金珉锡 太阳的后裔:Paths to Happiness: 7 Real Life Stories of Personal Growth, Self-Improvement and Positive Change

http://www.dailygood.org/pdf/ij.php?tid=660
Cultivating An Eagle Mind, by Matthieu Ricard
Human qualities often come in clusters. Altruism, inner peace, strength,
freedom, and genuine happiness thrive together like the parts of a
nourishing fruit. Likewise, selfishness, animosity, and fear grow together.
So, while helping others may not always be "pleasant," it leads the mind
to a sense of inner peace, courage, and harmony with the
interdependence of all things and beings.
Afflictive mental states, on the other hand, begin with self-centeredness,
with an increase in the gap between self and others. These states are
related to excessive self-importance and self-cherishing associated with
fear or resentment towards others, and grasping for outer things as part
of a hopeless pursuit of selfish happiness. A selfish pursuit of happiness
is a lose-lose situation: you make yourself miserable and make others
miserable as well.
Inner conflicts are often linked with excessive rumination on the past
and anticipation of the future. You are not truly paying attention to the
present moment, but are engrossed in your thoughts, going on and on in
a vicious circle, feeding your ego and self-centeredness.
This is the opposite of bare attention. To turn your attention inside
means to look at pure awareness itself and dwell without distraction, yet
effortlessly, in the present moment.
If you cultivate these mental skills, after a while you won't need to apply
contrived efforts anymore. You can deal with mental perturbations like
the eagles I see from the window of my hermitage in the Himalayas deal
with crows. The crows often attack them, diving at the eagles from
above. But, instead of doing all kinds of acrobatics, the eagle simply
retracts one wing at the last moment, lets the diving crow pass, and then
extends its wing again. The whole thing requires minimal effort and
causes little disturbance.
Being experienced in dealing with the sudden arising of emotions in the
mind works in a similar way.
--Matthieu Ricard, from "This is Your Brain on Bliss" [1]
Links:
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[1]
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/sustainable-happiness/this-is-your-b
rain-on-bliss


At Once, Beneficiary and Victim, by Aldous Huxley
_ "Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has
ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening
everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous
system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this
mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most
of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and
leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be
practically useful."_ -- Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad
According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large.
But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To
make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled
through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What
comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of
consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this
Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced
awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those
symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages.
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic
tradition into which he has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as
language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's
experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that
reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of
reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for
actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this
world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were,
petrified by language. The various "other worlds," with which human
beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of
the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the
time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is
consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons,
however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the
reducing valve.
--Aldous Huxley, From "Doors of Perception"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Dec 14, 2009


Law of Least Effort, by Deepak Chopra
If you observe nature at work, you will see that least effort is expended.
Grass doesn't try to grow, it just grows. Fish don't try to swim, they just
swim. Flowers don't try to bloom, they bloom. Birds don't try to fly, they
fly. This is their intrinsic nature. The earth doesn't try to spin on its own
axis; it is the nature of the earth to spin with dizzying speed and to hurtle
through space. It is the nature of babies to be in bliss. It is the nature of
the sun to shine. It is the nature of the stars to glitter and sparkle. And it
is human nature to make our dreams manifest into physical form, easily
and effortlessly.
In Vedic Science, the age-old philosophy of India, this principle is known
as the principle of economy of effort, or "do less and accomplish more."
Ultimately you come to the state where you do nothing and accomplish
everything. This means that there is just a faint idea, and then the
manifestation of the idea comes about effortlessly. What is commonly
called a "miracle" is actually an expression of the Law of Least Effort.
Nature's intelligence functions effortlessly, frictionlessly, spontaneously.
It is non-linear; it is intuitive, holistic, and nourishing. And when you are
in harmony with nature, when you are established in the knowledge of
your true Self, you can make use of the Law of Least Effort.
Least effort is expended when your actions are motivated by love,
because nature is held together by the energy of love. When you seek
power and control over other people, you waste energy. When you seek
money or power for the sake of the ego, you spend energy chasing the
illusion of happiness instead of enjoying happiness in the moment. When
you seek money for personal gain only, you cut off the flow of energy to
yourself, and interfere with the expression of nature's intelligence. But
when your actions are motivated by love, there is no waste of energy.
When your actions are motivated by love, your energy multiplies and
accumulates.
--Deepak Chopra, _Seven Spiritual Laws of Success_ [1]
Links:
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[1] http://www.innerself.com/Behavior_Modification/effort.htm
Published at www.ijourney.org on Jan 04, 2010


The Problem of Time, by Jacob Needleman
It is necessary to realize that technology itself is not the cause of our
problem of [not having enough] time. Its influence on our lives is a result,
not a cause -- the result of an unseen accelerating process taking place
in ourselves, in our inner being. Whether we point to the effect of
communication technology (such as e-mail) with its tyranny of instant
communication; or to the computerization, and therefore the
mentalization of so many human activities that previously required at
least some participation of our physical presence; or to any of the other
innumerable transformations of human life that are being brought about
by the new technologies, the essential element to recognize is how
much of what we call "progress" is accompanied by and measured by
the fact that human beings need less and less conscious attention to
perform their activities and lead their lives.
The real power of the faculty of attention, unknown to modern science,
is one of the indispensable and most central measures of humanness --
of the being of a man or a woman -- and has been so understood, in
many forms and symbols, at the heart of all great spiritual teaching of the
world. The effects of advancing technology, for all its material promise
they offer the world (along with the dangers, of course) is but the most
recent wave in a civilization that, without recognizing what it was doing,
has placed the satisfaction of desire above the cultivation of being.
The deep meaning of many rules of conduct and more principles of the
past -- so many of which have been abandoned without our
understanding their real roots in human nature -- involved the cultivation
and development of the uniquely human power of attention, its action in
the body, heart and mind of man. To be present, truly present, is to have
conscious attention. This capacity is the key to what it means to be
human.
It is not, therefore, the rapidity of change as such that is the source of
our problem of time. It is the metaphysical fact that the being of man is
diminishing.
--Jacob Needleman, in Time and the Soul [1]
Links:
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[1]
http://books.google.com/books?id=DY7D4M--TqgC&printsec=frontc
over&dq=jacob+needleman&client=firefox-a#v=onepage&
;q=&f=false


Death: the Key to the Door of Life, by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
There is no need to be afraid of death. It is not the end of the physical
body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to _live _while
we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that
comes with living behind a faade designed to conform to external
definitions of who and what we are. Every individual human being born
on this earth has the capacity to become a unique and special person
unlike any who has ever existed before or will ever exist again. But to the
extent that we become captives of culturally defined role expectations
and behaviors - stereotypes, not ourselves, -- we block our capacity of
self-actualization. We interfere with our becoming all that we can be.
Death is the key to the door of life. It is through accepting the finiteness
of our individual existences that we are enabled to find the strength and
courage to reject those extrinsic roles and expectations and to devote
each day of our lives - however long they may be - to growing as fully as
we are able. We must learn to draw on our inner resources, to define
ourselves in terms of the feedback we receive from our own internal
valuing system rather than trying to fit ourselves into some illfitting
stereotyped role.
It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living
empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you'll live forever, it
becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do.
You live your life in preparation for tomorrow or in remembrance of
yesterday, and meanwhile, each day is lost. In contrast, when you fully
understand that each day you awaken could be the last you have, you
take the time _that day_ to grow, to become more of who you really are,
to reach out to other human beings. []
Use this growth not selfishly, but rather in service of what may be, in the
future tide of time. Never allow a day to pass that did not add to what
was understood before. Let each day be a stone in the path of growth.
Do not rest until what was intended has been done. But remember - go
as slowly as is necessary in order to sustain a steady pace; do not
expend energy in waste. Finally, do not allow the illusory urgencies of
the immediate to distract you from your vision of the eternal.
--Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, from "Death: The Final Stage of Growth"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 16, 2009

What the Vision Does, by Peter Senge
If your deeper intention is an inseparable part of how you are, it is not
capable of attachment.
You can seek to accomplish your intention. You live out your intention. It
is like the wind, the life force from which your energy and determination
arises, whereas your vision is a particular destination you want to reach.
So, as best I can understand, the heart of the dynamic of being truly
committed and nonattached is to anchor in your deeper intention and
focus your energies on realizing your vision, while at the same time
knowing that the vision is, at best, a reflection of your deeper intention.
It is possible to be truly committed and not attached. Indeed, it is
essential to developing our mastery in the creative process. For years
we have expressed this basic idea as the principle. "It's not what the
vision is, it's what the vision does." In other words, rather than obsess
about realizing my vision, consider it as a force for change, a way of
aligning my actions with nature's unfolding. When you operate this way,
what happens may not be exactly as you imagined it in your vision, but
what happens would otherwise not have happened. You could hold a
vision of a genuine perfection in some domain and, although you might
never realize that vision, you might also achieve things that would have
never been achieved otherwise. It's not what the vision is, it's what the
vision does.
In this spirit, pursuing a vision is a way to live in harmony with your
deeper ineffable intention. In this sense, vision is a tool for orienting our
energies and effort around who we really are. But when we obsess
about whether or not our vision is being achieved, we confused the
animating force behind our being with an idea created by our mind.
--Peter Senge, from a dialogue with Charles Holmes
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 30, 2009

