paranormal” or “supernatural”. They often exaggerate it as the work of the Gods. Behind this belief is nothing but primitive ignorance. Social progress means that people must (a necessity, not a luxury) align their beliefs and behavior to new knowledge and understanding of nature.
All these stories of Janamsakhi were like an artistic instrument that was yielded more to spread Nanak’s spiritual sovereignty as a mystical prophet than as an effective teacher in flesh and blood. In the midst of ignorance and mystical craving, they provided a simple method to guide people, or rather allure them to a newly formed religious path by sermonizing through stories of mystical non-sense.
We scientists perceive it as the Truth that will give us absolute understanding of the universe – which is impossible at the moment for a young species like us. On the other hand, the mystics perceive the Ultimate Truth, to be the attainment of Absolute Divinity, which all the religious giants experienced. But this attainment, is nowhere near the actual Ultimate Truth – it is only a subjective experience of the mind, evoked by specific internal and external stimuli.
By nature, that mind is easily fooled by supernatural mysticism. It is extremely gullible. And no matter how much we the civilized human beings advance in the fields of modern sciences, there is always a part of us, that tries to allure us with magical nonsense, because that nonsense has been with us since the birth of humanity.
Now you know that the fascinating phenomenon of love has nothing to do with the supernatural entity known as Cupid, but everything to do with neurochemistry. Likewise, divinity is a cerebral creation, not a supernatural one. And it has been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn’t made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain!
It has been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn’t made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain!
In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous than the last. Every time the final box appears to have been reached, a key has been found which has opened up another, revealing a new universe even more breathtakingly improbable in its conception. We are now forced to suspect that, for human reason, there is no last box, that in some deeply mysterious, virtually unfathomable, self-reflective way, every time we open a still smaller box, we are actually being brought closer to the box with which we started, the box which contains our own conscious experience of the world. This is why no theory of knowledge, no epistemology, can ever escape being consumed by its own self-generated paradoxes. And this is why we must consider the universe to be irredeemably mystical.
On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on. Scarlet sumac had passed and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember sakes and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings. Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one's limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey. I think I can still do it - one thinks many foolish things when November's bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze.A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that?Maybe not. The last few years of my life have been characterized by stripping away, one by one, loves and communities that sustain the soul. A young colleague, new to my English department, recently asked me who I hang around with at school. "Nobody," I had to say, feeling briefly ashamed. This solitude is one of the surprises of middle age, especially if one's youth has been rich in love and friendship and children. If you do your job right, children leave home; few communities can stand an individual's most pitiful, amateur truth telling. So the soul must stand in her own meager feathers and learn to fly - or simply take hopeful jumps into the wind.In the Christian calendar, November 1 is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas - saints - who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one - who annoys you so - pretends for a day that he's the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday.Imagine a hectic procession of revelers - the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind's eye, these old firends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints; but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or notice, the feast, indeed, of most of us.It's an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet. Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: "nothing special," as Buddhists say, meaning "everything." Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral.All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along. A feast of being.
When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing that like being for the first time see, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light…unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous…we don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant.Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like "Eat his body! Drink his blood!"It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility.
There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia. I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blosssom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. ...Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can't take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower...I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism_, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant momemnts: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God's arms.When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, 'Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.' That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism.But, I'm sorry, I'm going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.
There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time like the heartbeat. There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish.
On my journey from the fantastical to the practical, spirituality has gone from being a mystical experience to something very ordinary and a daily experience. Many don’t want this, instead they prefer spiritual grandeur, and I believe that is what keeps enlightenment at bay. We want big revelations of complexity that validates our perceptions of the divine. What a let down it was to Moses when God spoke through a burning bush! But that is exactly the simplicity of it all. Our spiritual life is our ordinary life and it is very grounded in every day experience. For me, it is the daily practice of kindness, mindfulness, happiness, and peace.
In modern neurotheology we examine the physical bases to spiritual, religious and mystical experiences and beliefs, that implicitly appear to reduce this rich phenomenology to only neuronal functions. So, the thing is, there was no divine intervention necessary in the evolution of spirituality and religiosity. “Human Brain is the true God of all beliefs”.
Held tight as it seems to you in the finite, committed to the perpetual rhythmic changes, the unceasing flux of "natural" life— compelled to pass on from state to state, to grow, to age, to die— there is yet, as you discovered in the first exercise of recollection, something in you which endures through and therefore transcends this world of change. This inhabitant, this mobile spirit, can spread and merge in the general consciousness, and gather itself again to one intense point of personality. It has too an innate knowledge of— an instinct for— another, greater rhythm, another order of Reality, as yet outside its conscious field; or as we say, a capacity for the Infinite. This capacity, this unfulfilled craving, which the cunning mind of the practical man suppresses and disguises as best it can, is the source of all your unrest. More, it is the true origin of all your best loves and enthusiasms, the inspiring cause of your heroisms and achievements; which are but oblique and tentative efforts to still that strange hunger for some final object of devotion, some completing and elucidating vision, some total self-donation, some great and perfect Act within which your little activity can be merged.
As I stumbled into confusion about what was real and what was not, the strangest thing happened: The world disintegrated. Reality collapsed, or my perception of it. It ripped apart like a dry skin under pressure, giving way to something I can only describe as ineffable dimensions, depths upon depths.
The soul is imbued with a yearning that is carried, like a torch, from incarnation to incarnation. It burns with a curiosity about life and it’s true identity. Souls live, strive, and evolve, driven to seeking the truth about the world and themselves.
Farsi Couplet:Mun tu shudam tu mun shudi,mun tun shudam tu jaan shudiTaakas na guyad baad azeen, mun deegaram tu deegariEnglish Translation:I have become you, and you me,I am the body, you soul;So that no one can say hereafter,That you are someone, and me someone else.
Although we cannot attain Jesus in his fullness unless at the same time we also take into account his unique relationship with God which has a special nature of its own, this does not of itself mean that Jesus' unique way of life is the only way to God. For even Jesus not only reveals God but also conceals him, since he appeared among us in non-godlike, creaturely humanity. As man he is a historical, contingent being who in no way can represent the full riches of God... unless one denies the reality of his real humanity (and that runs counter to the consensus of the church). So the gospel itself forbids us to speak of a Christian religious imperialism and exclusivism.
But those who manage to genuinely place their hopes totally in God will never be disappointed. God will be with them continuously. They will then be able to bear witness to the miraculous way Providence works in their lives, yet without recognizing it. All of us have such experiences if we pay attention.
When Nureyev appeared in San Francisco not long ago there were quite a few ballet fans who flew all the way from New York to see him. The mystics would point out how fruitless it is to go to see important people when our first priority is to see ourselves. We think we know Tom, Dick and Harry, but we really know everyone, including ourselves, only on the surface level. If we could see our real Self coming down the street, we would wonder who this beautiful, radiant, magnificent creature could be. We would not be able to take our eyes off him.
Three deep cravings of the self, three great expressions of man's restlessness, which only mystic truth can fully satisfy. The first is the craving which makes him a pilgrim and a wanderer. It is the longing to go out from his normal world in search of a lost home, a 'better country'; an Eldorado, a Sarras, a Heavenly Syon. The next is the craving of heart for heart, of the Soul for its perfect mate, which makes him a lover. The third is the craving for inward purity and perfection, which makes him an ascetic, and in the last resort a saint.
Tolkien did admit that, 'As a guide, I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving.' In other words ~ he wrote about what interested him ~ and despite his protestation of including anything allegorical into his tale, Catholic history and mystic prophecy obviously received its fair share of attention ...
When the religious Cowper confesses in the opening lines of his address to the famous Yardley oak, that the sense of awe and reverence it inspired in him would have made him bow himself down and worship it but for the happy fact that his mind was illumined with the knowledge of the truth, he is but saying what many feel without in most cases recognizing the emotion for what it is—the sense of the supernatural in nature.
Your purpose, and its specific expressions, expands and accelerates as it becomes more similar to Nature’s purpose. The tools you need to apply it you collect along the path in discovering what that is. Time is there to provide you with the “opportunities” to find more creative responses to things like frustration, confusion and self-righteousness. As you gently, oh so gently and delicately, adjust to the requirements that exist in your actual circumstance, you are given the tools needed to surpass them.
This creation is so perfect that you can forget the Creator – you can just discard him, dump him – and still it goes on. So a true compliment to the Creator is when you forget about him. (Laughs) That is a real compliment to the wonderful piece of creation he has made; it is so perfect within itself that it does not need to draw from anything outside.
So, as you do the practice, if you are connected with your consciousness, then the mind is just free. It is so free that everything that you have smelled, tasted, touched, heard and seen is all there. You don’t have to try to remember anything; it is all simply there. You can just pull it back. Memory is not about remembering, memory is just about your ability to bring back the data, isn’t it?
Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as those these difference are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation.... Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in nurturance as a 'natural,' inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging.
Sometimes, we expect life to work a certain way and when it doesn’t we blame others or see it as a sign, rather than face the pain of the choices we should or shouldn’t have made. Real healing won’t begin until we stop saying, “God prevented this or that.” Often in our attempt to protect ourselves from pain, we leave things to fate and don’t take chances. Or, we don’t work hard enough to keep the blessings we are given. Maybe, we didn't recognize a blessing, until it was too late. Often, it is the lies we tell ourselves that keeps us stuck in a delusion of not being responsible for our lives. We leave it all up to God. The truth is we are not leaves blowing toward our destiny without any control. To believe this is to take away our freedom of choice and that of others. The final stage of grief is acceptance. This can’t be reached through always believing God willed the outcomes in our lives, despite our inaction or actions. To think so is to take the easy escape from our accountability. Sometimes, God has nothing to do with it. Sometimes, we just screwed up and guarded our heart from accepting it, by putting our outcome on God as the reason it turned out the way it did. Faith is a beautiful thing, but without work we can give into a mysticism of destiny that really doesn't teach us lessons or consequences for our actions. Life then becomes a distorted delusion of no accountability with God always to blame for battles we walked away from, won or loss.
You may have read or heard about the so-called positive thinkers of the West. They sayjust the opposite -- they don't know what they are saying. They say, "When you breatheout, throw out all your misery and negativity; and when you breathe in, breathe in joy,positivity, happiness, cheerfulness."Atisha's method is just the opposite: when you breathe in, breathe in all the misery andsuffering of all the beings of the world -- past, present and future. And when you breatheout, breathe out all the joy that you have, all the blissfulness that you have, all thebenediction that you have. Breathe out, pour yourself into existence. This is the methodof compassion: drink in all the suffering and pour out all the blessings.And you will be surprised if you do it. The moment you take all the sufferings of theworld inside you, they are no longer sufferings. The heart immediately transforms theenergy. The heart is a transforming force: drink in misery, and it is transformed intoblissfulness... then pour it out.Once you have learned that your heart can do this magic, this miracle, you would like todo it again and again. Try it. It is one of the most practical methods -- simple, and itbrings immediate results. Do it today, and see.That is one of the approaches of Buddha and all his disciples. Atisha is one of hisdisciples, in the same tradition, in the same line. Buddha says again and again to hisdisciples, "IHI PASSIKO: come and see!" They are very scientific people. Buddhism isthe most scientific religion on the earth; hence, Buddhism is gaining more and moreground in the world every day. As the world becomes more intelligent, Buddha willbecome more and more important. It is bound to be so. As more and more people come toknow about science, Buddha will have great appeal, because he will convince thescientific mind -- because he says, "Whatsoever I am saying can be practiced." And Idon't say to you, "Believe it," I say, "Experiment with it, experience it, and only then ifyou feel it yourself, trust it. Otherwise there is no need to believe.
The gentle pulsing and flickering of stars and nebulae made a kind of music, a sweet easy mesh of whispered tones and sighing harmonies that held him in its force like the earth [holding] the moon.
The New Man means to develop all the three dimensions of being, all the three doors to God: the head, the dimension of thinking, logic and reason, the heart - the dimension of joy, trust, intuition, relationships, beauty, creativity and a sense of unity in love and the being, the dimension of meditation, silence, emptiness and oneness with life.The first level of the head is the dimension of ideas, intellect, hypothesis, theories, logic, analysis, rationality and dualistic thinking.The first level is the level of the mind, which means a continuous oscillation like a pendulum between the mind's memories of the past and the ideas, dreams and expectations of the future. The second level of the heart is the dimension of joy, acceptance, trust, understanding, trust, friendship, intuition, empathy, creativity, compassion, humor, playfulness and a sense of unity in love. The third level of being is the dimension of presence, awareness, meditation, silence, emptiness and wholeness. The third level is our connection with our inner life source.
The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of weakness and confusion. Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning. - Albert Einstein, letter of February 5, 1921
Lao Tzu's first paragraph in the book "Tao Te Ching" is that the Tao that can be told is not the absolute Tao.Lao Tzu has his own logic, the logic of paradoxes, the logic of life.To understand Tao, you will have to create eyes.Lao Tzu believes in the unity of opposites, because that is how life is.The Tao can be communicated, but it can only be communicated from heart to heart, from being to being, from love to love, from silence to silence.Truth is always realized in silence. In silence, the truth is realized.You reach to truth through silence.All spiritual books tries to say something that can not be said in the hope that a thirst, a longing, is created in your heart to know the truth.Tao is totality. Life exists through the tension of the opposites, the meeting of the opposites.Lao Tzu says that the opposite poles of life are not really opposites, but complementaries.Thinking is always of opposites. Lao Tzu says: drop the split attitude. Be simple.And when you are simple, you do not choose. Lao Tzu says: be choiceless, let life flow.Enjoy both poles in life, and then your life becomes a symphony of opposites.How to drop the mind: do not choose. If you do not choose, the mind drops.Live life as it comes - float. Float with life. Enjoy the moment in its totality,It is to live as part of the whole, to live as part of existence.If you become silent and empty, everything will come on it's own accord.When you live without any desire for power, position, fame or success, the whole existence pours down into your emptiness.
You are most beautiful in your purest form. You are a manifestation of God himself. Open your eyes and let the light flow right through to your core. All it takes is for you to notice a flicker of leaves, a momentary glance from a loved one, or for a wave to hit your toes and freeze you in that timeless place where you know with every cell in your body that God, indeed is real.
True strength. There is no conflict with vulnerability or humility. Indeed, vulnerability and humility are essential here, and ultimately what makes strength true. One does not don the mask of strength in response to fear, which is a con, like those crazy small reptiles that stand up on their hind legs and spread useless wings to intimidate as a last resort. You stand there in self-respect for Christ’s sake and take it with some courage, responding in accordance with your honest values, taking sincere responsibility for them. Stand up for who you truly are, not the image you would like to sell, nor shrink to fit into the false harmony around you.
As researchers of the paranormal, we must understand there are ways to change the rhythm of time within us, ways to change the beat. These ways have been known since the beginnings of civilization, and possibly much earlier. And these ways would require no more effort than simply recognizing the secret rhythms of things. Moreover, we may learn to beat with them and begin to perceive a different kind of space, and ultimately discover an altogether different conception of reality…
There’s surprising relief and regeneration in finding ourselves within a moment of genuine grace, however small or temporary it may be.
When I was 15 years old, I came in contact with my first ashram, my first spiritual commune, in the form of Ljusbacken ("The Hill of Light") in Delsbo in beautiful Halsingland in the north of Sweden. Ljusbacken consisted of an international gathering of yogis, meditators, therapists, healers and seekers of truth. It was on Ljusbacken that I for the first time came in contact with my path in life: meditation.It was also on Ljusbacken that I meet people for the first time in my 15 year old life, where I on a deep wordless level felt that I meet people, who were on the same path as me. It was the first time that I meet people, who could put words on and confirm my own inner thirst after something that I could only occasionally sense vaguely, like some sort of inner guiding presence, or like a beacon in the distant far out on the open and misty ocean. For the first time in my life, I meet brothers, sisters and friends on the inner path. It was also on Ljusbacken that I meet the mystery called love for the first time in my 15 year old life. With my 15 year old eyes, I watched with wide eyed fascination and fear filled excitement the incomprehensible mystery, which is called woman.My own thirst after truth, together with my inner guiding light, resulted in an early spiritual awakening when I was 15 years old. It led me back to the inner path, which I have already followed for many lives. It led me back to a life lived with vision, with dedication and meaning, and not only a life governed by the endless desires of the ego, a mere vegetating without substance between life and death. It led me to explore the inner journey again, to discover the inner being, the meditative quality within, and to come in intimate contact with the endless and boundless ocean of consciousness, like the drop surrenders to the sea. At the source, the drop and ocean are one.
Working with people is basically not a question of formal education; working with people is a question of energy and awareness. Everyone can basically work with people. It is a question of developing a presence and a quality to work from. It is also about discovering our own unique way to be and work with people from our authentic inner being.The most important healing- and therapeutic ability is the capacity to be present. To be present means to develop a presence and a quality to work from. It means to be present with an open and relaxed heart, and to be grounded in our inner being, in the meditative quality within.Presence means to work from a meditative quality, from an inner "yes"-quality, from a state of non-doing. It is to be present for another person as a supporting light, as a supporting presence.Meditation is the way to deepen our capacity to be present, and explore how to bring the meditative presence into the healing- and therapeutic process. It is about developing a meditative presence and quality, to develop the inner "yes"-quality, the silence and emptiness within ourselves, the inner source of healing and wholeness, the capacity to surrender to life.
If you love another person, you have to become a no-self, a nothing. When you love, you have to become a nobody. When you are a nobody, love happens. If you remain somebody, love never happens.One becomes afraid of love, because love opens the inner emptiness.Love is not an effort. If love is an effort, it is not love.It is the same case with the ultimate experience, it happens when you do not make an effort. Then you can simply float with the river to the Ocean.
Prayer and Meditation Matthew 14 AND HE WENT UP INTO THE MOUNTAIN APART TO PRAY This was always the practice of Jesus when he would move into the masses, the crowd, afterwards he would go alone into deep prayer and meditation. Why did he do this? If you have been meditating, you will understand. You will understand that once you start meditating, a very fragile and delicate quality of consciousness is born in you. A flower of the unknown, of the beyond, starts opening, which is delicate. And whenever you move into the crowd, you lose something. Whenever you come back from the crowd, you come back lesser than you had gone. Something has been lost, some contact has been lost. The crowd pulls you down, it has a gravitation of it's own. You may not feel it if you live on the same plane of consciousness. Then there is no problem, then you have nothing to lose. In fact, when you live in the crowd, on the same plane, alone you feel very uneasy. When you are with people, you feel good and happy. But alone, you feel sad, your aloneness is not aloneness. It is loneliness, you miss the other. You do not find yourself in the aloneness, you simply miss the other.When you are alone, you are not alone, beacuse you are not there. Only the desire to be with others is there - that is what loneliness is. Always remember the distinction between aloneness and loneliness. Aloneness is a peak experience - loneliness is a valley. Aloneness has light in it, loneliness is dark. Loneliness is when you desire others; aloneness is when you enjoy yourself. When Jesus would move into the masses, into the crowd, he would tell his disciples to got to the other shore of the lake, and he would move into total aloneness. Not even the disciples were allowed to be with him. This was a constant practice with him. Whenever you go into the crowd, you are infected by it. You need a higher altitude to purify yourself, you need to be alone so that you can become fresh again. You need to be alone with yourself, so that you become together again. You need to be alone, so that you become centered and rooted in yourself again. Whenever you move with others, they push you off centre. AND WHEN THE EVENING WAS COME, HE WAS THERE ALONE Nothing is said about his prayer in the Bible, just the word "prayer".Before God or before existence, you simply need to be vulnerable - that is prayer. You are no to say something. So when you go into prayer, don't start saying something. It will all be desires, demands and deep complaints to God.And prayer with complaints is no prayer, a prayer with deep gratitude is prayer. There is no need to say something, you can just be silent. Hence nothing is said about what Jesus did in his aloneness. It simply says "apart to pray". He went apart, he became alone. That is what prayer is, to be alone, where the other is not felt, where the other is not standing between you and existence. When God's breeze can pass througn you, unhindered. It is a cleansing experience. It revejunates your spirit. To be with God simply means to be alone.You can miss the point, if you start thinking about God, then you are not alone. If you start talking to God, then in imagination you have created the other. And then you God is a projection, it will be a projection of your father. A prayer is not to say something. It is to be silent, open, available. And there is no need to believe in God, because that too is a projection. The only need is to be alone, to be capable of being alone - and immediately you are with God. Whenever you are alone, you are with God.
Even though the world hails Joan of Arc as some sort of hero, which she undoubtedly was, what pains me the most is that her pathological condition ultimately led to her demise at the age of only nineteen.
In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for nearly an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying…the child was not observing; he was at rest in the very center of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginning, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through.
The [character-]armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature.The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand them, is mystic man. He is interested not in "material" but in "spiritual" things. He forms a mystical, supernatural idea about nature.Both the mechanist and the mystic stand inside the limits and conceptual laws of a civilization which is ruled by a contradictory and murderous mixture of machines and gods. This civilization forms the mechanistic-mystical structures of men, and the mechanistic-mystical character structures keep reproducing a the mechanistic-mystical civilization. Both mechanists and mystics find themselves inside the framework of human structure in a civilization conditioned by mechanistics and mysticism. They cannot grasp the basic problems of this civilization because their thinking and philosophy correspond exactly to the condition they project and continue to reproduce. In order to realize the power of mysticism, one has only to think of the murderous conflict between Hindus and Muslims at the time India was divided. To comprehend what mechanistic civilization means, think of the "age of the atom bomb.
The most critical of these new religious developments for twentieth-century religious liberalism were a renewed and transformed emphasis on mystical practice and experience, the healing ministry known as mind cure, and the rise of modern psychology. These three interrelated spiritual innovations spread as significant components of popular religion in large part through the mass print media. Rather than religious movements dependent on revivalism or church life, these were first and foremost discourses, creatures of the printed word. Initially explored only by an avant-garde of liberal intellectuals late in the nineteenth century, the new books and ideas emerging at the margins of liberal Protestantism eventually reached a nation-wide middle-class audience. The mass media unleashed by nineteenth-century evangelicalism enabled the alternative spiritualities of the twentieth century to flourish, especially with the rise of religious middlebrow culture in the decades after World War I.
There was no need for a term like ‘magical thinking’ in the Golden Age of Man...there was only genuine everyday magic and mysticism. Children were not mocked or scolded in those days for singing to the rain or talking to the wind.
When the fuel is dried up in a vehicle, it stops driving automatically. You are a vehicle in the spiritual and the physical world, so you need some oil for alacrity, in order to get to your destination. The greater the quantity of your oil, the more you cover the distance, and the more you cover the distance, the closer you get to your success.
The humanitarian philosophies that have been developed (sometimes under some religious banner and invariably in the face of religious opposition) are human inventions, as the name implies - and our species deserves the credit. I am a devout atheist - nothing else makes any sense to me and I must admit to being bewildered by those, who in the face of what appears so obvious, still believe in a mystical creator. However I can see that the promise of infinite immortality is a more palatable proposition than the absolute certainty of finite mortality which those of us who are subject to free thought (as opposed to free will) have to look forward to and many may not have the strength of character to accept it.Thus I am a supporter of Amnesty International, a humanist and an atheist. I believe in a secular, democratic society in which women and men have total equality, and individuals can pursue their lives as they wish, free of constraints - religious or otherwise. I feel that the difficult ethical and social problems which invariably arise must be solved, as best they can, by discussion and am opposed to the crude simplistic application of dogmatic rules invented in past millennia and ascribed to a plethora of mystical creators - or the latest invention; a single creator masquerading under a plethora of pseudonyms. Organisations which seek political influence by co-ordinated effort disturb me and thus I believe religious and related pressure groups which operate in this way are acting antidemocratically and should play no part in politics. I also have problems with those who preach racist and related ideologies which seem almost indistinguishable from nationalism, patriotism and religious conviction.
Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you.
Recovery through sleep isn’t going to happen if the majority of the components of your being aren’t getting enough stimulation or resistance to work against. Your brain may be tired after work, but if your body and emotions haven’t been challenged through the day, they’re going to keep irritating you even if you’re asleep. They don’t need rest; they need work for real recovery to take place.
The typical image of a depressed, lazy and tired person is someone hunched over and inert. Often, the assumption is that if one had more enthusiasm and inspiration, he would then stand up straight and move. In many cases, this equation is backward. But, as with everything related to one’s physicality, balance is the key. An overly erect and rigid posture may convey confidence and power to some, but it also causes a subtle accumulation of tension and rigidity on various levels, including psychological and emotional.
No one will improve his health significantly without accurately perceiving priorities, knowing clearly what is at stake if those are not attended to and what is to be gained if acted on correctly. That’s the basic homework before any change can come about. Then that knowledge has to be transformed into a sustainable motivation.
Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole.
Ironically, many of the institutions that run the economy, such as medicine, education, law and even psychology are largely dependent upon failing health. If you add up the amounts of money exchanged in the control, anticipation and reaction to failing health (insurance, pharmaceutical research and products, reactive or compensatory medicine, related legal issues, consultation and therapy for those who are unwilling to improve their physical health and claim or believe the problem is elsewhere, etc.), you end up with an enormous chunk. To keep that moving, we need people to be sick. Then we have the extreme social emphasis placed on the pursuit and maintenance of a lifestyle based on making money at any cost, often at the sacrifice of health, sanity and well-being.
Physical well-being necessitates listening to what you already know, and then taking it seriously enough to act accordingly. When you wake up and feel the impulse to arch your back, stretch and exhale with a loud sigh, for God’s sake, do it.
In my experience, most people are actually seeking recovery from the monotony and anxiety of qualitative repetition. This applies to body, emotions and mind. And that monotony and anxiety involves inertia just as much as over-use, meaning inertia in some areas and over-use in others.
Yearning often does not provide a sense of attainment or “peace,” as it is fuel for one’s personal purpose, to in some specific way give or create; to do that is not necessarily easy or peaceful.
If I were to make a list of focus for well-being, I would begin with lifestyle (the totality of one’s circumstance and how that is engaged, including job and relationships, and proximity to nature), attending to the physical functions correctly (posture, breathing, exercise, food, rest, etc.), consistent expression of your natural range of qualities, working and playing well and hard, and designing things so that you are doing what compels you. Obviously, you can’t give this list out as a prescription for physical problems and diseases, but then again, it is probably the correct prescription. If one were to follow it, any specific problem, even extreme, would almost certainly resolve itself.
It’s highly refined stuff—holding to one’s purpose and focus, but also intuiting the value of being a piece in a larger design and evolution. The balance between these two rhythms is where and when true harmony is achieved and magic happens. Often, just the release of the obsession for personal preferences and to personally gain opens the door.