Willing to Experience our Suffering, by Charlotte Joko Beck
A few weeks ago someone gave me an interesting article on suffering,
and the first part of it was on the meaning of the word - "suffering". I'm
interested in these meanings; they are teachings in themselves. The
writer of this article pointed out that the word "suffering" is used to
express many things. The second part "fer", is from the Latin word
_"ferre," _meaning "to bear." And the first part, "suf" is from _sub,
_meaning "under." So there's a feeling in the word "to be under," "to bear
under," "to totally be under" - "to be supporting something from
underneath." [...]
So (remembering the definition of the word "suffer") until we bow down
and bear the suffering of life, not opposing it, but _absorbing _it and
_being _it - we cannot see what our life is. This by no means implies
passivity or non-action, but action from a state of complete acceptance.
Even "acceptance" is not quite accurate - it's simply _being _the
suffering. It isn't a matter of protecting ourselves, or accepting something
else. Complete openness, complete vulnerability is (surprisingly enough)
the only satisfactory way of living our life. []
Our practice throughout our lifetime is just this: At any given time we
have a rigid viewpoint or stance about life; it includes some things, it
excludes others. We may stick with it for a long time, but if we are
sincerely practicing our practice itself will shake up that viewpoint; we
can't maintain it. As we begin to question our viewpoint we may feel
struggle, upset, as we try to come to terms with this new insight into our
life; and for a long time we may deny it and struggle against it. That's
part of practice. Finally we become willing to experience our suffering
instead of fighting it. When we do so our standpoint, our vision of life,
abruptly shifts. Then once again, with our new viewpoint, we go along for
a while - until the cycle begins anew.
Once again the unease comes up. And we have to struggle, to go
through it again. Each time we do this - each time we go into the
suffering and let it be - our vision of life enlarges. It's like climbing a
mountain. At each point that we ascend we see more; and that becomes
broader with each cycle of climbing, of struggle. And the more we see,
the more expansive our vision, the more we know what to do, what
action to take.
--Charlotte Joko Beck, from "_Everyday Zen: Love and Work_"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Dec 21, 2009

Learning to 'Presence', by Peter Senge
When any of us acts in a state of fear or anxiety, our actions are likely to
revert to what is most habitual: our most instinctual behaviors dominate,
ultimately reducing us to our "fight - or - flight" programming of the
reptilian brain stem. Collective actions are no different. Even as
conditions in the world change dramatically, most businesses,
governments, schools, and other large organizations continue to take the
same kinds of institutional actions that they always have.
This does not mean that no learning occurs. But it is a limited type of
learning: learning how best to react to circumstances we see ourselves
as having no hand in creating. Reacting learning is governed by
"downloading" habitual ways of thinking, of continuing to see the world
within the familiar categories we are comfortable with. We discount
interpretations and options for action that are different than ones we
know and trust. We act to defend our interests. In reactive learning, our
actions are actually re-enacted habits, and we invariably end up
reinforcing pre-established mental models. Regardless of the outcome,
we end up being "right." At best, we get better at what we have always
done. We remain secure in the cocoon of our own world view, isolated
from the larger world. []
All learning integrates thinking and doing. All learning is about how we
interact in the world and types of capacities that develop from our
interactions. What differs is the depth of the awareness and the
consequent course of action. If awareness never reaches beyond
superficial events and current circumstances, actions will be reactions. If,
on the other hand, we penetrate more deeply to see the larger holes that
generate "what is" and our connection to this wholeness, the source and
effectiveness of our action can change dramatically.
In talking with pioneering scientists, we found extraordinary insights into
this capacity for deeper seeing and the effects such awareness can have
on our understanding, our sense of self, and our sense of belonging in
the world. In talking with entrepreneurs, we found extraordinary clarity
regarding what it means to act in the service of what is emerging. But we
also found that for the most part, neither of these groups talks with the
other. We came to realize that both groups are really talking about the
same process - the process by which we learn to "presence" an
emerging whole, to become what George Bernard Shaw called "a force
of nature."
-Peter Senge et al., from "_Presence: Human Purpose and Field of the
Future_"

Where Skillfullness and Clarity Meet, by J. Krishnamurti
We have become very skillful in dealing with our daily life; skillful, in the
sense of being clever in applying a great deal of knowledge which we
have acquired through education and experience. We act skillfully either
in a factory or in a business and so on. That skill becomes, through
repetitive action, routine. Skill, when it is highly developed - as it should
be - leads to self-importance and self-aggrandizement. Skill has brought
us to our present state, not only technologically, but in our relationships,
in the way we deal with each other - not clearly, not with compassion,
but with skill. Is there an action, in our daily life, which is skillful yet which
does not perpetuate the self, the me, which does not give importance to
one's self-centered existence? [] To answer that one has to inquire into
what clarity is; when there is clarity there is action which is skillful and
which does not perpetuate the self.
Clarity exists only when there is freedom to observe. One is only
capable of observing, looking, watching, when there is complete and
total freedom; otherwise there is always distortion in the observation. Is it
possible to be free of all distorting factors in one's outlook? []
One may describe what compassion is in the most eloquent and poetic
manner, but in whatever words it is expressed, those words are not the
thing. Without compassion there is no clarity; without clarity there is no
selfless skill - they are inter-related. Can one have this extraordinary
sense of compassion in one's daily life, not as a theory, not as an ideal,
not something to be achieved, to be practiced and so on, but to have it
totally, completely, at the root of one's being? []
We've strengthened in our consciousness, through great development
of skill, the structure and the nature of the self. The self is violence, the
self is greed, envy and so on. They are the very essence of self. As long
as there is the center as the me, every action must be distorted. Acting
from a center you're giving a direction, and that direction is distortion.
You may develop a great skill in this way but it is always unbalanced,
inharmonious. Now, can consciousness with its movement undergo a
radical transformation, a transformation not brought about by will. Will is
desire, desire for something and when there is desire there is a motive,
which is again a distorting factor in observation.
--J. Krishnamurti, from "The Wholeness of Life"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Mar 01, 2010


The Surprising Truth of Sufficiency, by Lynne Twist
We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the
mind-set of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the
surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don't mean a quantity of
anything. Sufficiency isn't two steps up from poverty or one step short of
abundance. It isn't a measure of barely enough or more than enough.
Sufficiency isn't an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we
generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are
enough.
In our relationship with money, it is using money in a way that
expresses our integrity; using it in a way that _expresses _value rather
than _determines_ value. Sufficiency is not a message about simplicity
or about cutting back and lowering expectations. Sufficiency doesn't
mean we shouldn't strive or aspire. Sufficiency is an act of generating,
distinguishing, making known to ourselves the power and presence of
our existing resources, and our inner resrouces. Sufficiency is a context
we bring forth from within that reminds us that if we look around us and
within ourselves, we will find what we need. There is always enough. [...]
I am not suggesting that there is ample water in the desert or food for
the beggards in Bombay. I am saying that even in the presence of
genuine scarcity of external resources, the desire and capacity for
self-sufficiency are innate and enough to meet the challenges we face. It
is precisely when we turn our attentions to these inner resources - in
fact, _only _when we do that - that we can begin to see more clearly the
sufficiency in us and available to us, and we can begin to generate
effective, sustainable responses to whatever limitations of resources
confront us. When we let go of the chase for more, and consciously
examine and experience the resources we already have, we discover
our resources are deeper than we knew or imagined. In the nourishment
of our attention, our assets expand and grow.
--Lynne Twist, in Soul of Money [1]
Links:
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[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=psWvaHa8UkAC
Published at www.ijourney.org on Dec 07, 2009

Receiving Each Day as an Invitation, by John O'Donohue
Each new day is a path of wonder, a different invitation. Days are where
our lives gradually become visible.
Often it seems that we have to undertake the longest journey to arrive at
what has been nearest all along. Mornings rarely find us so astounded at
the new day that we are unable to decide between adventures. We take
on days with the same conditioned reflex with which we wash and put on
our clothes each day. If we could be mindful of how short our time is, we
might learn how precious each day is. There are people who will never
forget today. []
The liturgy of dawn signals the wonder of the arriving day. Magic of
darkness breaking through into color and light is such a promise of
invitation and possibility. No wonder we always associate the hope and
urgency of new beginning with the dawn. Each day is the field of
brightness where the invitation of our life unfolds. A new day is an
intricate and subtle matrix; written into its mystery are the happenings
sent to awaken and challenge us.
No day is ever the same, and no day stands still; each one moves
through a different territory, awakening new beginnings. A day moves
forward in moments, and once a moment has flickered into life, it
vanishes and is replaced by the next. It is fascinating that this is where
we live, within an emerging lacework that continually unravels. Often a
fleeting moment can hold a whole sequence of the future in distilled
form: that unprepared second when you looked in a parent's eye and
saw death already beginning to loom. Or the second you noticed a
softening in someone's voice and you knew that a friendship was
beginning. Or catching your partner's gaze upon you and knowing the
love that surrounded you. Each day is seeded with recognitions.
The writing life is a wonderful metaphor for this. The writer goes to his
desk to meet the empty white page. As he settles himself, he is
preparing himself, for visitation and voyage. Each memory, longing, and
craft set the frame for what might emerge. He has no idea what will
come. Yet despite its limitations, his creative work will find its own
direction to form. Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our
integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will
become.
--John O'Donohue, from "To Bless the Space Between Us"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Dec 28, 2009

Beyond Endings, by John O'Donohue
Endings seem to lie in wait. Absorbed in our experience we forget that
an ending might be approaching. Consequently, when the ending signals
its arrival, we can feel ambushed. Perhaps there is an instinctive survival
mechanism in us that distracts us from the inevitability of ending, thus
enabling us to live in the present with innocence and whole-heartedness.
[]
Experience has its own secret structuring. Endings are natural. Often
what alarms us as an ending can in fact be the opening of a new journey
- a new beginning that we could never have anticipated; one that
engages forgotten parts of the heart. Due to the current overlay of
therapy terminology in our language, everyone now seems to wish for
"closure." This word is unfortunate: it is not faithful to the open-ended
rhythm of experience. Creatures made of clay with porous skins and
porous minds are quite incapable of the hermetic sealing that the
strategy of "closure" seems to imply. The word _completion_ is a truer
word. Each experience has within it a dynamic of unfolding and a
narrative of emergence. Oscar Wilde once said, "The supreme vice is
shallowness. Whatever is realized is right." When a person manages to
trust experience and be open to it, the experience finds its own way to
realization. Though such an ending may be awkward and painful, there
is a sense of wholesomeness and authenticity about it. Then the heart
will gradually find that this stage has run its course and the ending is
substantial and true. Eventually the person emerges with a deeper
sense of freedom, certainty, and integration.
The nature of calendar time is linear; it is made up of durations that
begin and end. The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time
there was eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of
relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something
may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning,
and effect continue to be held into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds
and deepens. In this sense, eternal time is intimate; it is where the
unfolding narrative of individual life is gathered and woven.
--John O'Donohue, from "To Bless the Space Between Us"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Feb 15, 2010