The essential dynamic underlying almost every elite and esoteric physical art is work with the breath, so there’s information available. I would only add that it’s unfortunate that so much work is done with it, and not much play. Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you. I’ve mentioned before that one good measure of someone’s depth of spirituality is how long it takes before they become offended. Imagine laughing hysterically at the criticisms, complaints and impositions you receive. At the least, you’d be breathing well.
People generally believe that stress is responsible for depletion, but apathy and uninspired systematic repetition are equally responsible. Or rather, systematic repetition produces as much or more stress and anxiety as anything else.
Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn’t going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.
If you’re ignoring a high percentage of the elements of your entire being, and the range of qualities they can naturally engage, there will be no real recovery or progress until you do. The typical relentless worker is just as lazy as the typical indulgent idler; they’re both just going through the habitual motions. To break the repetitive pattern, and discover more energy and effectiveness, one simply must stretch out in all directions, rotating focus and application of the qualities that make up one’s natural versatility.
The human body, like the human mind, is best at versatility and adaptability. This is our greatest skill and our greatest chance to unlock natural potential. What that means in terms of physical movement is that a fairly equal amount of time and effort should be allocated to the widest possible range of activity. That includes strength, flexibility, precision and endurance, but it certainly doesn’t stop there.
As I’ve mentioned too often before, we are governed, and specifically our physicality is governed, by fairly strict rules, which are easily observable in nature. We have some freedom to manipulate some of these, but really not by very much. Everyone knows, or at least has the information, about the horrors of ignoring health issues and expecting your body to do what you want it to do with the least investment in it. Another “authority” telling you what you should do is not the answer.
Besides having been identified recently as the single most important factor in what men find sexy in women, the list of how correct posture influences internal organs and systems, and also mood and general energy, is very long indeed. Your internal environment depends on the efficiency of the flow of elements within it. Obviously, this includes oxygen, blood, hormones and nutrients, but also all interaction between nerves and the brain. The spine, which is your foundation and support, has a natural position that guarantees the efficiency of movement and interaction of the related elements. Your internal organs are all right alongside the spine and depend on its correct position to function well. Any prolonged restriction or deviation from this natural position will result in some, at least partial, dysfunction. Over a long time, the results can be devastating.
I look at the idea of rest as rotating one’s qualitative focus, not just doing less or changing activity. The role of rest is recovery. If you keep pushing the same quality button (fast or slow, concentrated or dispersed, hard-working or lazy…) for the same component all the time, of course it’s going to become depleted, just like if you keep working a single muscle in the same fashion or don’t use it at all.
The trick is in genuinely appreciating the elements of apparent resistance while you are engaging them. Not to oppose or remove them as much as to creatively fold them into one’s linear line of movement, exploiting them and making the necessary adjustments as you go.
A balanced diet” is not so much about protein/fat/carbohydrate ratios. The real ratios to consider, at least for the typical American or European, are energy consumption/expenditure, pleasure/actual need, food/everything else.
If one follows what is in one’s heart (let’s leave out mind for the moment), one ends up with what one truly values and loves in life—and one acts accordingly. One’s own private indulgent cyclic habitual reactive subjective transitory feelings are, hopefully, not at the head of that list.
If you, one, loves something or someone, that means that one is willing to, and does, sacrifice for it. That is, one chooses to do and give what is better to the being or thing one loves than to sacrifice the loved one for the personal emotion that is unrelated to or even hinders the giving. In other words, the way to transform an emotion is with a deeper one. This involves discernment and, yes, discipline, which are both frowned upon and seen as emotionless and less important. Which is immaturity, plain and simple, and is the fundamental aspect of human growth from child to adolescence to adult.
Appreciation, affection, focus and intention fill up the space of self-reflection, and one loses oneself in the engagement. And what a relief it is when you get there.
Everyone claims to want the truth. If you really want it, I’d suggest investing seriously in humor and this mysterious skill of transforming bad news into good. Otherwise, you’ll only get more frustrated.
Truth, or mystery basically, seeks the expression of itself. That is, evolution exists to create more mystery, not to answer or end the existing mysteries. This is why with every “truth” revealed, or every answer given, all that actually occurs is the creation of yet a more complex and mysterious question.
Every brilliant theory in physics, for example, has been proven mainly wrong, except for the most recent ones, which will be. The big players, like Newton and Copernicus, gave us answers that were later proved more wrong than right. What they did—and why they are valued—is direct our attention to more piercing and compelling questions or possibilities. (I’d suggest the same holds true for the big spiritual players, but that’s a different letter.)
The depth and complexity of the questions we’ve recently been engaging tend to ignite associated questions very quickly. The family members of these subjects—purpose, responsibility, devotion, commitment, trust, yearning—and their neighbors—frustration, jealousy, ambition, sloth, etc.—get all excited and have things to say to each other. Because of the pressure and tension between them, one has to negotiate the dialogue carefully and use a lot of patience, tolerance and other unsexy qualities. Otherwise, we’ve got another war on our hands.
The nature of yearning is urgent so as to guarantee evolution, change.
As we move through time, we age, with the general speed of everything and the chaos that that produces in us in the form of anxiety, fear, confusion and negotiating an already-existing war, there is little time and space left to adjust to our developing relationship to yearning. In other words, as our needs are met, the question answered, we don’t then move on to the next question.
There exists a direct link, or harmony, between the past, the present and the future. This has been misinterpreted, or exaggerated in both directions, either by the assumption that everything is random, or that there is already a predetermined destiny. There is an actual link, and there is a lot of mystery or room to play and invent.
The experience of yearning is a composite of Nature’s purest impulse in you (the need for radical movement; think of all the analogies in all the religions and philosophies concerning the truth and beauty of light; if you take it literally, that means to become truth, beauty, light, get moving at 299,792,458 kilometres per second) combined with your unique qualities and talents of past/present/future (experiences, potentials, attractions and distractions, imagination, etc.). Simply put: need for radical movement in a definite direction.
The essential war within, and the cause of suffering, begins with the presumption that yearning, impulse and curiosity, desire and question, exist so as to end them. To attain, to acquire, to answer.
Like all things organically formed, there does exist a harmony, interrelated patterns, intuitive logic, and purpose, but these are subtle and you can’t find them exclusively by emotional or intellectual analysis. At first glance it’s all too complex and liquid-like, and our minds and emotions look for control and relief. To know water, you have to get wet; you can’t just sit back and analyze its components. So, do try to enjoy the swim, and don’t be afraid to just sit back and drink now and then—the water’s clean.
Traditionally, true contemplation involves an act of devotion, wherein self-consciousness is removed by transferring consciousness onto the thing at hand. The better you perceive it, the less you observe yourself doing that. In other words, you could say that, at least for the extended moments of engaging it, you love it more than yourself.
Nothing stands still, even if it looks as though it does. Look at a light in the room you are in right now. It appears to be stationary, while the fact is that millions of rays are moving towards you at the speed of light (299,792,458 kilometres per second). Even in every “inanimate” object, particles are moving rapidly and constantly. Nothing within or outside of you remains completely still.
On a psychological and physiological level, the habits of contraction are often caused by the desire to control or acquire, even to acquire generosity or devotion or emptiness. These are subtle and take time to identify and release. Under this is the desire for self-gain or improvement, to win something or better something. Those intentions are healthy enough up to a point, but to really see and engage what you have in front of you, you have to intend that it gains or wins.
There is an actual and palpable hierarchy of emotional, mental and physiological intensity that corresponds to the actual capacities and limitations of human beings. In other words, there does exist a real and definable scale of suffering, and of joy.
Although each of us has the right to believe we are suffering, I suppose, there is a definite and ultimately essential distinction to be made between actual suffering, its cause and resolution, and invented or imagined suffering.
The subjective experience of intense pain (“That’s all I can take”) corresponds exactly to one’s subjective experience in relation to truth (“That’s all I can take”).
The transitory and random quality of emotions (“Well, that’s just the way I feel about it”) is deeply connected to, and largely the cause of, random engagement of one’s values and priorities. This very randomness and inconsistency is actually the cause of deeper suffering, primarily through the accumulation of addictions and the indulgence in reactions that are disproportionately small in comparison to what is really being sacrificed for them. Curiously—and a major theme in my own work over decades—the casual association of emotions to love is part of the insanity in all this.
True balance, and harmony, necessitates finding a way to override the addictive, reactive emotions that are the fabric of one’s subjective illusion, and discover emotions that correspond to actuality.
On the high-end spectrum of emotions, which are innately connected to intuition and direct comprehension as well as imagination and creativity, meaning true empathy and knowledge, appreciative realization, transformation and invention, one finds a richer and more voluptuous combination of experience. Unfortunately, to “get there,” one has to be willing to sacrifice what is known for what is not.
The experience of frustration comes from the separation we impose between our yearning and our fear. Generally, we yearn for that which we fear, or at least fear the unknown (mystery, and therefore and paradoxically, truth) that will be caused through the pursuit of yearning. The more the separation between these two, yearning and fear, the more frustration if you are conscious, or the more neurosis if you are not (literally, “I can’t stand the frustration, I’m going crazy”).
By its nature, what you yearn for is most often intimidating. It produces, and itself is, a question, and one that is not easy to engage or answer.
Mastery of anything is, more than anything else, the transformation of work into play. Giving orders and answers, never making mistakes, and having around you others with the opinion that you are great has nothing at all to do with it. Read carefully: to yearn for, to be compelled by, is being called to play.
My intention is not to define a perfect life and then cause an unhappy analysis of what you are not doing correctly or are incapable of doing.
The question under all this: How to get the idler to accept and engage the yearning? And that, my friends, is a deep and subtle question that will take a while to master, and the mastering of it will require redefining the presumption of what mastery even is. It is certainly not control. Mastery of anything is, more than anything else, the transformation of work into play. Giving orders and answers, never making mistakes, and having around you others with the opinion that you are great has nothing at all to do with it. Read carefully: to yearn for, to be compelled by, is being called to play.
This pace and rhythm I speak of is constantly adjusting through discernment and sensitivity to all aspects of our life and being. As you notice more joy and resolution in your life through the movement toward what you yearn for, you naturally adjust in such a way that you invest more in that direction. If the idea of yearning and acting on what you yearn for causes more aggravation and suffering, you’re not looking at the elements accurately, or the idler is fighting against it.
If you are “playing” too much or “working” too much, you will have a reaction on the other side, which indicates your pace is off, too slow or too fast.
Like everyone on the planet, one identifies and looks toward a vision of improvement or refinement, but/and one has to find a way to engage both of those—what is so, and what can be—with an appropriate harmony that is itself the hallmark of wholeness. In essence, we are looking to create a harmony between the existing elements, not a more severe dichotomy between what we want and what we should be doing.
Sometimes I wonder how much of our suffering we allow or impose on ourselves simply in search of our worthiness to accept our own respect and appreciation. I’d written before some years ago that we often cause suffering in another so that we can then love them, as in, “You have suffered for me, so I can love you now.” The eventual shock of realizing the sacrifice made for you destroys the walls of self-righteousness and protection. The suffering sacrifice of another creates the willingness and capacity to do the same. Finally, love and respect (respect is part of the body of love) come from the recognition of something else already given up for them.Within the individual, you or me, a similar process takes place toward oneself. It is as if we know some- where that we are not worthy of our own love or respect until we have earned the right to it, and that is mainly through some kind of suffering. That suffering may be generic, as in a life lived in which tragedy after tragedy accumulate, or it may be specific, as in the constant sacrifice of other easier things for a being or vision. Or, perhaps more correctly, it is either consciously chosen or not.
The infinite possibilities that exist in any given moment cause infinite possibilities in response. The wording is correct here; the possibilities exist already, and have already caused the existing possibilities of response.
Sometimes I wonder how much of our suffering we allow or impose on ourselves simply in search of our worthiness to accept our own respect and appreciation.
The exact proportion and combination of the qualities within you, as they are, even while you search and struggle for them to be different or better, is a unique beauty.
In making a clear distinction between desire (answer) and yearning (question), we inevitably end up back at personal purpose.
Virtually everyone defines their identity—or constructs their belief of who they are—through their specific combination of desires and suffering. Or, desires obtained (apparent subjective success at the sacrifice of something else), desires unobtained (suffering), and desires still left as questions (to be obtained or not). And...most of the desires, and the suffering, are themselves by-products of others, established by society and the rules of each sect of society.
You have everything already inside you necessary for the true response to any challenge you will meet. Usually, it’s just a question of assembling some elements in a way that you didn’t think to do before (which brings us to intuition…).
The ability to remain constant, whole and playful, even while working technically, concentrating and upholding urgency, is essential to achieve a state of balance that will allow for this to happen. This has to come to life, and cannot stay just an idea or hope or intention or imitation, or ignored. The guarantee and proof that this balance and power is real is in its actualization. That is, that it manifests in functional reality. As in any intention, whether that be vague or specific, an ambition or desire, a goal or state of being, a question or hope, a curiosity or purpose, there exist natural and unnatural obstacles to its realization.
The temptations and reactions that can cause non-creativity, imbalance and distraction are many. Let’s start with the prejudice everyone has against imposed challenges. It’s a concept that people associate with an accusation, a kind of guilty until proven innocent. Or, you’re not good enough until you prove it, with the implication behind this that you will probably fail or are unworthy. If you settle for this association at the expense of perceiving the actuality and necessity of challenge, or Creative Resistance, in hundreds or thousands of situations in every day of your life, and in anything worthy of your attention, you bought into the illusion sold basically to keep you small, in control, like those and safe for those who sell it.