Humor is a Magical Interface, by Steve Bhaerman
*
*
* Humor is a magical interface between the logical and intuitive minds.
Consequently, it has the power to bypass the left-brain's linear
gatekeepers and allow outside-the-box ideas to come in under the radar.
Which is not to say that all comedy awakens. We've all experienced
brutality thinly disguised as "humor," usually with the unfunny disclaimer,
"What's the matter? Can't take a joke?"
Some kinds of humor perpetuate prejudice, misunderstanding, denial,
separation. They are merely reflecting the prejudice, misunderstanding,
denial and separation that now exist. The best kind of humor is a vehicle
for love that not only leaves 'em laughing, it leaves 'em smiling. By
understanding, embracing and practicing humor at its best, we can add
to the "laugh force" on the planet, and allow enlightening humor to strike
more frequently.
"Laughter is medicine." We've heard it so often, it's almost a clich. To go
a bit deeper, laughter is "medicine" in the Native American sense ... a
form of magic that can transmute suffering into insight, rigidity into
flexibility, separation into connection. As an alchemical (or we might say,
all-comical) tool, humor has the power to heal the heart and free the
mind. Wholehearted hearty laughter naturally kindles joy. []
On rare occasions, a joke fires on all cylinders. One such story,
purported to be true, is something that happened during the Cuban
missile crisis in 1962. As you may or may not remember, this is the
closest we as a world have come to nuclear holocaust. [] Fortunately,
wiser heads and hearts prevailed on both sides.
However, in the midst of the crisis there were some American and
Soviet delegates meeting to discuss possible trade between the two
countries. When news of the missile crisis hit, there was tremendous
tension and the room fell silent. Finally, one of the Soviet delegates
stood up and proposed that they take turns telling jokes. He volunteered
to start. "What's the difference between capitalism and communism?""In
capitalism, man exploits man. In communism, it's the other way around."
The room erupted in laughter, the kind of explosion that heals. When the
laughter died down, they were able to continue their business in peace
and equanimity.
Ever since I heard this story many, many years ago I have held it as the
highest octave of humor -- a joke that offered physical and emotional
release, and mental and spiritual insight. Instantly, the room was
transformed as each individual recognized him or herself -- as well as
everyone else -- as humans, united at the heart.
--Steve Bhaerman, aka Swami Beyondananda
Published at www.ijourney.org on Aug 09, 2010

Noticing the Gaps, by Eckhart Tolle
In the first moment of seeing something or hearing a sound -- and more
so if it is unfamiliar -- before the mind names or interprets what you see
or hear there is usually a gap of alert attention in which the perception
occurs. That is the inner space. Its duration differs from person to
person. It is easy to miss because in many people those spaces are
extremely short, perhaps only a second or less.
This is what happens: a new sight or sound arises, and in the first
moment of perception, there is a brief cessation in the habitual stream of
thinking. Consciousness is diverted away from thought because it is
required for sense perception. A very unusual sight or sound may leave
you "speechless" -- even inside, that is to say, bring about a longer gap.
The frequency and duration of those spaces determine your ability to
enjoy life, to feel an inner connectedness with other human beings as
well as nature. It also determines the degree to which you are free of
ego because ego implies complete unawareness of the dimension of
space.
When you become conscious of these brief spaces as they happen
naturally, they will lengthen, and as they do, you will experience with
increasing frequency the joy of perceiving with little or no interference of
thinking. []
Inner space also arises whenever you let go of the need to emphasize
your form-identity. That need is of the ego. It is not a true need. []
Here are some ways in which people unconsciously try to emphasize
their form-identity. If you are alert enough, you may be able to detect
some of these unconscious patterns within yourself: demanding
recognition for something you did and getting angry or upset if you don't
get it; trying to get attention by talking about your problems, the story of
your illness, or making a scene, giving your opinion when nobody has
asked for it and it makes no difference to the situation; being more
concerned with how the other person sees you than with the other
person, which is to say using other people for egoic reflection or as ego
enhancers [] taking things personally, feeling offended; making yourself
right and others wrong through futile mental complaining; wanting to be
seen, or appear important.
Once you have detected such a pattern within yourself, I suggest that
you conduct an experiment, Find out what it feels like and what happens
if you let go of that pattern. Just drop it and see what happens.
De-emphasizing who you are on the level of form is another way of
generating consciousness. Discover the enormous power that flows
through you into the world when you stop emphasizing your form
identity.
-- Eckhart Tolle, from "A New Earth"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Jan 11, 2010

When You Don't Choose Love You Choose Fear, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross If we could literally reach into you and remove all your fears - every one
of them - how different would your life be? Think about it. If nothing
stopped you from following your dreams, your life would probably be
very different. This is what the dying learn. Dying makes our worst fears
come forward to be faced directly. It helps us see the different life that is
possible, and in that vision, takes the rest of our fears away.
Unfortunately, by the time the fear is gone most of us are too sick or too
old to do those things we would have done before, had we not been
afraid. [] Thus, one lesson becomes clear: we must transcend our fears
while we can still do those things we dream of.
To transcend fear though, we must move somewhere else emotionally;
we must move into love.
Happiness, anxiety, joy, resentment -- we have many words for the
many emotions we experience in our lifetimes. But deep down, at our
cores, there are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions
come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows
happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate,
anxiety and guilt.
It's true that there are only two primary emotions, love and fear. But it's
more accurate to say that there is only love or fear, for we cannot feel
these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They're
opposites. If we're in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we're in a
place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear. Can you think of a time
when you've been in both love and fear? It's impossible.
We have to make a decision to be in one place or the other. There is no
neutrality in this. If you don't actively choose love, you will find yourself in
a place of either fear or one of its component feelings. Every moment
offers the choice to choose one or the other. And we must continually
make these choices, especially in difficult circumstances when our
commitment to love, instead of fear, is challenged.
Having chosen love, doesn't mean you will never fear again. In fact it
means that many of your fears will come up to finally be healed. This is
an ongoing process. Remember that you will become fearful after you've
chosen love, just as we become hungry after we eat. We must
continually choose love in order to nourish our souls and drive away
fear, just as we eat to nourish our bodies and drive away hunger.
--Elisabeth Kubler-Ross & David Kessler from "Life Lessons: Two
Experts on Death and Dying Teach Us About the Mysteries of Life and
Living"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Jan 18, 2010

Forgiveness & Your Life's Unfinished Business, by Stephen Levine
As awareness becomes yet subtler, able to discern even the muffled
whispers of the mind, we are confronted with what a dying musician
friend called "the Unfinished Symphony" - the dreams and longings that
have played themselves out unabated just beneath the surface of our
worldly persona - the unfilled, the uncompleted, the oft-resented
inheritance of a life only partially lived. Many coming upon long
unresolved issues and old holdings, find it difficult to simply let go. The
holding around the unresolved, the unapproached has become so
cramped close that it seems to take considerable effort to soften it back
to its natural openness. But forgiveness acts almost as a kind of
lubricant to allow the yet held to slip lightly away. Indeed, in theory it
would be ideal to just let go of heavy states such as resentment or fear
or guilt. But in practice we discover that the considerable momentum of
our identification with such feelings is not so easily dispersed. Before we
are fully able to just be mindful of such feelings, to just let them be
without the least tendency to cling or condemn, it may well be necessary
to deepen the practice of forgiveness - to actualize the potential for
letting go that the open-handed acceptance of forgiveness offers upon
meeting the gravel-fisted judgment of the often unkind mind. [] The
practice of forgiveness opens the mind to the natural compassion of the
heart. Practiced daily, it allows ancient clinging to dissolve. But in the
beginning forgiveness may have something of an odd quality about it.
One needs first to recognize that guilt arises uninvited. It is important to
use forgiveness not as a means of squashing guilt, or even upleveling
the unforgiveness of another, but as a means of dissolving obstructions.
At first one may feel they did nothing wrong, so why ask for or send
forgiveness. But emotions are not so rational; they have a life of their
own. We ask for forgiveness and offer forgiveness not because of some
imagined wrongdoing but because we no longer wish to carry the load of
our resentments and guilts. To allow the mind to sink into the heart. To
let go and get on with it. [] Forgiveness benefits oneself, not just another.
Although we may open our hearts to another, it is a means of letting
ourself back into our own heart. Indeed, forgiveness may be felt across
hundreds of miles and even acknowledged, but that is not the primary
purpose [] In fact, to wait for such acknowledgment is an example of how
we continue unfinished business. Forgiveness finishes business by
letting go of the armoring which separates one heart from another. As
one teacher said, "As long as there are two there is unfinished business.
When the two become one, the heart whispers to itself in every
direction." -- Stephen Levine
Published at www.ijourney.org on Feb 01, 2010

Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it
everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of,
every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of
our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and
economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward,
every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every
young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor
and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every
"superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history
of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the
rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in
glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a
fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants
of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of
some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager
they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have
some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of
pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic
dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will
come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere
else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit,
yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we
make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building
experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of
human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it
underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and
to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever
known.
--Carl Sagan, _Pale Blue Dot_, 1994
Published at www.ijourney.org on Jan 25, 2010

Being Judicious, not Judgmental, by Thanissaro Bhikku
One of the most difficult but necessary skills we need to develop as
meditators is learning how to be judicious without being judgmental. An
as a preliminary step to developing that skill, it's good to reflect on the
difference beween the two.
Being judgmental is basically an effort to get rid of something we don't
understand and probably don't want to understand. We see something
we don't like and we try to dismiss it, to stamp it out without taking the
time to understand it. we're impatient. Whatever we're being judgmental
about, we just want to get rid of it quickly.
Being judicious, however, requires patience together with undestanding.
A judicious choice is one you've made after understanding all the
options, all the sides of a question. That way your choice is based on
knowledge, not on greed, aversion, or delusion. [...]
The problem with being judgmental is that it's not effective. We try to
stamp out things here and they go springing up someplace else. [...]
Being judicious, though, is more effective. It's more precise. We see
what's really skillful, what's really unskillful in the mind, and we learn how
to disentangle the two. Often our skillful and unskillful habits get
entangled. The things we don't like within ourselves actually do have
some good in them, but we don't notice it. We focus instead on what we
don't like, or what we're afraid of, and we end up trying to stamp it all out,
the good along with the bad.
So this is why we meditate: to step back a bit, to watch things patiently
so that we can see them for what they are and deal with them effectively.
Our concentration practice gives us a comfortable center in our
awareness where we can rest, where we feel less threatened by things.
When we feel less threatened and less oppressed, we have the
resilience to be more patient, to look into what's going on in the mind,
and to develop the proper attitude toward what is skillful and what isn't.
[...]
One of the main problems in modern life is that people have so little
time. When they meditate, they want to cram as much of their meditation
as possible into their little bits and pieces of spare time. Of course that
aggravates the whole problem of bing judgmental. So keep reminding
yourself that meditation is a long-term project. When you have a sense
of that long arc of time, it's a lot easier to sit back and work very carefully
at the basic steps. It's like learning any skill.
- By Thanissaro Bhikku, from "Meditations"