One of the great images to come down to us through Zen Buddhism is the encounter between an enlightened master and an advanced apprentice during the course of a shared meal. The apprentice, becoming fed up with the stress and waiting and the master’s apparent disregard for him, demands an explanation without complication of exactly how to become enlightened. The master asks, “Have you finished your rice?” “Yes,” says the apprentice. “Then go wash your bowl.
What you have to do to achieve what you want necessitates the creative actualization of the totality of your being as it is. Nothing more, but also nothing less.
My take on personal evolution is largely about the spirit of connecting and disconnecting things, relating to what I call “the gap” or time and space between things. It is also about becoming practical in all this, developing the power and precision to simply bring the grand ideas home, to compress the paradigm of perception/choice/action/result into a single gesture.
Because as you become better at everything, as the innate skills actually manifest in reality, the bar rises for the next jump. The core demand for evolution is relentless, and respect, happiness, love and joy are irrevocably tied to it.
The challenges are illusions, but necessary ones to determine if you can see through them.
The composite of what you know to do—that which compels you, that which you are naturally already drawn to, that which exploits the unique potentials inside you, that which you know you are capable of doing, that which will build a bridge between imagination and reality—causes a relationship that obliges sacrifice.
Now, if you open the treasure chest of desire, what do you find there? What do all the desires have in common? You. Go ahead and stop here and test it for a few days if you are really serious about the question. After you get past the first thousand, you begin to enter into a subtle territory, known as the border between desire and yearning. Or, if you want, between answers and questions. The defining quality, or essence, of desire is that it is engaged as if it were an answer.
Of course, the self-righteous demand and expectation for love, and exactly how it should be expressed, is not the most streamlined method for producing it in another for you. That is, it does not compel or create the love itself. You’re neither loving nor producing that which would compel the love toward you. You’re compressed between them both and incapable of accepting either. And rightly so. Which then accelerates the accumulating suffering.
Think clearly here—desire does not produce fun, but yearning does. To identify the transition point between these two, look at desire as accumulating or consuming, and yearning as letting go of or giving. You don’t collect truth or love, for example, you give them, and in the giving they come into being. And you have fun. Real fun, guilt-free fun, resentment-free fun, doubt-free fun; you experience and become the questions you engage—discipline and strength, imagination, independence, fearlessness, trust and freedom, knowledge, truth.
Once you get off the bandwagon of believing that truth is your enemy and is bad news with all kinds of associated unhappy obligations, you can then afford to take it on with some enthusiasm and start to have some fun with it.
Once you get off the bandwagon of believing that truth is your enemy and is bad news with all kinds of associated unhappy obligations, you can then afford to take it on with some enthusiasm and start to have some fun with it. You can begin to trust yourself and play with mystery and big questions without the need for a crutch of an answer to lean on and sell to others (“Here you go, this crutch worked for me.”). And you then begin to see these big words, like imagination, fearlessness and truth as signposts to more fun, instead of the reverse as you do now. To start the engine, just follow what you yearn for, make a contract with that which compels you, and fulfill the trust of that contract through choice and action.
We live in a dimension where it is necessary to find a balance between wants and needs, or desires and yearning, or answers and questions. The totality of these makes up what we know as reality or truth, at least adolescent truth—facts. The fact of the matter is, you have to live in society one way or another, and there’s a reason for that, so the base of engagement begins with acceptance of the variables as they actually are.
You may have noticed that the questions asked are better than the answers given. What do you expect? Perhaps we could submit these answers in a game and see if anyone could figure out what the hell the question was. “Ahh, how to be happy?
It takes a relative amount of courage just to get out of bed each day. There are those who are stronger in their courage, and they help to compel us along a little further in the fulfillment of our faith.
Life will give you what you need once you will do something with it. It may not give you what you want so as to be as comfortable as you want, as Nature’s concern is need as it relates to evolution. In my humble opinion, Nature is too kind, but, as I say, the game is big, and the challenges and temptations absolute. And this is a fascinating aspect of the totality of beauty; it gives more than is only necessary. The generosity is mind- and heart boggling.
If your curiosity reaches a breaking point (compelled actually means that you only have the remaining choice to act on it, having tried all the other options before), and becomes fascination with mystery or truth, you find what you need. Maybe it’s a person, maybe it’s a tragedy, maybe it’s an explosive recognition that, “My God, I’m still alive.
Transcendence is more about the personal act of not engaging the enemy, finding a way out of the cage that is being designed for you at a particular moment by others, circumstance, or your own bad habits and ignorance.
What is at the base of shame or guilt? It is the consciousness of an imbalance, or of an action in the past that has caused, and probably continues to cause, suffering.
Transcendence is a word I don’t use often; I prefer transformation. Why? Because the essential game is about using what is in front of you and in you exactly as it is, but finding a way to do something with that that is surprising and an expression of inspiration and intuition. You engage reality and make something out of it that only you can, alchemizing limitation, conflict or what appears to be bad into something else.
If you know what life really wants, and if you know what you really want, you can begin to create the relationship.
Transformation, on the other hand, is creating beauty from horror or destruction (or, for beginners, an actually pleasant evening with the usual family problems).
Ironically, to “inspire” means to breathe, to infuse life by breathing. As with a lot of things that have the capacity to inspire, it takes some time to get past the apparent boredom and find the hidden secrets. I figure if I keep harping on it, maybe someone will eventually explore the possibility long enough to realize just how breathtaking it is.
We have been trained to feel shame and guilt basically as a means to cause fear and hesitation, to control behavior, or to oppress real freedom and joy. The origins of that are communal fear, jealousy and the desire for power over others. Consequently, many people have the addiction of using shame or guilt simply to avoid possibilities in life, and have, at the same time, a reason to avoid them—if you act spontaneously or feel joy, the result will eventually bring suffering, so you had better watch out, and don’t ever forget the past shame and guilt.
In terms of achieving what I call “being in the right place at the right time,” one has to know balance. Not from the outside as an observer, but from the inside out. For every individual, that requires creating a successful balanced interface between what one is compelled by and the essential principles of nature, which we comprehend through our intuitive conscience. Those are our clues to the mystery. When one gets it right, there it is.
Breathing is the fundamental act of being alive. One can go without thoughts, emotions or sensations, sleeping, talking or any other activity for a long time, without food for weeks, without water for days. But if you stop breathing, you’ll be dead before you finish reading this letter. Because it is the essence of life, some focus upon it seems appropriate.
There’s a long tradition in many disciplines regarding the breath, so I’m certainly not the first to suggest its importance. Unfortunately, though, having so much tradition, that gives the sense to many that there’s nothing really new there, nothing extraordinary to discover. The traditions themselves in most cases haven’t really evolved and haven’t succeeded in compelling the general public. Everyone knows to “take a deep breath” when stressed, but the immediate impact is minimal at best (actually, a deep breath is not much help; a long, smooth, slow exhale is, however). And the idea of another obligation, studying or relearning how to breathe, lacks inspiration.
I think that as a species we’ve played at being the self-indulgent, spoiled adolescent way too long, and now there are permanent damages and absolute risks that most people are ignoring.
Historically, techniques to attain altered states of consciousness, usually called meditation, or sometimes prayer, actually involve various forms of concentration, the first level of this kind of internal work. The linear scale of progression is Concentration, then Meditation, and finally Contemplation. Virtually all categories of meditation are, in actuality, forms of concentration. What makes them so are the innate “goals” or ambitions attached to them: to achieve a state or to acquire something, like relaxation, insight or “advancement.” This then constructs a dichotomy, or dualism, between the pursuer and the thing pursued. That is, you are conscious of or believe in something “better,” you are separate from it, and there is effort to attain it.
Meditation, in contrast, is the accidental moments of actual harmony that arrive anyway when you are trying to get something, even in trying to get harmony or calm. This often happens outside of the intention to meditate, and most people access the beginnings of this through other events, such as walking, working, athletic activities, or transitional moments, such as between waking and sleeping. The effect, in brief, is one of harmony and well-being, from which other insights or intuitive glimpses can naturally emerge. The moment you notice this, the meditation is over.
Contemplation is purer still, yet more sophisticated. This comes from a strongly developed base of concentration—basically, constancy—through any temptation, including altered states of consciousness, that leads one to meditation (effortless engagement), from which is born an intuitive connection to that which is being focused upon (often, the nature of being in the moment, which is the default “focus”). Some people can attain this state accidentally through some combination of surprising events, which is sometimes called revelation. Fewer still can cause this to happen intentionally, mainly because you have to surprise yourself to have it occur. In any case, it requires a real sense of the value of paradox. One leaves a single position behind (such as “I like this” or “I don’t like this”) and expands in comprehension to simultaneously experience its opposite as well. From there, one rises above the two through a creative burst of intuition, and looks down on them both. What you might call transcendence, although I prefer mildly amused.
Accurately perceiving and following one’s intuition is, I think, the essential human spiritual process. The distractions, confusion, misinterpretations and temptations that oppose that process are enormous. At the same time, there are always clues for how to go about it. The divine is a mystery, so the impulse to really discover, like a child, has to be the core response to anything; that’s the only way beyond the habits, presumptions and prejudices that feed ignorance and fear. To question well, instead of hiding behind a belief or answer, requires the application of the most valued of all human qualities, such as compassion, courage, imagination, respect, humility, devotion, and ultimately love of life itself.This kind of passionate questing is evident in the most admired and, if you will, divine individuals in every culture, religion, and skill throughout history.
More focus has been placed on these subjects through human history than on anything else—mystery and mysticism, God, imagination, intuition, the nature of relationships, human purpose, happiness and salvation…
Through the realization of the potentials and possibilities within and outside of you, one connects imagination with reality. What could be becomes so. You transform what exists, causing not only its evolution, but determining to a large part the course of its evolution. It’s a kind of alchemy in that what you create has not existed before, you give birth to other potentials and possibilities, which continues and expands the program. Perhaps more importantly, the very core of existence is touched and celebrated, that being creation itself.
There are so many stereotypes, prepackaged concepts and platitudes out there in our thinking on the divine, and the associated emotions those produce; it’s very difficult to transcend. But that’s ultimately what experiencing the divine is all about: transcending stereotypes, concepts and platitudes. As soon as one falls back on an acceptable definition or understanding, it disappears. It’s like water; the moment you try to grasp it, you lose it.
The purest definition of “religious” is: relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality.
Resolution of conflicting interests within each of us—the desire to fulfill a personal purpose versus the desire to forget about it and just go have fun, for example—takes time and focus and application of a lot of qualities, like playing a difficult piece of music with two hands on the piano. Many people are looking for a simple pill to make that apparent dichotomy go away. Once they discover it doesn’t exist, it’s very frustrating.
In the quest for a functional and direct interaction between imagination and reality, and the evolution of them both, there is in place a natural resistance, which I have referred to as Creative Resistance, because it demands just that: creativity. Much of this calls for redefining, or refining, one’s relationship with time, and all the qualities and skills that will only come from engaging time more creatively and effectively. As such, part of the bargain is about acquiescing to a rhythm that is subtler and has more definite purpose to it than one’s subjective preferences.
The seed of all this is imagination. But when you think of imagination, it helps to view it more as it exists in the rest of nature, rather than as we tend to see it in humans. That is, that imagination is actual and a need, immediately searches for expression, and con- sequently, is intimately connected to yearning and its instantaneous application. This is also the case in human beings, but we generally associate it with unnecessary, or extra, expression, such as an ability to make something more attractive or stimulating (the current view of art, for example), or the creative use of “free time” (time left over after you have done what you had to do).
In an animal’s or a plant’s expression of imagination (let’s leave out the rest for now, so we don’t have to deal with the question of consciousness in, for example, minerals), there is always purity in the connection between need and evolution. That which is created is a response to reality and very specific, essential concerns. This then is the origin of the union between what is so and mysterious harmony—truth and beauty. The bridge between them is inspired intuition and the actions it causes. Or, imagination causes inspiration causes intuition causes beauty, which then causes imagination again…
One could make a nice link between imagination and spirit. To make that link, all we need is some inspiration. Essentially, imagination has the innate potential to compel or inspire and to set in motion causation. That’s why it exists.
Preceding the birth of every religion, there was someone who was an incarnation of this process: imagination causes inspiration causes intuition causes beauty, which causes imagination…the dynamic that takes place in the dimension of spirit. That is, for whatever reasons that will remain mysterious, although they are suggested in various schools of thought, someone got the cause thing down right, and the rest flowed. After the fact, an effort was made, almost always by others, to control both the impact of this and the possible benefits from it. Ambition and desire took over. Where you had an exact presentation, or manifestation, of beauty and truth, somebody began using it for other purposes.
These five values are the organic origins of what could be called intuitive conscience. They are also what we experience personally as our core, essential yearnings, however distorted or confused we may interpret them: to care and be cared for; to share equally in freedom and responsibility; to belong, and to trust that what we belong to will continue; that there exists an objective hierarchy of virtue and wisdom; that there exists that which is unquestionably sacred or divine.
We survive largely because of the existence and recognition of high-end qualities—compassion, integrity, courage, humility, etc. These are how we perceive spirit. Even the most cynical and fatalistic bastard will snap out of self-absorption, abuse and hopelessness when confronted by an extreme expression of any one of these qualities. (Case studies show that this also applies even to rapists and murderers, not always, but more so than any other technique or therapy.) That is, beyond belief, the desire to feel good, or even hope or despair, there does exist an essential intuitive value system in each of us. This runs through and across every culture, and even every species. I don’t believe that those intuitive values are there to fool us into occupying ourselves so as to feel good while waiting for the inevitable to happen. Nature is not so decadent. Or cynical.
What is it that we do here? By easing away from the mania that pulls on us, recalling and reconnecting with our essential spirit and callings, we regenerate our core inspiration and faith in Life and our place within it…with a purposeful eye toward facilitating evolution toward ‘More capable human beings,’ meaning grander, freer, more authentic and meaningfully effective.How do we do that? By delving into pockets of rituals that have, across traditions and cultures, produced superior forms of insight and understanding, healing, evolution and resolution. One could call these tunnels into beauty, truth and love. And we can find access to them in any given day of our lives.
My personal sense of presence that I kind of carry around with me is along the lines of “Somebody has to be there first before acting.” The more one is there, the better the results in whatever you’re doing — more precision, subtlety, relevance…and much less dispersion and depletion. When you watch someone who is good at this, you can sometimes feel like they’re actually stretching out the walls of possibility in a given situation, literally creating open space. Much of this comes only through time and experience, eventual understanding that how one does something, not the specifics of action, is what impacts others most.
My hope and intent is to provide a wide range of resources and ideas that provoke real questions and considerations under the surface of common dialogue. With a definite thrust toward clues for moving beyond limiting patterns that restrict our personal and communal evolution and experience of, as well as effectiveness in, life. Part of that is about giving different angles of insight into the why and how of developing skills, whatever they may be. I think the larger discussion, or maybe the more relevant one surrounding skills development, involves what quality of fuel is being used to run the skill. Inevitably, and very quickly, this enters into considerations of how much of oneself one brings to the show. For example, anyone can learn a sophisticated skill in an extremely short period of time, once they’re completely convinced of the need, benefit and value of doing so and find enough full-bodied conviction to engage it accordingly (“You never hear anyone practicing a language; they simply listen and then begin to speak.” — Wade Davis).
There’s a tunnel between our external skill sets and our deepest longings and passions. People with the highest developed skills always know how to traverse that tunnel. That is, personal integration and wholeness — and consequent accomplishment and fulfillment — are largely about “enlightening” the tool with the best we have in us. The tool could be anything — a voice or body, a musical instrument or paint brush, a trowel or computer. But skill is made up of capability, and that requires practiced familiarity over time with how to inject into the moment our unique talents, virtues and qualities.
Recent discoveries in developmental psychology and other behavioral disciplines have shown that babies are born with a “first draft” of a moral mind. Among others, brain scientist, Gary Marcus, has described this moral understanding as “already defined and organized before experience.” Evolutionary psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, describes this first draft of the moral mind as consisting of five primary values. Modern cross-cultural anthropologists point to these same five primary values as the foundation of all cultures, currently and historically, and 21st century ethologists suggest the same values apply to most if not all species.
There is something mysterious yet definitely accessible to us all under the agitated waves of difficulty that allows us to feel and flow along a more comprehensive intuitive and spiritual understanding of true meaning. And to find solace, accepting serenity and even beauty within it.
It’s misleading or deceptive in a way that such skills are learned like any other — simple practice, sincere investment over time. Yes, like small steps, one at a time, to cross the bridge. Just a single step today.
The sweet spot is a term used by audiophiles and recording engineers to describe the focal point between two sources of sound, where an individual is fully capable of hearing the audio mix the way it was intended to be heard by the musicians. Different static methods exist to broaden the area of the sweet spot.Sound engineers also refer to the sweet spot of any sound-producing body that may be captured with a microphone. Every individual instrument and voice has its own sweet spot, the perfect location to place the microphone or microphones in order to obtain the best sound.In tennis, baseball, or cricket, a given swing will result in a more powerful impact if the ball strikes the racquet or bat on the sweet spot, where a combination of factors results in a maximum response for a given amount of effort. The actual sweet spot on a racquet or bat is a very small area, where dispersing vibrations and spin in multiple directions are canceled out, resulting in a perfect contact point between incoming and outgoing energies.
I don’t really consider myself to be a teacher, although I understand that others do. There’s a certain restriction or reduction in that stereotype that doesn’t ring true. Especially the underlying assumption that I know something that others don’t, and my job is to give them what I know. That’s simply not true.
We do have some capacity to determine how things evolve, and how we evolve, individually and as a community or race. That’s a tremendous freedom and a tremendous responsibility.
Whether or not we personally do impact some ultimate evolution beyond ourselves, we can definitely influence what happens today. To choose to waste a day, or a lifetime, is opposed to the essential spirit of life, expressed, sacrificed for, and upheld through every perceivable interaction in nature. It’s also opposed to every human expression of spirit throughout history. We know to live up to our potential, to fulfill the trust of creation by moving forward, even if we don’t believe it or feel like it or know why.
The primary reason that I’m not a representative of specific groups or schools of thought is that that choice gives me the freedom to look at these groups and thoughts from the inside and the outside. I’m trying to be honest in that role—what really works here and what does not? That is, I have nothing to sell or win by any given position. I’m promoting a similar process for any person I interact with in my work, including toward me.Investment in a given idea or group tends to immediately shut down options for perception, and then choice. Prejudice, bigotry and arrogance breed from that. One is forced to think a certain way to stay within the group or thought, and then to defend against apparent opposition. This constructs and feeds the kinds of adamant separation and conflict we see so many manifestations of on every level. In many cases, it’s also the cause of deep internal conflict in most individuals, yet it isn’t really addressed.
There are some things that don’t function as one would assume. For example, the impulse and linear thinking associated with the search for happiness most often produce questions like, “What’s in it for me?” or “How do I get what I want?” Paradoxically, if you will, that very question pushes authentic happiness away. Now, to try to explain that to someone in such a way that they hear and are interested by the idea is going to probably involve some paradox and non-linearity.
Freedom and responsibility themselves are at stake. One does not find freedom or enact responsibility by surrendering to another’s conceptualization of these ideas. Living out the rules of conscience laid down by someone else for the attainment of an unquestioned goal, a freedom designed and articulated by someone else, is the surrender of human imagination and intuition.In the more extreme versions of this, we end up with a collective momentum resulting in events such as Nazi extermination of millions of Jews, the Inquisition, or similar events recently in Africa and elsewhere. That comes from allocating one’s conscience to someone else, not attending to one’s own deeper intuitive sense of right and wrong.
Each religion has provided a tremendous service in defining elements of conscience. They have made it possible for us to live together in a society, to work toward common goals, and to learn how to accept or tolerate relative opposition to our own opinions. I also think that this has been done much as a parent needs to provide a similar service for an adolescent. Internal and external conflict requires discipline to organize and structure some form of minimizing the chaos imposed on others.
There is a pivot point, however, to become an adult. That transition comes from recognizing and acting in accordance with your own deepest impulses. On the responsibility front, that means acting in harmony with your conscience, not because you’re going to be punished if you don’t, or paid for it if you do (heaven, enlightenment, salvation, or whatever), but because you know it to be right. On the freedom front, that means acquiescing to your deepest inspirations, following what truly compels you, even when it’s difficult to do so. These two principles brought together in the same time and space is what integrity is all about. And it is only through such integrity that you resolve conflict between the two of them: what you “know to do” and what you “want to do.
Whether or not one believes in the accelerating dangers of the climate crisis, the end of fossil fuels, or the permanent annihilation of species of plants, insects and animals that essentially cover our ass by maintaining an inconceivably complex environment in which we have the freedom and responsibility to do pretty much whatever we’d like, it’s not too difficult to at least perceive the dangers of heightened tensions between cultures that now, for the first time, have the power to annihilate each other or the entire planet.
We all understand the value of sacrifice, even if that only involves setting aside dessert so as to lose weight, or putting money in the bank so as to later buy a house. Progress or achievement in any arena requires choices that often oppose what one feels like doing. The trick in truly succeeding with this in the long run is locating enough depth of feeling that the experience of conflicting desires dissolves. For that to happen, one has to learn how to think emotionally and physiologically.
Traditional stoicism, indifference to pleasure or pain, is a form of imposing conscience so as to block more immediate desires. The problem is that it eventually collapses on itself because natural emotional and physiological impulses are being ignored or repressed. To pass beyond that dichotomy—”I want to eat ice cream, and yet I don’t”—requires conceiving and creating an integrated mind in which our passions and childlike impulses find expression through conscience. In other words, what we feel like doing and what we “should” do become one and the same.
We don’t know how to feel with conscience. Ideas like integrity or devotion remain abstract, theoretically correct and good, but lacking the ability to produce immediately fulfilling emotions or sensations. What I mean by learning to think emotionally and physiologically is rediscovering the visceral joy of investing in what we already love, the kind of unquestioned spiritual relentlessness we had as kids. As adults, that demands an internal dialogue through which we transpose the search for pleasure onto a platform that is in harmony with our conscience and real responsibilities. We find the pleasure in applied conscience. That’s a lot easier than it sounds. Basically, it’s about recognizing and feeling passion for what we really want to do in our lives.
On those who try to make me their guru or master, my approach is to start destroying that from the first moment we meet. It probably seems naive and idealistic, but I rely on basic, old-fashioned qualities in keeping my interactions clean: integrity, chivalry, honesty. In my experience, it’s not that difficult to eliminate the guru paradigm and stereotype, if one really wants to. Finally, it comes down to simply not accepting a role or the associated temptations offered.
General attitude and outlook—the way we perceive and experience anything—is more influenced by our physical state than anything other single factor. I’d guess that for most of us, at least 50% of our struggles and discontent are brought on by being physically out of balance. The causes of that imbalance are many, but at the core, there’s an insensitivity or inability to locate and maneuver essential physical processes within us: how to breathe, how to sit, stand and walk, how to see and hear, how to slow down or speed up, how to relax, how to sleep, how to eat, how to adjust our physiological responses to the different circumstances we find ourselves within. This kind of removal or abstraction from our physicality causes an enormous amount of problems on many levels. One key result of it is a distrust in our own ability to influence our emotional state and our energy and perspectives in general; we often feel that we can’t get our hands on the control switches, as if most of life just happens and we can’t do much about it.
On an even subtler dimension, clarity, intuitive knowledge and contentment are primarily determined by chemical and hormonal balances in the body and brain. Most of this is entirely manipulable through fairly simple physical exercises that anyone can do.
In my work, I try to create situations in which we take ideas, information, experiences and qualities to a pragmatic arena. Then within those, to relearn or experiment with how we respond to internal and external variables. There’s no point to understanding something but remaining incapable of applying it. I think real knowledge and understanding is experiential, and the easiest way to access those is through our physical being.
As a soul, you have the freedom – and earned responsibility – to transpose your personal process of evolution, to manifest your greatest talents and vision, into the work that matters to you most as a means to personal redemption.
Prove to the world that you are alive, let your words breathe life into the nostrils of the universe.
In the construction of one’s life, we define ourselves largely by the problems we engage and the debts we incur. The greater and more sophisticated the problems, the greater and more sophisticated the person. True resolution, or transcendence of endless dichotomy, is rare indeed. To truly make a debt vanish requires, in a way, a certain kind of magic. In all traditions, this is looked upon as one of the great mystical tricks. It is not forgotten, fixed, or hidden perfectly; it disappears. To have this occur, one must do more than simply forgive (another or oneself), although in action that’s an important step. One intuits the value of the problem as the birth of possibility.
The simple, external acts in which you resolve shame and guilt, and set right a debt, by passing by them all and giving something grander even so and instead of. You end the circle by leaving it behind. Conscience brings awareness of the need to change something, but the source of your actions must become inspiration and devotion. You’re not doing it to get out of debt; you are doing it because you know it to be the thing to do.
Through the realization of the potentials and possibilities within and outside of you, one connects imagination with reality. What could be becomes so.
Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse.Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.
I used unexpectedly to experience a consciousness of the presence of God, or such a kind that I could not possibly doubt that He was within me or that I was wholly engulfed in Him. This was in no sense a vision: I believe it is called mystical theology. The soul is suspended in such a way that it seems to be completely outside itself. The will loves; the memory, I think, is almost lost; while the understanding, I believe, thought it is not lost, does not reason—I mean that it does not work, but is amazed at the extent of all it can understand; for God wills it to realize that it understands nothing of what His Majesty represents to it.
Enlightenment is not an experience at all, because the experiencer is lost. The "I", the ego is lost.Enlightenment is more like an experiencing. It is a process. It begins, but it never ends. You enter it, but you can never possess it. It is a deep merging and melting with Existence. It is a oneness. It is like a drop dropping into the Ocean.
Lovers of God possess intense concentration. In prayer their attention rivets itself so completely onto God that nothing can tear it away. Even a suggestion of the divine may draw them into a higher state of consciousness. Occasionally this can be somewhat inconvenient. Sri Ramakrishna once went to see a religious drama produced by his disciple. The curtain went up and a character started singing the praises of the Lord. Sri Ramakrishna immediately began to enter the supreme state of consciousness. The stage faded; the actors and actresses faded. As only a great mystic can, he uttered a protest: "I come here, Lord, to see a play staged by my disciple, and you send me into ecstasy. I won't let it happen!" And he started saying over and over, "Money... money...money," so as to keep some awareness of the temporal world.