The Lovely State of Observation, by Vimala Thakar
*
*
* There are two parts of life. Motion and motionlessness. Movement
is one part of life but to be in a state of no movement is also a
substantial part of our life. Speech is one aspect, one part of life,
unconditional silence is also a substance of life. Form and formlessness,
sound and silence, motion and motionlessness, light and darkness, birth
and death, the two together constitute the wholeness of life. Man has
created a contradiction between the two, man looks upon them as an
opposition to life. Is there a contradiction between birth and death or is
life a continuity, an eternal ocean of ISNESS on which there are bubbles
of birth and death?
Silence is as much a substantial part of our lives to which we are not
introduced. Motionlessness is a state of our being to which we are not
introduced, The way we live, we go on collecting things on the material
level, knowledge on the intellectual level, experience on the sensual and
psychological level. We go on acquiring and the I, the Me, the Ego that
goes on acquiring becomes stronger by every experience, with every
achievement and we create an enclosure around us by our own
knowledge, experience, possessions. In that enclosure we live and we
feel secure in that, We live secluded, isolated from the Whole, because
of the sense of possessions.
Meditation is a way of living that introduces us to that other part of our
life. The silence, the motionlessness, it introduces us to our pure
ISNESS which have never been conditioned and shall never be
conditioned. []
Meditation is coming home, to relax, to rest. If that takes place and one
finds that though one has withdrawn and retired from activity, the inner
movement goes on, thoughts come up, memories come up, then you
begin to observe them. Till now you were busy carrying out functional
roles, you were either the doer or the experience. From these two roles
you have set yourself free voluntarily. You are now the observer. The
inner movements come up, the involuntary movement comes up though
the voluntary has been discontinued. You sit there quietly, you do not
prepare to see, but if thoughts appear, then they are seen by you. It is a
lovely state, the state of observation.
--Vimala Thakar, from "Meditation In Daily Life"

To Know Without Needing To Understand, by Gangaji
*
*
*
*
*
* Usually, we search for understanding because we believe that it
will lead to true experience. We try to understand every experience that
is brought to us, and then we have our little mental niches where we put
the experience. This is one example of how the great power of the mind
leads our lives. But when it comes to the recognition of truth, the mind is
not equipped to lead. The mind is not the enemy, there is nothing wrong
with it. The tragedy is that we believe the conclusions of the mind to be
reality. This is a huge tragedy, responsible for both mundane suffering
and the most profound suffering, individually and collectively.
You are conditioned to try to keep mental understanding in an exalted
place, but that is not true understanding. That is in the realm of
understanding how to tie your shoes, practice good manners, learn a
new language, or decipher advanced mathematical formulas. The power
of understanding, which is a beautiful power of the mind, is useless in
the discovery of your true self.
Whatever you are searching for in this moment, however worldly or
spiritual it may be, just stop. A huge fear may arise, the fear that if you
stop, you will die, you will never make it to where you are headed. This
fear is understandable, but all the magnificent beings who have
preceded you encourage you to know that the mind's true stopping is
absolutely good news. Deep inside, you already know this. You just can't
quite believe it is true because you don't understand it. And you want to
understand it so that you will then have some control over it; it will have
a place and be definable as something religious, spiritual, or existential.
To know what you know in the core of your being without understanding
is effortless. The effort arises in having to understand it so that you can
mentally know it and remember it, so that it will be there for you if you
get into trouble. I invite you to stop that search.
[]
The simplicity of the truth is what keeps it out of the reach of any
concept, including whatever concepts might be used in the moment to
point to it. It is out of reach because it is too close to be reached.
Concepts of the mind are distant compared to the closeness of the truth
of who you are.
-- Gangaji, from 'The Diamond in Your Pocket'

If Sameness Is A Demand We Make, by Rev. Carol Carnes
When I lived in Hawaii, if the temperature dropped to 65 degrees
Fahrenheit, we felt we had been hit with serious winter. In California, 41
degrees was enough to cause complaints. Here in Canada those
temperatures are considered balmy when they occur in January and we
celebrate the warm weather!
It is all relative to what we consider normal. Deviations from the norm
are either something we resist or welcome. What determines our
reaction is how much our "norm" includes the possibility of change,
surprise, unexpected occurrences. In Calgary we know that the Chinook
winds will surely come and raise the temperatures dramatically a few
times every winter. We count on that change to be part of our "norm."
If sameness is a demand we make of our partner, our job, our children,
our friends, our world, then we are going to be seriously challenged
when the inevitable happens. People grow; they evolve; change their
minds, rethink their politics, get new jobs, move to different cities. They
find new friends, gain or lose weight, take up yoga while we sit in front of
the TV. If we feel a loss or a threat from their growth, it is time to expand
our sense of what "normal" is.
As the song says "Everything must Change. Nothing stays the same."
The temporariness of form or experience is something we can rely upon,
absolutely. It is in the variations of weather, the ups and downs of
relationships, the shift from toddler to teen, the necessity of learning new
skills, that keeps us in harmony with the nature of things. A kind of non
resisting ability to let things flow is a high awareness and a healthy way
to live. Knowing that change will surely come, we are more likely to
treasure the moment and celebrate it now.
--Rev. Carol Carnes
Published at www.ijourney.org on Mar 08, 2010

Pain, the Price of Freedom, by Michael Singer
*
*
* Wise beings do not want to remain a slave to the fear of pain. They
permit the world to be what it is instead of being afraid of it. They
wholeheartedly participate in life, but not for the purpose of using life to
avoid themselves. If life does something that causes a disturbance
inside of you, instead of pulling away, let it pass through you like the
wind. After all, things happen every day that causes a disturbance inside
of you. At any moment you can feel frustration, anger, fear, jealousy,
insecurity or embarrassment. If you watch you will see the heart is trying
to push it all away. If you want to be free you have to learn to stop
fighting all these human feelings.
When you feel pain, simply view it as energy. Just start seeing these
inner experiences as energy passing through your heart and before the
eye of your consciousness. Then relax. Do the opposite of contracting
and closing. Relax and release. Relax your heart until you are actually
face-to-face with the exact place where it hurts. Stay open and receptive
so you can be present right where the tension is. You must be willing to
be present right at the place of the tightness and pain, and then relax
and go even deeper. This is very deep growth and transformation. But
you will not want to do this. You will feel tremendous resistance to doing
this, and that's what makes it so powerful. As you relax and feel the
resistance, the heart will want to pull away, to close, to protect, and to
defend itself. Keep relaxing. Relax your shoulders and relax your heart.
Let go and leave room for the pain to pass through you. It's just energy.
Just see it as energy and let it go.
If you close around the pain and stop it from passing through, it will stay
in you. That is why our natural tendency to resist is so
counterproductive. If you don't want the pain, why do you close around it
and keep it. Do you actually think that if you resist, it will go away? It's
not true. If you release and let the energy pass through. Then it will go
away. If you relax when the pain comes up inside your heart, and
actually dare to face it, it will pass. Every single time you relax and
release, a piece of the pain leaves forever. Yet every time you resist and
close, you are building up the pain inside. It's like damming up a stream.
You are then forced to use the psyche to create a layer of distance
between you who experiences the pain and the pain itself. That is what
all the noise is inside your mind: an attempt to avoid the stored pain.
-- Michael Singer, from '_The Untethered Soul_ [1]'
Links:
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[1] http://www.untetheredsoul.com/book.html

Along the Thread of our Inner Sincerity, by Adyashanti
Sincerity is a word that I often use in teaching to convey the importance
of being rooted in the qualities of honesty, authenticity, and
genuineness. There can be nothing phony or contrived in our
motivations if we are to fully awaken to our natural and integral state of
unified awareness. While teachings and teachers can point us inward to
"the peace beyond all understanding," it is always along the thread of
our inner sincerity, or lack thereof, that we will travel. For the ego is
clever and artful in the ways of deception, and only the honesty and
genuineness of our ineffable being are beyond its influence. At each step
and with each breath we are given the option of acting and responding,
both inwardly and outwardly, from the conditioning of egoic
consciousness which values control and separation above all else, or
from the intuitive awareness of unity which resides in the inner silence of
our being. Without sincerity it is so very easy for even the greatest
spiritual teachings to become little more than playthings of the mind. In
our fast-moving world of quick fixes, big promises, and short attention
spans, it is easy to remain on a very surface level of consciousness
without even knowing it. While the awakened state is ever present and
closer than your feet, hands, or eyes, it cannot be approached in a
casual or insincere fashion. There is a reason that seekers the world
over are instructed to remove their shoes and quiet their voices before
entering into sacred spaces. The message being conveyed is that one's
ego must be "taken off and quieted" before access to the divine is
granted. All of our ego's attempts to control, demand, and plead with
reality have no influence on it other than to make life more conflicted and
difficult. But an open mind and sincere heart have the power to grant us
access to realizing what has always been present all along. [...] When
you are earnest, you are both sincere and one-pointed; to be
one-pointed means to keep your attention on one thing. I have found that
the most challenging thing for most spiritual seekers to do is to stay
focused on one thing for very long. The mind jumps around with its
concerns and questions from moment to moment. Rarely does it stay
with one question long enough to penetrate it deeply. --By Adyashanti,
from his essay, "The Indispensable Qualities of Awakening"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Sep 27, 2010