Jesus in the Temple of God in JerusalemMatthew 2112: AND JESUS WENT INTO THE TEMPLE OF GOD, AND CAST OUT ALL THEM THAT SOLD AND BOUGHT IN THE TEMPLE, AND OVERTHROW THE TABLES OF THE MONEY-CHANGERS, AND THE SEATS OF THEM THAT SOLD DOVESRebellion is individual. It comes out of the truth of one being.Revolutions are organized, but you can not organize a rebellion.Revolutions becomes establishment, and then they fail.Rebellion comes out of the truth and authenticity of one being's heart.Revolution is organized and political, rebellion is spiritual.A revolution is of the future, rebellion is here and now.In revolution, you try to change others, in rebellion you change yourself.Jesus is a rebel.Christianity is the organized religion, which appeared after Jesus was murdered.Christianity is established by the same establishment that Jesus rebelled against.Jesus is a rebel, who lived out of his own love, truth and understanding.AND HE SAID TO THEM, IT IS WRITTEN, MY HOUSE SHALL BE CALLED THE HOUSE OF PRAYERJesus entered the temple of God in Jerusalem, and saw that the temple had been destryed. It was not a house of prayer.People were not meditating, people were not praying. The temple was no longer the abode of God.Priests have always been against God. The talk about God, but they are basically against God. They do not teach truth.The temple of God in Jerusalem had been destroyed by the priests.Christianity is based on one simple word: love. But the result of Christianity is wars, murder and crusades.The priests go on talking about love, but he does not live in love.AND HE SAID UNTO THEM, IT IS WRITTEN, MY HOUSE SHALL BE CALLED THE HOUSE OF PRAYER; BUT YE HAVE MADE IT A DEN OF THIEVESJesus says that the temple of God, is not longer a house of prayer. It is a house of thieves.AND WHEN HE WAS COME INTO THE TEMPLE, THE CHIEF PRIESTS AND THE ELDERS OF THE PEOPLE CAME UNTO HIM AS HE WAS TEACHING AND SAID, BY WHAT AUTHORITY DOES THOU THESE THINGS? AND WHO GAVE THEE THIS AUTHORITY?Organized religion always asks about authority, status, as if truth needs some authority, some licensing from the outside.The priests talks the language of the establishment, even while meeting a mystic like Jesus.Truth arises from your own being, this is the inner authority.Truth is born out of your own being.The priests asks Jesus who has given him the authority to overthrow the tables of the money-changers? Who has given him the authority to change the rules of the temple?But Jesus did not answer the priests. He remained silent. Jesus is his own authority. Jesus whole message is to be your own authority. You are not here to follow anybody. You are here to be yourself.Your life is yours. Your love is your inner being. The priests wanted to arrest Jesus and throw him into prison, but they were afraid of the masses of people who listened to Jesus.They had to wait for the right moment to arrest him.The authentic mystic is always a danger to the priests and the organized religion.When you can allow the yes to be born in you, there is no need to go to a temple.Then God desends in you. Whenever a man is ready, God finds him.
To be able to die consciously, we need to prepare for death while we are still living.Only if we live consciously, we can die consciously.Only a meditator is able to die consciously as life is an opportunity to prepare for death. Meditation is a death, a death of the ego. Death is not in opposition of life, death is the finale, the crescendo of life. How we die shows us how we have been living. Death is not an end, death is a new beginning, a new life.
The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it “has no patience with mysticism, far less the occult.” Nor does it have any time with moralism, the prescriptions or distortions we would impose on the world, obscuring it from our view. It asks, it insists rather, that we take this moment for what it is, undistracted, and not cloud it with needless worries of what might have been or fantasies of what might come to be. It is, essentially, a training in the real…”the Universe itself is the scripture of Zen." Pico Iyer from introduction.
Meditation expands our inner being. The inner being is like a small, individual river flowering towards the Ocean. In meditation, I feel how my inner being expands into an inner ocean, which is part of everything, which is one with Existence. Through the inner being, we come in contact with the inner ocean, the undefined and boundless within ourselves, where we are one with life. We realize that God is part of life. We realize that God is not a person, but the consciousness that is part of everything. We find God in a flower, in a tree, in the eyes of a child or in a playful dog. Through discovering our inner being, we discover that we are also part of the flower, the child or the dog. We realize that God is everywhere.
A friend of mine commented yesterday that she has experienced similar insights that I talked about that all enlightened Masters and founders of religion are actually talking about the same ocean, the same invisible life source, the same God. She also said that she worked in a Christan environment at the time that she received these insights, and when she tried to share these insights with the Christians she was accused of being "impure" and of being associated with the "Devil". Christians hold on to the idea that Jesus was the only son of God, without realizing that we are all son's and daughter's of God. By holding on to the idea that Jesus is the only son of God, they do not either to realize that all enlightened Masters are talking about the same God. Jesus did not talk about faith, he talked about trust. He talked about discovering a trust in yourself and in relationship to God. Jesus said that the kingdom of God is within you. In Christianity, the church has become the intermediate between man and God, and people who claim that they have found a direct relationship to God are accused of blasphemy. The Christan church has become a barrier between man and God, and anyone who has declared that he has found a direct relationship to God are immediately banned by the church, for example Master Eckhart and Franciskus of Assisi. I have always had a deep love for Jesus, but it is not the picture of Jesus that the Christian church presents. I was a disciple of Jesus in a former life, and was thrown to the lions in Colosseum in Rome as one of the early Christians. Jesus had many more disciples than the twelve disciples mentioned in The Bible. In this life, I resigned my automatic membership in the church as soon as I could think for myself when I was 15 years old. I was also disgusted with an organization that said that they preached love and which has murdered more people than Hitler. My experience with these rare and precious insights are that they expand our consciousness of reality. They are gradual initiations into reality. They may fade away, but we will never be the same again after receiving them. They will also come more and more, the more committment we have to our spiritual growth.
Like the moon shining bright Up high with all its grace,I can only show you at night And hide half of my face.
Mother Nature gave Jesus, the Son of Nature the biological elements to see things that nobody else could, or rather nobody else would. And you are the child of Nature as well. As such you have all the powers within you, just like Jesus, to rise above the laws of the society that tend to bind your conscience with textual mysticism and fanaticism.
He said he’d heard the sound of one hand clapping. He said, once his mind took in the wondrous no-sound of holy oneness, the empty echo of eternal bliss, he was never the same. He could hear it still, he said, resounding in the ether and tickling the back of his brain.Something not normal was going on with his brain. No argument there.
We know what wood is and what earth and stone are and that they have a color and texture, a smell and even a taste, but matter as a perceptible material substance independent of the nature of the wood, earth and stone composed of it seems incomprehensible. In order for us to regard a thing as real it must possess at least some distinctive physical qualities. We must be able to experience it as a physical thing before we can decide it is real. Matter as proposed by modern science, however, has no distinctive or definite physical qualities at all. Matter is simply some unimaginable stuff possessing no conceivable definition whatsoever. The concept of matter, then, proves to be just as elusive and abstract as the concepts of spirit, soul or the life-principle.
The most fundamental, basic need in magick, is the development of the will. The magus says, “I will, and not heaven nor hell can stop me.” It is in this forming and growing, creating, of the will, where heaven and hell learns to follow the will of the magus. A person who wants to develop the soul must never say, “Maybe” or “If I see a sign” because the master creates his own signs. If you need a star to align in front of a tree because that to you would be a sign, then you make the star align with the tree, if not in this world, in the other worlds and in the other dimensions. There are no “ifs” and there are no “maybes” there are only “I wills.” This is the basic platform of magick, and most people never get past it, because not all can.
...on a number of occasions this book has made reference to magic, and each time you've shaken your head, muttering such criticisms as "What does he mean by 'magic' anyhow? It's embarrassing to find a grown man talking about magic in such a manner. How can anybody take him seriously?" Or, as slightly more gracious readers have objected, "Doesn't the author realize that one can't write about magic? One can create it but not discuss it. It's much too gossamer for that. Magic can be neither described nor defined. Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to slice roast beef."To which the author now replies, Sorry, freeloaders, you're clever but you're not quite correct. Magic isn't the fuzzy, fragile, abstract and ephemeral quality you think it is. In fact, magic is distinguished from mysticism by its very concreteness and practicality. Whereas mysticism is manifest only in spiritual essence, in the transcendental state, magic demands a steady naturalistic base. Mysticism reveals the ethereal in the tangible. Magic makes something permanent out of the transitory, coaxes drama from the colloquial.
What is the difference between my view and the classical Christian perspective? I am convinced that there are not multiple comings and multiple returns of Christ, but only one decisive coming at the end of the world, which includes the resurrection, the rapture, and his appearance in the sky!
I can see better when i close my eyes; don't make much ado, that's my latest style of view.
All endeavors, heroic or monstrous, scientific or philosophical, rise from the electrochemical functioning of the mind, that takes place relentlessly in the little specks of protoplasm inside the head. These specks of jelly inside the brain, known as the neurons, determine our identity, personality and everything that we are.
When things are good, it is because we remember a time when they were not. When there was pain. But now the pain is gone, so things are ‘good’. When we hurt, it is because we recall a time when we did not. When there was no pain. But now we suffer, so things are ‘bad’. The tiger sipped from the cup, peering at the boy over the rim. Stars swirled in its eyes. “Good. Bad. The cup holds both.
This human need for mysticism – surrender to an unknown truth, union – stands at the helm of all romantic feeling. It is, in essence, the same intimacy known in a mother’s arms; in those who are deprived of the experience, the need freezes and, distorted, it can rent a life. All addiction has as its foundation skewed yearning for the same transcendence. For me, the spell of the material was broken by my brother’s death; after his suicide, all I wanted was the renewal of my connection to the intangible.
I remember when Elvis died. I wrote my sentiments with words of a little girl in my dear diary, "Many people wanted to see his body. They literally wanted to dig his bones out just to make sure that he was being buried. And I could not understand why. Why people could not leave him alone and let his soul rest in peace." I couldn't get it. I didn't grasp it at that time. In a head of a little girl it was hard to believe that there were mysteries to be solved. That there ruled a conspiracy theory that people thought it was odd that he was buried and the casket was never opened. They didn't believe he was dead! Oh yes. Elvis Lives! And as the world needs his songs, his words, his thoughts, his love, his light more than ever before.
But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man's life is profoundly more significant than it is. His sickness was the sickness of our age. We want so much not to be extinguished at the end that we will go to any length to make conjuror-tricks for one another simply to obscure the bitter, secret knowledge that it is our fate not to be.
Under the mystichood ofNameless Bride, we grope in Her Sacred Darkness for plasmatic encounter, the fifth ionized state of matter. Our mundane sight of differentation and separation recedes into the magickal Abyss of Blackness where all is touch. We feel each other as tactile presences whose extended dimension stretches to the stars only to coalesce beyond galactic expanses in the white and worm-holes of Her ever spiraling Gown of Worlds beyond Worlds. Let us feel Her concrescence as we stroke each unique form in the unfathomable dimensions of Her perfect formfulness - ever-changing, ever-new, ever-variable in the rainbow myriads of infinite spasms of delight.
What did I fear, and why? — I, to whom the night had beena more familiar facethan that of man —I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which none of us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness and silence only a more alluring interest and charm!
Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the die will come up proximately 1 ,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come approximately up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable.But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term "probability" includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification. Cf. Ernst Mally's Probability and Law, Hans Reichenbach The theory Probability, Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, von Mises' Probability, Statistics and Truth
The most fundamental exercise is self-observation, which is the catalyst for inner change, it will give self-knowledge and a clear mind and perception. Without it, the attempt to reach enlightenment and awaken consciousness is destined to fail.
To a realized master, death and rebirth is in every breath. Death is that of body consciousness, ego and limits of the mind. Rebirth is that of the cosmic mind of being the Spirit. In this realization is liberation.When awake as liberated, each prayer and each moment of meditation is for humanity as there is no more individual ego or identity left. Such realized masters continually gift humanity with the grace of higher consciousness- so that each of us attain our fullest potential in goodness.
Quinn seemed to have become one of a jaded philosophical society, a group of arcane deviates. Their raison d'etre was a kind of mystical masochism, forcing initiates toward feats of occult daredevilry - "glimpsing the inferno with eyes of ice", to take from the notebook a phrase that was repeated often and seemed a sort of chant of power. As I suspected, hallucinogenic drugs were used by the sect, and there was no doubt that they believed themselves communing with strange metaphysical venues. Their chief aim, in true mystical fashion, was to transcend common reality in the search for higher states of being, but their stratagem was highly unorthodox, a strange detour along the usual path toward positive illumination. Instead, they maintained a kind of blasphemous fatalism, a doomed determinism which brought them face to face with realms of obscure horror. Perhaps it was this very obscurity that allowed them the excitement of their central purpose, which seemed to be a precarious flirting with personal apocalypse, the striving for horrific dominion over horror itself.("The Dreaming In Nortown")
Each asana is like a sound or letter in an alphabet. Every letter in an alphabet produces a unique sound vibration. Each asana vibrates at a specific frequency. When asanas are performed in sequence, beautiful phrases or sutras result, producing a mystical language.
And though it be not so in the physical, yet in moral science that which cannot be understood is not always profitless. For the soul awakes, a trembling stranger, between two dim eternities,—the eternal past, the eternal future. The light shines only on a small space around her; therefore, she needs must yearn towards the unknown; and the voices and shadowy movings which come to her from out the cloudy pillar of inspiration have each one echoes and answers in her own expecting nature.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
The conventional term is "mystical experience," meaning something that by its very nature lies beyond the reach of language, except for some vague verbal hand-wavings about "mystery" and "transcendence." As far as I was concerned - as a rationalist, an atheist, a scientist by training - this was the realm of gods and fairies and of no use to the great human project of trying to retain a foothold on the planet for future generations.