Applying Realization to Relationships, by Adyashanti
Many spiritual seekers have had glimpses of the absolute unity of all
existence, but few are capable of or willing to live up to the many
challenging implications inherent in that revelation. The revelation of
perfect unity, that there is no other, is a realization of the ultimate
impersonality of all that seems to be so very personal. Applying this
realization to the arena of personal relationships is something that most
seekers find extremely challenging, and is the number one reason why
so many seekers never come completely to rest in the freedom of the
Self Absolute. Inherent in the revelation of perfect unity is the realization
that there is no personal me, no personal other, and therefore no
personal relationships. Coming to terms with the challenging implications
of this stunning realization is something that few people are willing to do,
because realizing the true impersonality of all that seems so personal
challenges every aspect of the illusion of a separate, personal self. It
challenges the entire structure of personal relationships which are born
of needs, wants, and expectations. [...] This is the challenge, to let your
view get this vast, to let your view get so vast that your identity
disappears. Then you realize that there is no other, and there is nothing
personal going on. Contrary to the way the ego will view such a
realization, it is in reality the birth of true love, a love which is free of all
boundaries and fear. To the ego such uncontaminated love is
unbearable in its intimacy. When there are no clear separating
boundaries and nothing to gain the ego becomes disinterested, angry, or
frightened. In a love where there is no other, there is nowhere to hide, no
one to control, and nothing to gain. It is the coming together of
appearances in the beautiful dance of the Self called love. To the
seeker who is sincere, an experiential glimpse of this possibility is not
enough. If you are sincere, you will find it within yourself to go far beyond
any glimpse. You will find within your Self the courage to let go of the
known and dive deeply into the Unknown heart of a mystery that calls
you only to itself. --Adyashanti, in "The Heart of Relationship [1]"
Links:
------
[1]
http://www.adyashanti.org/index.php?file=writings_inner&writingid=
15
Published at www.ijourney.org on Feb 08, 2010

Growing in Spontaneity, by Vimala Thakar
Never argue with one's own understanding.
The whisper of intelligence is always there, whatever you do.
If you create a time lag between the whisper of intelligence and
understanding in you and your action, then you are preventing the
cerebral organ from growing into a new dimension. When you argue with
intelligence, when you postpone acting according to understanding then
there is confusion, the brain gets confused.
The voice of understanding, the voice of intelligence has an insecurity
about it. How do you know that it is the right thing?
So we tend to ignore it. Instead we accept authority. We conform.
But the brain cannot be orderly, competent, accurate and precise if you
do not listen to it, if you have no respect. We are so busy with the
outside world, and its compulsions, that the world that is inside us does
not command that respect and reverence, that care and concern from
us.
So one has to be a disciple of one's own understanding, look upon that
understanding as the master.
Sometimes one may commit a mistake, it might be the whim of the ego
and we might mistake the whim, the wish of the ego for the voice of
silence and intelligence, but that we have to discover. Unless you
commit mistakes, how do you learn to discriminate between the false
and the true? In learning there is bound to be a little insecurity, a
possibility of committing mistakes. Why should one be terribly afraid of
committing mistakes?
So instead of accepting the authority of habits and conditionings, while
one is moving one watches, and when there is a suggestion, a whisper
from within, from one's own intelligence, one does not neglect, ignore, or
insult that.
To eliminate the time lag between understanding and action is the way
to grow into spontaneity.
--Vimala Thakar
Published at www.ijourney.or

Daily Life of Art, by Nina Wise
Since the inception of the human species and until only decades ago,
daily life was infused with art making. We crafted our own tools, we
sewed our own clothing, we built our own shelters, we cultivated our own
food. We sang songs that we made up, songs that were passed down to
us, and songs that were given to us by the gods. We danced together
matching our steps to the steps of our companions. We built musical
instruments out of hides and sinew, twine and bent wood. We painted on
walls and on our bodies and our implements. These creative acts
enhanced our well-being as individuals, strengthened family bonds, knit
communities together, and provided access to states of being that
invoked insight and wisdom. We as a species cannot reside in
psychological and physical health if we abandon the very activities that
maintain well-being.
Everyone is creative. Creativity is our very nature. But for many of us,
the creative impulse has gone into hiding. "I can't draw, I can't sing, I
can't dance," we confess to each other, and we plant ourselves in front
of the television for the evening. But the creative impulse that is at the
core of all being remains robust within us.
Creativity is about having the courage to invent our lives--to concoct
lovemaking games, cook up a new recipe, paint a kitchen cabinet, build
sculptures on the beach, and sing in the shower. Creativity is about our
capacity to experience the core of our being and the full range of our
humanness.
The question of how to become more creative is not about learning
anything, or even doing anything, but about allowing whatever arises to
gain expression. To do this, we must bypass the voice inside of us that
says stop. The censoring mind is clever and has an entire litany of
reasons we must refrain from expressing ourselves: You are a bad
dancer so sit back and watch while the skillful ones dance. And you
certainly can't paint so don't even try because you will embarrass
yourself. You sing off-key and you can't hold a rhythm--you will disturb
everyone within earshot if you open your mouth. And if you happen to
disregard this sage advice, you will make a total fool of yourself and no
one will ever love you or give you a job. We obey this voice as if being
guided by inner wisdom; but when we tune in, we hear a quieter voice
calling out to us to express ourselves freely. This is the voice that can
liberate us. If we listen and respond, our lives become rich with the
pleasure creative freedom provides.
--Nina WIse, in _A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life_ [1]
Links:
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[1] http://www.ninawise.com/writings.html
Published at www.ijourney.org on Apr 19, 2010

What Eugene Taught Me, by Linda Lantieri
When I first met Eugene, he had been a peer mediator for several years
in his South Bronx high school. Once, when he was asked by his teacher
to think about a goal he had for himself in the future, he had said, "To be
alive at twenty-one." He was eighteen years old at the time. A year after
he graduated, I got a telephone call from his principal telling me that
Eugene had been in the "wrong place at the wrong time" and had been
hit by a random bullet while standing on a street corner in his
neighborhood. He was in Metropolitan Hospital, paralyzed from the waist
down. It took me two days to get up enough courage to visit him.
As I walked into the hospital ward that day, I saw a disheartening sight
-- overy thirty young men in wheelchairs, many of them victims of
violence that plagued our city. I spotted Eugene immediately. I asked
him, "How are you doing?" I will never forget his response. He said, "I
wasn't doing too great until this morning, when I got up and decided to
find the place in my heart that could forgive the guy that pulled the
trigger." Almost speechless, I managed to ask, "How were you able to do
that?" He replied, "I realized that I could have been that guy if I didn't
know there was a better way."
The compassion and insight that Eugene displayed that day is still the
exception, not the norm, but it has inspired me to think further about how
to foster such resilience and courage in our young people and how we
can make these exceptions in students' and teachers' lives more
widespread.
--Linda Lantieri, in _Schools With Spirit_ [1]
Links:
------
[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=LhrQnxwQHUcC
Published at www.ijourney.org on Mar 29, 2010

What is Goodness?, by Rabindranath Tagore
The question will be asked, "What is goodness? What does our moral
nature mean?" My answer is that when a man begins to have an
extended vision of his self, when he realizes that he is much more than
at present he seems to be, he begins to get conscious of his moral
nature. Then he grows aware of that which he is yet to be, and the state
not yet experienced by him becomes more real than that under his direct
experience.
Necessarily, his perspective of life changes, and his will takes the place
of his wishes. For will is the supreme wish of the larger life, the life
whose greater portion is out of our present reach, most of whose objects
are not before our sight.
Then comes the conflict of our lesser man with our greater man, of our
wishes with our will, of the desire for things affecting our sense with the
purpose that is within our heart. Then we begin to distinguish between
what we immediately desire and what is good. For good is that which is
desirable for our greater self. Thus, the sense of goodness comes out of
a truer view of our life, which is connected view of the wholeness of the
field of life, and which takes into account not only what is present before
us but what is not, and perhaps never humanly can be.
--Rabindranath Tagore, in Sadhana [1]
Links:
------
[1]
http://www.scribd.com/doc/30399164/Sadhana-by-Rabindranath-Tagore
Published at www.ijourney.org on Apr 26, 2010

An Undying Faith of the Infinite in Us, by Rabindranath Tagore
When we watch a child trying to walk, we see its countless failures; its
successes are but few. If we had to limit our observation within a narrow
space of time, the sight would be cruel. But we find that in spite of its
repeated failures there is an impetus of joy in the child which sustains it
in its seemingly impossible task. We see it does not think of its falls so
much as of its power to keep its balance though for only a moment.
Like these accidents in a child's attempt to walk, we meet with sufferings
in various forms in our life every day, showing the imperfections in our
knowledge and our available power, and in the application of our will. But
if these only revealed our weakness to us, we would die of utter
depression. When we select for observation a limited area of our
activities, our individual failures and miseries loom large in our minds;
but our life leads us instinctively to take a wider view. It gives us an ideal
of perfection which ever carries us beyond our present limitations. Within
us we have a hope which always walks in front of our present narrow
experience; it is the undying faith in the infinite in us; it will never accept
our disabilities as a permanent fact; it sets no limit to its own scope; it
dares to assert that man has oneness with God; and its wild dreams
become true everyday.
We see truth when we set our mind towards the infinite. The ideal of
truth is not in the narrow present, not in our immediate sensations, but in
the consciousness of the whole which gives us a taste of what we
*should* have in what we *do* have.
--Rabindranath Tagore, in Sadhana [1]
Links:
------
[1]
http://www.scribd.com/doc/30399164/Sadhana-by-Rabindranath-Tagore
Published at www.ijourney.org on Oct 18, 2010
Trust in the Awareness, by Ajahn Sumedho
'Meditation' can mean all kinds of things. It's a word that includes any
kind of mental practices, good or bad. But when I use this word, what I'm
mainly using it for is that sense of centering, that sense of establishing,
resting in the center. The only way that one can really do that is not to try
and think about it and analyze it; you have to trust in just a simple act of
attention, of awareness. It's so simple and so direct that our complicated
minds get very confused. "What's he talking about? I've never seen any
still point. I've never found a still point in me. When I sit and meditate,
there's nothing still about it." But there's an awareness of that. Even if
you think you've never had a still point or you're a confused, messed-up
character that really can't meditate, trust in the awareness of that very
perception. []
Awareness is your refuge:
Awareness of the changingness of feelings,
of attitudes, of moods, of material change
and emotional change:
Stay with that, because it's a refuge that is
indestructible.
It's not something that changes.
It's a refuge you can trust in.
This refuge is not something that you create.
It's not a creation. It's not an ideal.
It's very practical and very simple, but
easily overlooked or not noticed.
When you're mindful,
you're beginning to notice,
it's like this.
-- Ajahn Sumedho, from "Intuitive Awareness"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 08, 2010

Understanding and Cultivating Silence, by Ajahn Sumedho
Just by exploring this you really get to understand what [self] is, how
you become a personality and also to see that when there is no person
there is still awareness. It's an intelligent awareness; it's not an
unconscious dull stupidity, it's a bright, clear, intelligent emptiness. When
you become a personality through having thoughts like: feeling sorry for
yourself, views and opinions, self-criticism and so forth, and then it stops
-- there is the silence. But still the silence is bright and clear, intelligent. I
prefer this silence rather than this endless proliferating nattering that
goes on in the mind.
I used to have what I call an 'inner tyrant', a bad habit that I picked up of
always criticizing myself. It's a real tyrant -- there is nobody in this world
that has been more tyrannical, critical or nasty to me than I have. Even
the most critical person, however much they have harmed and made me
miserable, has never made me relentlessly miserable as much as I have
myself, as a result of this inner tyrant. It's a real wet blanket of a tyrant,
no matter what I do it's never good enough. Even if everybody says,
"Ajahn Sumedho, you gave such a wonderful [inspiring talk]", the inner
tyrant says "You shouldn't have said this, you didn't say that right." It
goes on, in an endless perpetual tirade of criticism and fault-finding. Yet
it's just habit, I freed my mind from this habit, it does not have any footing
anymore. I know exactly what it is, I no longer believe in it, or even try to
get rid of it, I just know not to pursue it and just to let it dissolve into the
silence.
That's a way of breaking a lot of these emotional habits we have that
plague us and obsess our minds. You can actually train your mind, not
through rejection or denial but through understanding and cultivating this
silence. So don't use this silence as a way of annihilating or getting rid of
what is arising in experience, but as a way of resolving and liberating
your mind from the obsessive thoughts and negative attitudes that can
endlessly plague conscious experience.
-- Ajahn Sumedho, from "Intuitive Awareness"
Published at www.ijourney.org on May 31, 2010

We Start Where We Are, by Marianna Cacciatore
When we learn to be of service to one another without imposing our
ideas and advice, eventually the truth of our wholeness begins to reveal
itself.
This is how it unfolds. In the beginning, we encourage ourselves to
believe in another person's inner strength and offer our deepest
presence, even if it is difficult. Over time we see their inner strength
come to the surface and they heal. Suddenly, it dawns on us that what is
true for the person we are caring for may well be true for us. If they have
within them everything they need to heal, then perhaps so do we. At
once, the roles of giver and receiver disappear. Both are student and
teacher, healer and healed. When the day comes thatwe find ourselves
immersed in sorrow, for one reason or another, we will know we have
within us all that we need to heal.
Some people have the reverse experience: They begin by learning to
care for themselves and something shifts inside. Self love inspires love
for others. Compassion is unleashed from within. From this inspired
place, they begin to care for others in an intentional way.
I've seen it work both ways, and in the end it doesn't matter where we
start. It's that we start. We start where we are.
--Marianna Cacciatore, _Being There for Someone in Grief_ [1]
Links:
------
[1] http://mariannacacciatore.com/introduction.htm
Published at www.ijourney.org on May 24, 2010

A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted, by John O'Donohue
When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,
The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.
Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.
The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.
You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.
At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.
You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.
Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Who feels they have all the time in the world.
Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.
--John O'Donohue, from "To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of
Blessings"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Jun 14, 2010

Courage to Risk Telling the Truth, by Angeles Arrien
Something definitely changes when we finally summon the courage to
risk telling the truth about who we are and are not. The primary
questions become: how and why do we avoid being who we truly are?
What gets in the way of trusting our self completely? Under what
circumstances do we deceive or delude ourselves?
When we are phony, pretentious, or cynical in order to achieve
interpersonal or material gain, we diminish ourselves and disrespect
others. The extent to which we have positive regard and respect for
ourselves and others determines how successfully we achieve congruity
among all aspects of our character. It becomes necessary in this
process of congruity, to demonstrate the self-regard that is true to who
we are, and as we do this, we are unwilling to compromise our integrity
in order to satisfy the expectations of others or win their approval. We
know our behavior is authentic when we can consistently say what we
mean, do what we say, and say what is so when it is so. We can check
ourselves by asking whether our motivation, speech, appearance, and
actions match our true character in all the varied aspects of our lives --
relationships, work, and community. When our words, actions, and
behaviors are in harmony, wisdom and authenticity emerge.
Authenticity is the expression of what is genuine and natural. It
commands great respect because, unfortunately, it is so rare. The desire
to be accepted, or to engage in competition and comparison, drives us to
limit our behavior to what falls within narrowly prescribed, predictable
norms. Ridding ourselves of old patterns and accessing the authentic
self are entry ways to freedom and the domain of wisdom. In fact, as we
discover how to befriend these processes, ageing and renewing our
character can be what Carl Jung called, "A winter grace." Jung believed
that if we do not develop inner strength as we age, we will become
defensive, dogmatic, depressed, resentful, and cynical. Our homeland of
authenticity is within, and there we are sovereign. Until we rediscover
this ancient truth in a way that is unique for each of us, we are
condemned to wander, seeking solace in the outer world where it cannot
be found.
--Angeles Arrien, from "The Second Half of Life"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Jul 26, 2010


Willing to Experience our Suffering, by Charlotte Joko Beck
A few weeks ago someone gave me an interesting article on suffering,
and the first part of it was on the meaning of the word - "suffering". I'm
interested in these meanings; they are teachings in themselves. The
writer of this article pointed out that the word "suffering" is used to
express many things. The second part "fer", is from the Latin word
_"ferre," _meaning "to bear." And the first part, "suf" is from _sub,
_meaning "under." So there's a feeling in the word "to be under," "to bear
under," "to totally be under" - "to be supporting something from
underneath." [...]
So (remembering the definition of the word "suffer") until we bow down
and bear the suffering of life, not opposing it, but _absorbing _it and
_being _it - we cannot see what our life is. This by no means implies
passivity or non-action, but action from a state of complete acceptance.
Even "acceptance" is not quite accurate - it's simply _being _the
suffering. It isn't a matter of protecting ourselves, or accepting something
else. Complete openness, complete vulnerability is (surprisingly enough)
the only satisfactory way of living our life. []
Our practice throughout our lifetime is just this: At any given time we
have a rigid viewpoint or stance about life; it includes some things, it
excludes others. We may stick with it for a long time, but if we are
sincerely practicing our practice itself will shake up that viewpoint; we
can't maintain it. As we begin to question our viewpoint we may feel
struggle, upset, as we try to come to terms with this new insight into our
life; and for a long time we may deny it and struggle against it. That's
part of practice. Finally we become willing to experience our suffering
instead of fighting it. When we do so our standpoint, our vision of life,
abruptly shifts. Then once again, with our new viewpoint, we go along for
a while - until the cycle begins anew.
Once again the unease comes up. And we have to struggle, to go
through it again. Each time we do this - each time we go into the
suffering and let it be - our vision of life enlarges. It's like climbing a
mountain. At each point that we ascend we see more; and that becomes
broader with each cycle of climbing, of struggle. And the more we see,
the more expansive our vision, the more we know what to do, what
action to take.
--Charlotte Joko Beck, from "_Everyday Zen: Love and Work_"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Dec 21, 2009

Learning to 'Presence', by Peter Senge
When any of us acts in a state of fear or anxiety, our actions are likely to
revert to what is most habitual: our most instinctual behaviors dominate,
ultimately reducing us to our "fight - or - flight" programming of the
reptilian brain stem. Collective actions are no different. Even as
conditions in the world change dramatically, most businesses,
governments, schools, and other large organizations continue to take the
same kinds of institutional actions that they always have.
This does not mean that no learning occurs. But it is a limited type of
learning: learning how best to react to circumstances we see ourselves
as having no hand in creating. Reacting learning is governed by
"downloading" habitual ways of thinking, of continuing to see the world
within the familiar categories we are comfortable with. We discount
interpretations and options for action that are different than ones we
know and trust. We act to defend our interests. In reactive learning, our
actions are actually re-enacted habits, and we invariably end up
reinforcing pre-established mental models. Regardless of the outcome,
we end up being "right." At best, we get better at what we have always
done. We remain secure in the cocoon of our own world view, isolated
from the larger world. []
All learning integrates thinking and doing. All learning is about how we
interact in the world and types of capacities that develop from our
interactions. What differs is the depth of the awareness and the
consequent course of action. If awareness never reaches beyond
superficial events and current circumstances, actions will be reactions. If,
on the other hand, we penetrate more deeply to see the larger holes that
generate "what is" and our connection to this wholeness, the source and
effectiveness of our action can change dramatically.
In talking with pioneering scientists, we found extraordinary insights into
this capacity for deeper seeing and the effects such awareness can have
on our understanding, our sense of self, and our sense of belonging in
the world. In talking with entrepreneurs, we found extraordinary clarity
regarding what it means to act in the service of what is emerging. But we
also found that for the most part, neither of these groups talks with the
other. We came to realize that both groups are really talking about the
same process - the process by which we learn to "presence" an
emerging whole, to become what George Bernard Shaw called "a force
of nature."
-Peter Senge et al., from "_Presence: Human Purpose and Field of the
Future_"