The Truth Is That I Was Recognized For Stubbornness And Not Goodness. Even, Though I Was Very Intelligent And Sent To School By A Little Few Supports From Sponsors And My Mother. My Brain Was Never Ever Cool. Due To All The Mistakes I Saw From A Very Tender Age From All Those Whom I Looked Upon As Elders And Shinning Examples. Although They Where Some Good Examples Which Still Live On. Still The Early Damaged As Already Been Done. So It Led Me Dropping Out Of School In To Working And Using The Great Ancient Vedic Philosophies I Have Been Hearing From The Very Beginning Of My Conception In My Mother Womb Till The Day I Was Born And Forever. I Used Them All To Materialize Many Of My Dreams And Practice Mysticism Coupled With Spiritualism To Keep My Self Secured And Keep Cool Depending On God.
The mystical perception (which is only “mystical” if reality is limited to what can be measured by the intellect and senses) is remarkably consistent in all ages and all places. All phenomena are processes, connections, all is in flux…have the mind screens knocked away to see there is no real edge to anything, that in the endless interpenetration of the universe, a molecular flow, a cosmic energy shimmers in all stone and steel as well as flesh…
I die, and yet not dies in meThe ardour of my love for Thee,Nor hath Thy Love, my only goal,Assuaged the fever of my soul.To Thee alone my spirit cries;In Thee my whole ambition lies,And still Thy Wealth is far aboveThe poverty of my small love.I turn to Thee in my request,And seek in Thee my final rest;To Thee my loud lament is brought,Thou dwellest in my secret thought.However long my sickness be,This wearisome infirmity,Never to men will I declareThe burden Thou has made me bear.To Thee alone is manifestThe heavy labour of my breast,Else never kin nor neighbors knowThe brimming measure of my woe.A fever burns below my heartAnd ravages my every part;It hath destroyed my strength and stay,And smouldered all my soul away.Guidest Thou not upon the roadThe rider wearied by his load,Delivering from the steeps of deathThe traveller as he wandereth?Didst Thou not light a beacon tooFor them that found the Guidance trueBut carried not within their handThe faintest glimmer of its brand?O then to me Thy Favour giveThat, so attended, I may live,And overwhelm with ease from TheeThe rigor of my poverty.
To understand the extreme lengths to which the Sufis were prepared to go in reading esoteric meanings into the quite simple language of their Scriptures, it is necessary to remember that the Koran was committed to memory by all deeply religious men and women, and recited constantly, aloud or in the heart; so that the mystic was in a state of uninterrupted meditation upon the Holy Book. Many passages which would otherwise pass without special notice were therefore bound to arrest their attention, already sufficiently alert, and to quicken their imagination, already fired by the discipline of their austerities and the rigor of their internal life.
It was the discovery of the quantum universe that changed everything, and that universe was so small and so dynamic that it could not be observed directly. Trying to explain their insights, scientists looked at the language of mysticism. At the subatomic level, the parallels between quantum reality and mysticism were striking. For example, the behavior of light: in some contexts it acted like a wave, in others like a particle. Could it be both? Physicists had no concept for grasping this, so they dispensed with Western logic and embraced paradox. (This is important, too, for the notion of vampires being both living and dead.)
At that time I also had, for a short while, the strength to bear it. But all too soon I lost external sight of the shape of that beautiful man, and I saw him disappear to nothing, so quickly melting away and fusing together that I could not see or observe him outside of me, nor discern him within me. It was to me at that moment as if we were one without distinction.
Sadistic brutality and mystical feeling go always hand in hand when the normal capacity for orgastic experience is lacking. This was as true of the inquisitors of the medieval church, of the cruel and mystical Philip II of Spain, as it is of any modern mass murderer.
To gain control over a large number of people you do not have to place them in containers with suction caps attached to their bodies like in the film “The Matrix”. It is enough to create an all-encompassing information network because then people will automatically take their places in its cells.
What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this 'someone else' really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father's father... thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference - the difference between you and someone else - when objectively what is there is the same?
There is a certain mysticism in the Christian's affirmation of the physical universe. There is a confidence that whatever is discovered conforms with Jesus Christ and is a manifestation of His will.
Divinity never forces itself upon you. If you are willing, it is always there for you. If you are not willing, it is not there for you. So all you need to do is create the right kind of willingness and receptivity. Just to bow down and not have a will of your own is the biggest receptivity. It is the easiest way to receive.
...the clearer the light is, the more it blinds and darkens the pupil of the owl; and the more we look at the sun, the greater is the darkness it causes in our vision ... in the same way, when the divine light of contemplation assails the soul that is not wholly enlightened, it causes spiritual darkness within it.
The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason, great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way.
There are two Paths to the Innermost: the Way of the Mystic, which is the way of devotion and meditation, a solitary and subjective path; and the way of the occultist, which is the way of the intellect, of concentration, and of trained will; upon this path the co-operation of fellow workers is required, firstly for the exchange of knowledge, and secondly because ritual magic plays an important part in this work, and for this the assistance of several is needed in most of the greater operations. The mystic derives his knowledge through the direct communion of his higher self with the Higher Powers; to him the wisdom of the occultist is foolishness, for his mind does not work in that way; but, on the other hand, to a more intellectual and extrovert type, the method of the mystic is impossible until long training has enabled him to transcend the planes of form. We must therefore recognize these two distinct types among those who seek the Way of Initiation, and remember that there is a path for each.
Those who seek only the rapture of divine union and quiescence of the mystic state are likewise not on our path. Such navel gazers lose the script for why they are even incarnated in the first place. To the sorcerer there is not much point in moments of primordial awareness if it does not carry over into the living levels of consciousness; no purpose to receiving the uncreated and clear light, if one cannot reflect it outward through world and deed; and no purpose in being a sovereign if you cannot leave the kingdom better than you found it.
Mystical organizations are only a crystallization of facts which can be found, in a more diffuse and less tangible form, in all strata of people. The degree of mystical, sentimental and sadistic feelings corresponds exactly to the degree of the disturbance of natural orgastic experience. Close observation of the audience of a trashy thriller or of a boxing match teaches more about these problems than a hundred handbooks of sexology.
Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form…the cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the center of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no center.
I suspect that scientists are driven by the sense that the world out there - reality - contains a hidden order, and the scientist is trying to elucidate the hidden order in our reality. And that impulse is what the scientist shares with the mystic. The impulse to get to the bottom of things. To know how the world really works. To know the nature of things.
The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension, and once again, the warm tears freeze upon my face. These rocks and mountains, all this matter, the snow itself, the air- the earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.
An eternity of wisdom and life lies waiting for discovery by those who are willing to embark on the mystical adventure. All of our resources are within us. All we need is our heart, our mind and the will to be something better than we are.
For if the will has nothing to employ it and love has no present object with which to busy itself, the soul finds itself without either support or occupation, its solitude and aridity cause it great distress and its thoughts involve it in the severest conflict.
The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth.
To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. (“The Medusa”)
The next time you stand on a beach at night, watching the moon’s bright path across the water, and the conscious of the moon-drawn tides, remember that the moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space. And remember if the moon was formed in this fashion, the event may have had much to do with shaping the ocean basins and the continents as we know them.
The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.
The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.
Farsi Couplet: Agar firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast, Hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast. English Translation: If there is a paradise on earth, It is this, it is this, it is this
No soul in the world is without a particular mission to perform and accomplish, and the misery of every soul is in not having come to understanding of the purpose for which he is born. The lifetime of confusion is always caused by souls wandering all the time away from the purpose of which they were born.Inayat Khan (1882 – 1927).
I let my head fall back, and I gazed into the Eternal Blue Sky. It was morning. Some of the sky was yellow, some the softest blue. One small cloud scuttled along. Strange how everything below can be such death and chaos and pain while above the sky is peace, sweet blue gentleness. I heard a shaman say once, the Ancestors want our souls to be like the blue sky.
Through Jung [Pauli] became very interested in various kinds of mysticism, including Jewish mysticism. This led Pauli to develop a friendship with Gershom Scholem, the world's greatest authority in that field and in the Cabala, .... On one occasion Scholem asked me to tell him about unsolved problems in modern physics. .... When I mentioned this number --137-- to Scholem, .... He told me that in Hebrew .... The number corresponding to the word 'cabala' happens to be 137.
The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.
In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram —impersonal and unattainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive.
Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth.
I have become so accustomed to think “scientifically” that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him.
When shall I get to kiss thee?’ I asked.‘By all means you can forever ask,’ she answered.‘Your lips ask a heavy price,’ I said.‘It’s a fair exchange of one so fair,’ she said.‘What lips are worthy for your mouth and lips?’ I asked.‘Only the discerning can this secret know,’ she answered.‘Don’t worship idols, be with the Truth,’ I said.‘In the Way of Love, both are allowed,’ she said.I said, ‘The tavern helps to heal the heart.’‘Blessed are those who heal the lonely heart,’ she answered.‘It’s not religion, the priestly robe, the wine,’ I said.‘But to the gnostic both lead to the Divine,’ she answered.‘What use to an old man of youthful lips?’ I asked.‘By such sweet kissing, he grows young!’ she answered.‘When shall the bridegroom embrace the bride?’‘When the stars are that way inclined.’I said, ‘The prayer of Hafiz is for His glory.’‘This is the prayer of angels too, in heaven,’ she answered.
Beryl: Beryl is a warm gemstone which develops, between the third hour and midday, from the foam of water when the sun burns it severely. Its power is thus more from air and water than from fire, but nevertheless it has some of the properties of fire. And if a man has drunk or eaten poison, then he should place a little beryl in spring water and drink it at once. Continue for five days drinking it once a day while fasting, and the poison will foam up through vomiting, or it will pass out of him through the rear.
There can only be two contexts of your life. Either you are the author of your life, or He (the Creator) is the author of your life. People who feel that their creation is the responsibility of the Creator, find opportunities unexpectedly. Those who feel that their lives are their own, have to fashion their own means.
The parallels to modern physics [with mysticism] appear not only in the Vedas of Hinduism, in the I Ching, or in the Buddhist sutras, but also in the fragments of Heraclitus, in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, or in the teachings of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan.
Why do people kill others just like them with such ferocity simply because they worship a different god? What harm were they doing? People suffer in these wars and dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions even lose their lives. Whatever happened to the survival instinct? One could just about understand the violent battle for wealth or territory but how are we supposed to understand the battle for a belief?
You know how long's the universe. It's seven million freeways side by side. You know how high. So high the moon just falls. But little punks, you still know the hardcore of the universe. It's cause you're hardcore too. You're made of pure universe, under your bones. And nothing ever starts shit by meaning to. We meant to break down the amerikan dream throwing bottles. All we broke was bottles. What worked was one stolen handful of flax seed. All ages shows in the highschool parkade, and the keys to the bandroom door. Their dream was a joke anyway. What worked was a nother joke.
Khusrau darya prem ka, ulti wa ki dhaar, Jo utra so doob gaya, jo dooba so paar. English Translation. Oh Khusrau, the river of love Runs in strange directions. One who jumps into it drowns, And one who drowns, gets across.
When we talk of "exploring the mystical," we are not trying to dig into creation, because if you dig into creation, it will only get more complex. It will not bring clarity; it will only bring more complexity. That is why the yogis looked in a different direction. We looked inward. If you look inward, a different dimension opens up. Now instead of things getting more complex, you get to clarity. It is because of this that we say that those who look inward have a third eye. They see things that others cannot see. They have brought a new clarity to life.
Why two (or whole groups) of people can come up with the same story or idea at the same time, even when across the world from each-other:"A field is a region of influence, where a force will influence objects at a distance with nothing in between. We and our universe live in a Quantum sea of light. Scientists have found that the real currency of the universe is an exchange of energy. Life radiates light, even when grown in the dark. Creation takes place amidst a background sea of energy, which metaphysics might call the Force, and scientists call the "Field." (Officially the Zero Point Field) There is no empty space, even the darkest empty space is actually a cauldron of energies. Matter is simply concentrations of this energy (particles are just little knots of energy.) All life is energy (light) interacting. The universe is self-regenreating and eternal, constantly refreshing itself and in touch with every other part of itself instantaneously. Everything in it is giving, exchanging and interacting with energy, coming in and out of existence at every level. The self has a field of influence on the world and visa versa based on this energy.Biology has more and more been determined a quantum process, and consciousness as well, functions at the quantum level (connected to a universe of energy that underlies and connects everything). Scientist Walter Schempp's showed that long and short term memory is stored not in our brain but in this "Field" of energy or light that pervades and creates the universe and world we live in.A number of scientists since him would go on to argue that the brain is simply the retrieval and read-out mechanism of the ultimate storage medium - the Field. Associates from Japan would hypothesize that what we think of as memory is simply a coherent emission of signals from the "Field," and that longer memories are a structured grouping of this wave information. If this were true, it would explain why one tiny association often triggers a riot of sights, sounds and smells. It would also explain why, with long-term memory in particular, recall is instantaneous and doesn't require any scanning mechanism to sift through years and years of memory.If they are correct, our brain is not a storage medium but a receiving mechanism in every sense, and memory is simply a distant cousin of perception.Some scientists went as far as to suggest that all of our higher cognitive processes result from an interaction with the Field. This kind of constant interaction might account for intuition or creativity - and how ideas come to us in bursts of insight, sometimes in fragments but often as a miraculous whole. An intuitive leap might simply be a sudden coalescence of coherence in the Field.The fact that the human body was exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation suggested something profound about the world. It hinted at human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper and more extended than we presently understand. It also blurred the boundary lines of our individuality - our very sense of separateness. If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a Field and sending out and receiving quantum information, where did we end and the rest of the world began? Where was consciousness-encased inside our bodies or out there in the Field?Indeed, there was no more 'out there' if we and the rest of the world were so intrinsically interconnected. In ignoring the effect of the "Field" modern physicists set mankind back, by eliminating the possibility of interconnectedness and obscuring a scientific explanation for many kinds of miracles. In re-normalizing their equations (to leave this part out) what they'd been doing was a little like subtracting God.