Where Skillfullness and Clarity Meet, by J. Krishnamurti
We have become very skillful in dealing with our daily life; skillful, in the
sense of being clever in applying a great deal of knowledge which we
have acquired through education and experience. We act skillfully either
in a factory or in a business and so on. That skill becomes, through
repetitive action, routine. Skill, when it is highly developed - as it should
be - leads to self-importance and self-aggrandizement. Skill has brought
us to our present state, not only technologically, but in our relationships,
in the way we deal with each other - not clearly, not with compassion,
but with skill. Is there an action, in our daily life, which is skillful yet which
does not perpetuate the self, the me, which does not give importance to
one's self-centered existence? [] To answer that one has to inquire into
what clarity is; when there is clarity there is action which is skillful and
which does not perpetuate the self.
Clarity exists only when there is freedom to observe. One is only
capable of observing, looking, watching, when there is complete and
total freedom; otherwise there is always distortion in the observation. Is it
possible to be free of all distorting factors in one's outlook? []
One may describe what compassion is in the most eloquent and poetic
manner, but in whatever words it is expressed, those words are not the
thing. Without compassion there is no clarity; without clarity there is no
selfless skill - they are inter-related. Can one have this extraordinary
sense of compassion in one's daily life, not as a theory, not as an ideal,
not something to be achieved, to be practiced and so on, but to have it
totally, completely, at the root of one's being? []
We've strengthened in our consciousness, through great development
of skill, the structure and the nature of the self. The self is violence, the
self is greed, envy and so on. They are the very essence of self. As long
as there is the center as the me, every action must be distorted. Acting
from a center you're giving a direction, and that direction is distortion.
You may develop a great skill in this way but it is always unbalanced,
inharmonious. Now, can consciousness with its movement undergo a
radical transformation, a transformation not brought about by will. Will is
desire, desire for something and when there is desire there is a motive,
which is again a distorting factor in observation.
--J. Krishnamurti, from "The Wholeness of Life"

The Surprising Truth of Sufficiency, by Lynne Twist
We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the
mind-set of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the
surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don't mean a quantity of
anything. Sufficiency isn't two steps up from poverty or one step short of
abundance. It isn't a measure of barely enough or more than enough.
Sufficiency isn't an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we
generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are
enough.
In our relationship with money, it is using money in a way that
expresses our integrity; using it in a way that _expresses _value rather
than _determines_ value. Sufficiency is not a message about simplicity
or about cutting back and lowering expectations. Sufficiency doesn't
mean we shouldn't strive or aspire. Sufficiency is an act of generating,
distinguishing, making known to ourselves the power and presence of
our existing resources, and our inner resrouces. Sufficiency is a context
we bring forth from within that reminds us that if we look around us and
within ourselves, we will find what we need. There is always enough. [...]
I am not suggesting that there is ample water in the desert or food for
the beggards in Bombay. I am saying that even in the presence of
genuine scarcity of external resources, the desire and capacity for
self-sufficiency are innate and enough to meet the challenges we face. It
is precisely when we turn our attentions to these inner resources - in
fact, _only _when we do that - that we can begin to see more clearly the
sufficiency in us and available to us, and we can begin to generate
effective, sustainable responses to whatever limitations of resources
confront us. When we let go of the chase for more, and consciously
examine and experience the resources we already have, we discover
our resources are deeper than we knew or imagined. In the nourishment
of our attention, our assets expand and grow.
--Lynne Twist, in Soul of Money [1]
Links:
------
[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=psWvaHa8UkAC
Published at www.ijourney.org on Dec 07, 2009
Receiving Each Day as an Invitation, by John O'Donohue
Each new day is a path of wonder, a different invitation. Days are where
our lives gradually become visible.
Often it seems that we have to undertake the longest journey to arrive at
what has been nearest all along. Mornings rarely find us so astounded at
the new day that we are unable to decide between adventures. We take
on days with the same conditioned reflex with which we wash and put on
our clothes each day. If we could be mindful of how short our time is, we
might learn how precious each day is. There are people who will never
forget today. []
The liturgy of dawn signals the wonder of the arriving day. Magic of
darkness breaking through into color and light is such a promise of
invitation and possibility. No wonder we always associate the hope and
urgency of new beginning with the dawn. Each day is the field of
brightness where the invitation of our life unfolds. A new day is an
intricate and subtle matrix; written into its mystery are the happenings
sent to awaken and challenge us.
No day is ever the same, and no day stands still; each one moves
through a different territory, awakening new beginnings. A day moves
forward in moments, and once a moment has flickered into life, it
vanishes and is replaced by the next. It is fascinating that this is where
we live, within an emerging lacework that continually unravels. Often a
fleeting moment can hold a whole sequence of the future in distilled
form: that unprepared second when you looked in a parent's eye and
saw death already beginning to loom. Or the second you noticed a
softening in someone's voice and you knew that a friendship was
beginning. Or catching your partner's gaze upon you and knowing the
love that surrounded you. Each day is seeded with recognitions.
The writing life is a wonderful metaphor for this. The writer goes to his
desk to meet the empty white page. As he settles himself, he is
preparing himself, for visitation and voyage. Each memory, longing, and
craft set the frame for what might emerge. He has no idea what will
come. Yet despite its limitations, his creative work will find its own
direction to form. Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our
integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will
become.
--John O'Donohue, from "To Bless the Space Between Us"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Dec 28, 2009


Beyond Endings, by John O'Donohue
Endings seem to lie in wait. Absorbed in our experience we forget that
an ending might be approaching. Consequently, when the ending signals
its arrival, we can feel ambushed. Perhaps there is an instinctive survival
mechanism in us that distracts us from the inevitability of ending, thus
enabling us to live in the present with innocence and whole-heartedness.
[]
Experience has its own secret structuring. Endings are natural. Often
what alarms us as an ending can in fact be the opening of a new journey
- a new beginning that we could never have anticipated; one that
engages forgotten parts of the heart. Due to the current overlay of
therapy terminology in our language, everyone now seems to wish for
"closure." This word is unfortunate: it is not faithful to the open-ended
rhythm of experience. Creatures made of clay with porous skins and
porous minds are quite incapable of the hermetic sealing that the
strategy of "closure" seems to imply. The word _completion_ is a truer
word. Each experience has within it a dynamic of unfolding and a
narrative of emergence. Oscar Wilde once said, "The supreme vice is
shallowness. Whatever is realized is right." When a person manages to
trust experience and be open to it, the experience finds its own way to
realization. Though such an ending may be awkward and painful, there
is a sense of wholesomeness and authenticity about it. Then the heart
will gradually find that this stage has run its course and the ending is
substantial and true. Eventually the person emerges with a deeper
sense of freedom, certainty, and integration.
The nature of calendar time is linear; it is made up of durations that
begin and end. The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time
there was eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of
relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something
may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning,
and effect continue to be held into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds
and deepens. In this sense, eternal time is intimate; it is where the
unfolding narrative of individual life is gathered and woven.
--John O'Donohue, from "To Bless the Space Between Us"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Feb 15, 2010

Humor is a Magical Interface, by Steve Bhaerman
*
*
* Humor is a magical interface between the logical and intuitive minds.
Consequently, it has the power to bypass the left-brain's linear
gatekeepers and allow outside-the-box ideas to come in under the radar.
Which is not to say that all comedy awakens. We've all experienced
brutality thinly disguised as "humor," usually with the unfunny disclaimer,
"What's the matter? Can't take a joke?"
Some kinds of humor perpetuate prejudice, misunderstanding, denial,
separation. They are merely reflecting the prejudice, misunderstanding,
denial and separation that now exist. The best kind of humor is a vehicle
for love that not only leaves 'em laughing, it leaves 'em smiling. By
understanding, embracing and practicing humor at its best, we can add
to the "laugh force" on the planet, and allow enlightening humor to strike
more frequently.
"Laughter is medicine." We've heard it so often, it's almost a clich. To go
a bit deeper, laughter is "medicine" in the Native American sense ... a
form of magic that can transmute suffering into insight, rigidity into
flexibility, separation into connection. As an alchemical (or we might say,
all-comical) tool, humor has the power to heal the heart and free the
mind. Wholehearted hearty laughter naturally kindles joy. []
On rare occasions, a joke fires on all cylinders. One such story,
purported to be true, is something that happened during the Cuban
missile crisis in 1962. As you may or may not remember, this is the
closest we as a world have come to nuclear holocaust. [] Fortunately,
wiser heads and hearts prevailed on both sides.
However, in the midst of the crisis there were some American and
Soviet delegates meeting to discuss possible trade between the two
countries. When news of the missile crisis hit, there was tremendous
tension and the room fell silent. Finally, one of the Soviet delegates
stood up and proposed that they take turns telling jokes. He volunteered
to start. "What's the difference between capitalism and communism?""In
capitalism, man exploits man. In communism, it's the other way around."
The room erupted in laughter, the kind of explosion that heals. When the
laughter died down, they were able to continue their business in peace
and equanimity.
Ever since I heard this story many, many years ago I have held it as the
highest octave of humor -- a joke that offered physical and emotional
release, and mental and spiritual insight. Instantly, the room was
transformed as each individual recognized him or herself -- as well as
everyone else -- as humans, united at the heart.
--Steve Bhaerman, aka Swami Beyondananda
Published at www.ijourney.org on Aug 09, 2010

Noticing the Gaps, by Eckhart Tolle
In the first moment of seeing something or hearing a sound -- and more
so if it is unfamiliar -- before the mind names or interprets what you see
or hear there is usually a gap of alert attention in which the perception
occurs. That is the inner space. Its duration differs from person to
person. It is easy to miss because in many people those spaces are
extremely short, perhaps only a second or less.
This is what happens: a new sight or sound arises, and in the first
moment of perception, there is a brief cessation in the habitual stream of
thinking. Consciousness is diverted away from thought because it is
required for sense perception. A very unusual sight or sound may leave
you "speechless" -- even inside, that is to say, bring about a longer gap.
The frequency and duration of those spaces determine your ability to
enjoy life, to feel an inner connectedness with other human beings as
well as nature. It also determines the degree to which you are free of
ego because ego implies complete unawareness of the dimension of
space.
When you become conscious of these brief spaces as they happen
naturally, they will lengthen, and as they do, you will experience with
increasing frequency the joy of perceiving with little or no interference of
thinking. []
Inner space also arises whenever you let go of the need to emphasize
your form-identity. That need is of the ego. It is not a true need. []
Here are some ways in which people unconsciously try to emphasize
their form-identity. If you are alert enough, you may be able to detect
some of these unconscious patterns within yourself: demanding
recognition for something you did and getting angry or upset if you don't
get it; trying to get attention by talking about your problems, the story of
your illness, or making a scene, giving your opinion when nobody has
asked for it and it makes no difference to the situation; being more
concerned with how the other person sees you than with the other
person, which is to say using other people for egoic reflection or as ego
enhancers [] taking things personally, feeling offended; making yourself
right and others wrong through futile mental complaining; wanting to be
seen, or appear important.
Once you have detected such a pattern within yourself, I suggest that
you conduct an experiment, Find out what it feels like and what happens
if you let go of that pattern. Just drop it and see what happens.
De-emphasizing who you are on the level of form is another way of
generating consciousness. Discover the enormous power that flows
through you into the world when you stop emphasizing your form
identity.
-- Eckhart Tolle, from "A New Earth"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Jan 11, 2010