You can convert this human system into absolute receptivity, where you can perceive life in ways that you have never believed possible. If you keep all your ideas, emotions and your nonsense aside, maybe you can take a step, move one inch. One little step existentially is worth more than all the scriptures that you can read on the planet. One little step is far more important than all the philosophies that you can spout.
See, when we say a "spiritual seeker," unfortunately most people assume that he is God-oriented. A spiritual seeker is not God-oriented; if Devil is the chief of existence, he wants to know that. We want to know what is true; we are not interested in proving our belief systems, because we don't have any.
For the New Age community, 'ancient' knowledge is always considered unimpeachable and unimprovable, just as a diverse range of beliefs from Eastern mysticism to UFOs, energy dowsing to cryptozoology, are - though mutually contradictory - unquestionably accepted in the name of open-mindedness.
By music I mean the ‘spirit of the game,’ which is what all spirituality ultimately points to — ‘I hear the voice’ (of Nature, God, beauty, truth, love…). Hear it and move onto or into. The easiest way to do that is to notice and invest in whatever it is that provokes wonderment. You could call this coming back to mysticism as a way of life. We were all already there as children.
Love has an enormous spectrum of expression and impact. At the far end, it begins to unravel and move away from subjective experience and personal preference. It becomes pure intent, something that no longer tickles our desires, but fulfills the deeper needs of each circumstance we’re in.
Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine's riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, like a series of fortune-telling cards being deal and slid in front of her. The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman... After a while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in these panels are precisely those out of all the city millions she must in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her own - they are the day's messengers from whatever the Beyond has for a Third World, where the days are assembled one by one under non-union conditions. Each messenger carrying the props required for their character, shopping bags, books, musical instruments, arrived here out of darkness, bound again into darkness, with only a minute to deliver the intelligence Maxine needs. At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window at her.
In the heart of the mystic lies a deep longing to be reunited with the ancient ways, coupled with a yearning to be able to show others what she can see. She wants to show others what she can see. Sadly, more often than not, others do not have the eyes with which to see, or, their eyes are blinded by bondage and fear. She is ever alone and yet ever accompanied by a thousand leagues of beauties and voices, that this mystic existence can only be described as a thorny rose— the mystic is the one who reaches for the rose because she knows that those who crave the rose must not fear the thorns.
WE say then- that the Cause of all, which is above all, is neither without being, nor without life----nor with- out reason, nor without mind, nor is a body----nor has shape----nor form----nor quality, or quantity, or bulk----nor is in a place----nor is seen----nor has sensible contact----nor perceives, nor is perceived, by the senses----nor has disorder and confusion, as being vexed by earthly passions,----nor is powerless, as being subject to casualties of sense,----nor is in need of light;----neither is It, nor has It, change, or decay, or division, or deprivation, or flux,----or any other of the objects of sense.
TRIAD supernal, both super-God and super-good, Guardian of the Theosophy of Christian men, direct us aright to the super-unknown and super-brilliant and highest summit of the mystic Oracles, where the simple and absolute a!nd changeless mysteries of theology lie hidden within the super-luminous gloom of the silence, revealing hidden things, which in its deepest darkness shines above the most super-brilliant, and in the altogether impalpable and invisible, fills to overflowing the eyeless minds with glories of surpassing beauty. This then be my prayer; but thou, O dear Timothy, by thy persistent commerce with the mystic visions, leave behind both sensible perceptions and intellectual efforts, and all objects of sense and intelligence, and all things not being and being, and be raised aloft unknowingly to the union, as far' as attainable, with Him Who is above every essence and knowledge. For by the resistless and absolute ecstasy in all purity, from thyself and all, thou wilt be carried on high, to the superessential ray of the Divine darkness, when thou hast cast away all, and become free from all.
It would be pleasant to believe that the age of pessimism is now coming to a close, and that its end is marked by the same author who marked its beginning: Aldous Huxley. After thirty years of trying to find salvation in mysticism, and assimilating the Wisdom of the East, Huxley published in 1962 a new constructive utopia, The Island. In this beautiful book he created a grand synthesis between the science of the West and the Wisdom of the East, with the same exceptional intellectual power which he displayed in his Brave New World. (His gaminerie is also unimpaired; his close union of eschatology and scatology will not be to everybody's tastes.) But though his Utopia is constructive, it is not optimistic; in the end his island Utopia is destroyed by the sort of adolescent gangster nationalism which he knows so well, and describes only too convincingly.This, in a nutshell, is the history of thought about the future since Victorian days. To sum up the situation, the sceptics and the pessimists have taken man into account as a whole; the optimists only as a producer and consumer of goods. The means of destruction have developed pari passu with the technology of production, while creative imagination has not kept pace with either.The creative imagination I am talking of works on two levels. The first is the level of social engineering, the second is the level of vision. In my view both have lagged behind technology, especially in the highly advanced Western countries, and both constitute dangers.
A Super-Integral Spirituality has all the features of an Integral Spirituality, plus, among other things, an inherent conjunction of each stage with a given state, giving all of its stages a transpersonal or spiritual flavor (at least the possibility of either gross nature mysticism, subtle deity mysticism, causal formless mysticism, or nondual Unity mysticism). These mystical states are, of course, available to virtually all the lower 1st- and 2nd-tier stages, although there are likely some significant differences in 3rd tier, given its inherent conjunction of structures and states.
A far cicada rings high and clear over the river’s heavy wash. Morning glory, a lone dandelion, cassia, orchids. So far from the nearest sea, I am taken aback by the sight of a purple land crab, like a relict of the ancient days when the Indian subcontinent, adrift on the earth’s mantle, moved northward to collide with the Asian landmass, driving these marine rocks, inch by inch, five miles into the skies. The rise of the Himalaya, begun in the Eocene, some fifty million years ago, is still continuing: an earthquake in 1959 caused mountains to fall into the rivers and changed the course of the great Brahmaputra, which comes down out of Tibet through northeastern India to join the Ganges near its delta at the Bay of Bengal.
The ancient sages of Kashmir Shaivism did not look for the truth only in logic and intellectual speculation. They relied much more on their experiences during deep yogic states to guide them in understanding and clarifying age-old philosophical dilemmas. They discovered the Absolute within themselves and found that they were one with it. They studied the Self that lay beyond the mind and the ego, and found that It was divine, creative energy. God was not some distant ruler or some inert entity. These sages realized and recognized that He was within everything, was the vitality of life itself, and was always the one transcendent Reality as well. In this way Kashmir Shaivites taught the principle of theistic absolutism.For centuries Indian philosophers have been debating whether this world is real or an illusion. In the process of watching the unfolding of their own creative energy during meditation, the sages of Kashmir found the source of all creation, and witnessed how everything in this universe evolves from this one absolute Reality into manifestation which is also real. Because all creation exists within the Absolute, they established the principle of spiritual realism.— B. N. Pandit, Specific Principles of Kashmir Shaivism (3rd ed., 2008), p. x
From this perspective, we were all divine Shakespeares, creating and playing the roles of muscled heroes and conniving villains, pious saints and debauched sinners, corrupt CEOs and disinterested temp workers.
As long as man was in the moolight he desired to reach the moon…there was bliss in the moonlight but the moon itself was distant. Moonlight was near but man longed for the moon…man reached the moon but there he was without moonlight. If one reaches the moon one does not find moonlight any longer and if one is in moonlight one does not find the moon. It is a strange fact that one is only because of the other…one is a sign of the other yet both are forever separate. If the Beloved is the Moon, moonlight is His remembrance. When the Beloved is present His remembrance is not and when His remembrance is present the Beloved is not. Proximity to one is distance from the other, Union with one is separation from the other. Thus union is hidden in every separation and separation in every union.
If grass grows and withers, it can only mean that it is part of a greater thing, which is even more real; not that the grass is less real than it looks. St. Thomas (Aquinas) has a really logical right to say, in the words of the modern mystic, A. E.: "I begin by the grass to be bound again to the Lord.
A mystic doesn’t say “I believe.” They say “I know.” A true mystic will ironically speak with that self-confidence but at the same time with a kind of humility. So when you see that combination of calm self-confidence, certitude, and humility all at the same time you have the basis for mysticism in general.
Man is a little world--a microcosm inside the great universe. Like a fetus, he is suspended, by all his three spirits, in the matrix of the macrocosmos; and while his terrestrial body is in constant sympathy with its parent earth, his astral soul lives in unison with the sidereal anima mundi. He is in it, as it is in him, for the world-pervading element fills all space, and is space itself, only shoreless and infinite. As to his third spirit, the divine, what is it but an infinitesimal ray, one of the countless radiations proceeding directly from the Highest Cause--the Spiritual Light of the World? This is the trinity of organic and inorganic nature--the spiritual and the physical, which are three in one, and of which Proclus says that 'The first monad is the Eternal God; the second, eternity; the third, the paradigm, or pattern of the universe;' the three constituting the Intelligible Triad.
In his numerous works, especially in The Idealist View of Life and Eastern Religions and Western Thought, the great Eastern Philosopher, Professor Radhakrishnan, advocates the necessity for the revival of the deeply spiritual mystical experience which is the basis of all religions and which is expressed in a pure form in Hinduism. He says: “In spite of all appearances to the contrary, we discern in the present unrest the gradual dawning of a great light, a converging life-endeavour, a growing realisation that there is a secret spirit in which we are all one, and of which humanity is the highest vehicle on earth, and an increasing desire to live out this knowledge and establish a kingdom of spirit on earth.” (Eastern Religions and Western Thought, p. 33). “The different religions have now come together, and if they are not to continue in a state of conflict or competition, they must develop a spirit of comprehension which will break down prejudice and misunderstanding and bind them together as varied expressions of a single truth. Such a spirit characterised the development of Hinduism, which has not been interrupted for nearly fifty centuries.
For all its complexity, however, astrology remains fundamentally simple. It offers a time-honored system of symbols that sum up key aspects of human life while providing profound insights and practical guidance.
The sword is a handle onto the Way of the world that is offering itself to you. If you are willful it will weigh a ton and wear you out. If you lose focus it will cut open your hand. Mindfulness keeps your mind on the blade; and if you are mindful you will not think about the future or past, there will be no blocks to the flow of Tao, and the Way of the world will flow through the sword and through you. You will become the sword of the world.
The most 'authoritative' accounts of a historical Jesus come from the four canonical Gospels of the Bible. Note that these Gospels did not come into the Bible as original and authoritative from the authors themselves, but rather from the influence of early church fathers, especially the most influential of them all: Irenaeus of Lyon who lived in the middle of the second century. Many heretical gospels existed by that time, but Irenaeus considered only some of them for mystical reasons. He claimed only four in number; according to Romer, 'like the four zones of the world, the four winds, the four divisions of man's estate, and the four forms of the first living creatures-- the lion of Mark, the calf of Luke, the man of Matthew, the eagle of John.
We in the West regard the universe as a creation of God; like an invention or a product. After he created the universe, God set himself to oversee it and manage it. We see God as our boss. He created the universe, he is present in it, he manages every part of it, but he is still separate from it. It's like he installed video cameras all over the universe, so he can see everything that happens, and he can cause this or that to happen, but he is not a part of what happens. The Eastern view is very different. To the Hindu, for example, God didn't create the universe, but God became the universe. Then he forgot that he became the universe. Why would God do this? Basically, for entertainment. You create a universe, and that in itself is very exciting. But then what? Should you sit back and watch this universe of yours having all the fun? No, you should have all the fun yourself. To accomplish this, God transformed into the whole universe. God is the Universe, and everything in it. But the universe doesn't know that because that would ruin the suspense. The universe is God's great drama, and God is the stage, the actors, and the audience all at once. The title of this epic drama is "The Great Unknown Outcome." Throw in potent elements like passion, love, hate, good, evil, free will; and who knows what will happen? No one knows, and that is what keeps the universe interesting. But everyone will have a good time. And there is never really any danger, because everyone is really God, and God is really just playing around.
As the beautiful does not exist for the artist and poet alone—though these can find in it more poignant depths of meaning than other men—so the world of Reality exists for all; and all may participate in it, unite with it, according to their measure and to the strength and purity of their desire.
Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the practical man is here invited: to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation from the fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to new levels of the world. Thus he may become aware of the universe which the spiritual artist is always trying to disclose to the race. This amount of mystical perception—this “ordinary contemplation,” as the specialists call it—is possible to all men: without it, they are not wholly conscious, nor wholly alive. It is a natural human activity, no more involving the great powers and sublime experiences of the mystical saints and philosophers than the ordinary enjoyment of music involves the special creative powers of the great musician.