When You Don't Choose Love You Choose Fear, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross If we could literally reach into you and remove all your fears - every one
of them - how different would your life be? Think about it. If nothing
stopped you from following your dreams, your life would probably be
very different. This is what the dying learn. Dying makes our worst fears
come forward to be faced directly. It helps us see the different life that is
possible, and in that vision, takes the rest of our fears away.
Unfortunately, by the time the fear is gone most of us are too sick or too
old to do those things we would have done before, had we not been
afraid. [] Thus, one lesson becomes clear: we must transcend our fears
while we can still do those things we dream of.
To transcend fear though, we must move somewhere else emotionally;
we must move into love.
Happiness, anxiety, joy, resentment -- we have many words for the
many emotions we experience in our lifetimes. But deep down, at our
cores, there are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions
come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows
happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate,
anxiety and guilt.
It's true that there are only two primary emotions, love and fear. But it's
more accurate to say that there is only love or fear, for we cannot feel
these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They're
opposites. If we're in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we're in a
place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear. Can you think of a time
when you've been in both love and fear? It's impossible.
We have to make a decision to be in one place or the other. There is no
neutrality in this. If you don't actively choose love, you will find yourself in
a place of either fear or one of its component feelings. Every moment
offers the choice to choose one or the other. And we must continually
make these choices, especially in difficult circumstances when our
commitment to love, instead of fear, is challenged.
Having chosen love, doesn't mean you will never fear again. In fact it
means that many of your fears will come up to finally be healed. This is
an ongoing process. Remember that you will become fearful after you've
chosen love, just as we become hungry after we eat. We must
continually choose love in order to nourish our souls and drive away
fear, just as we eat to nourish our bodies and drive away hunger.
--Elisabeth Kubler-Ross & David Kessler from "Life Lessons: Two
Experts on Death and Dying Teach Us About the Mysteries of Life and
Living"

We Start Where We Are, by Marianna Cacciatore
When we learn to be of service to one another without imposing our
ideas and advice, eventually the truth of our wholeness begins to reveal
itself.
This is how it unfolds. In the beginning, we encourage ourselves to
believe in another person's inner strength and offer our deepest
presence, even if it is difficult. Over time we see their inner strength
come to the surface and they heal. Suddenly, it dawns on us that what is
true for the person we are caring for may well be true for us. If they have
within them everything they need to heal, then perhaps so do we. At
once, the roles of giver and receiver disappear. Both are student and
teacher, healer and healed. When the day comes thatwe find ourselves
immersed in sorrow, for one reason or another, we will know we have
within us all that we need to heal.
Some people have the reverse experience: They begin by learning to
care for themselves and something shifts inside. Self love inspires love
for others. Compassion is unleashed from within. From this inspired
place, they begin to care for others in an intentional way.
I've seen it work both ways, and in the end it doesn't matter where we
start. It's that we start. We start where we are.
--Marianna Cacciatore, _Being There for Someone in Grief_ [1]
Links:
------
[1] http://mariannacacciatore.com/introduction.htm

Wisdom in the Workplace, by William Guillory
Actually, wisdom is not anything new in the workplace, it simply has not
been acknowledged and legitimized as essential to organizational
success -- at least in the Western world. Wisdom has always been
valued and integral to the way non-western organizations have
functioned. The business traditions of Japan are firmly rooted in the
principles of Buddha (Buddhism), and Sun-Tzu (The Art of War), and
those of China in Lao Tzu (Taosim) and Confucius.
There is wisdom in the saying that 'we must learn equally from the
wisdom of others, since we individually don't make enough mistakes of
our own to learn how much we need to know'. When we learn something
new, it is commonly because something we previously believed is no
longer valid. Being open to continually changing our reality is the key to
acquiring wisdom.
What is important to understand is that, that which is released does not
have to be replaced with anything new. What replaces it is a natural way
of being. Wisdom is a way of being. Being natural occurs when we let go
of our assumptions of how it should be, how it could be, and how it ought
to be, and just allow it to be like it is, as a prelude to interacting with
others.
Statements like this prompt us to rethink the wisdom of our in depth
explorations. Wisdom is a way of being that is the natural result of
personal and spiritual transformation. It is an in depth understanding,
empathy, and compassion for the human experience. As the work place
becomes increasingly diverse from human, cultural and systems
perspectives, it is clear that resolutions beyond ordinary problem solving
or compromise will be necessary for successful business functioning.
Therefore everyone in the workforce will be forced to master this skill of
being in proportion to his or her level of responsibility. This conclusion is
perhaps best captured by the following Albert Einstein quote: The world
that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus
far, creates problems that we cannot solve at the level that we have
created them.
--William Guillory, from "_The Living Organization_"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Feb 22, 2011

We are the Ones We've Been Waiting For, by Hopi Elders
You have been telling people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you
must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are
things to be considered
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for your leader.
Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, "This could be a
good time! There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift
that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the
shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.
Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the
shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our
heads above the water.
And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in
history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the
moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.
The time of the one wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word
'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now
must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
--Hopi Elders' Prophecy, June 8, 2000
Published at www.ijourney.org on Aug 23, 2010

Equanimity: the Radical Permission to Feel, by Shinzen Young
*
*
* Equanimity is a fundamental skill for self-exploration and emotional
intelligence. It is a deep and subtle concept frequently misunderstood
and easily confused with suppression of feeling, apathy or
inexpressiveness.
Equanimity comes from the Latin word _aequus _meaning balanced,
and _animus _meaning spirit or internal state. As an initial step in
understanding this concept, let's consider for a moment its opposite:
what happens when a person loses internal balance.
In the physical world we say a person has lost balance if they fall to one
side or another. In the same way a person loses internal balance if they
fall into one or the other of the following contrasting reactions:
* Suppression -A state of though/feeling arises and we attempt to cope
with it by stuffing it down, denying it, tightening around it, etc.
* Identification -A state of thought/feeling arises and we fixate it, hold
onto it inappropriately, not letting it arise, spread and pass with its
natural rhythm.
Between suppression on one side and identification on the other lies a
third possibility, the balanced state of non-self-interferenceequanimity. []
Equanimity belies the adage that you cannot "have your cake and eat it
too."When you apply equanimity to unpleasant sensations, they flow
more readily and as a result cause less suffering. When you apply
equanimity to pleasant sensations, they also flow more readily and as a
result deliver deeper fulfillment. The same skill positively affects both
sides of the sensation picture. Hence the following equation:
Psycho-spiritual Purification = (Pain x Equanimity) + (Pleasure x
Equanimity)
Furthermore, when feelings are experienced with equanimity, they
assure their proper function as motivators and directors of behavior as
opposed to driving and distorting behavior. Thus equanimity plays a
critical role in changing negative behaviors such as substance and
alcohol abuse, compulsive eating, anger, violence, and so forth.
_ _
Equanimity involves non-interference with the natural flow of subjective
sensation. Apathy implies indifference to the controllable outcome of
objective events. Thus, although seemingly similar, equanimity and
apathy are actually opposites. Equanimity frees up internal energy for
responding to external situations. By definition, equanimity involves
radical permission to feel and as such is the opposite of suppression. As
far as external expression of feeling is concerned, internal equanimity
gives one the freedom to externally express or not, depending on what is
appropriate to the situation.

--Shinzen Young, from "What is Equanimity"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Jul 05, 2010

The mystery never leaves you alone Tt is strange to be here . The mystery never leaves you alone . Behind
your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of
another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you
news of this inner world. Through our voices, we bring out sound from
the mountain beneath our soul. These sounds are words. There are so
many talking all the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on TV, on
radio, in the paper, in books. The noise of words keeps what we call the
world there for us. We take each others' sounds and make patterns and
predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies. Each day, our tribe of
language holds what we call the 'world' together. Yet the uttering of the
world reveals how each of us relentlessly creates. Everyone is an artist.
Each person brings out sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to
become visible. Humans are new here. Above us, the galaxies dance
out toward infinity. Under our feet is the ancient earth. We are beautifully
molded from this clay. Yet the smallest stone is millions of years older
than us. In your thoughts, the silent universe seeks echo. An unknown
world aspires towards reflection. Words are the oblique mirrors which
hold your thought. You gaze into these word mirrors and catch glimpses
of meaning, belonging shelter. Behind their bright surfaces is the dark
and the silence. Words are like the god Janus, they face inwards and
outwards at once. If we become addicted to the external our interiority
will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or
deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our
vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the
interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal
and eternal, ancient and new together. No one else can undertake this
task for you. You are the one and only threshold of your inner world. This
wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is natural; to befriend the worlds
that come to balance in you. Behind the faade of image and distraction,
each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one
of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and
shapes a unique world. Human presence is a creative and turbulent
sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace. --John O'Donohue, from
"Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Oct 11, 2010

Two Ways of Learning Relaxation, by Shinzen Young
There are two ways of learning relaxation, because there are two
distinct levels at which a person can relax. I speak of top-to-bottom
relaxation versus bottom-to-top relaxation. "Top" refers to the surface
conscious mind, "bottom" the deep unconscious.
Top-to-bottom relaxation is what most people think of when they think of
relaxation. It's voluntary relaxation, like a progressive relaxation where
you make an effort to relax. When a person sits to meditate I think it is
good to do whatever possible to relax the overall body. I usually try to
get an overall sense of the body relaxing. I call it a "settled-in" sense. For
example, I notice that during sitting sometimes my shoulders will come
up, so I'll relax them as an act of conscious intention.
This form of relaxation, although it's valid and useful, is also limited,
because there are certain things that you can't relax intentionally, like the
kind of intense sensations that come up when you stub your toe. You
can't go through a progressive relaxation, and just relax the sensations
going on in your stubbed toe. And what about the sensations that go with
a stubbed ego? For that type of phenomenon, it is desirable to learn
about a second kind of relaxation which I call bottom-to-top.
Bottom-to-top relaxation deals with the source of tension which is deep
within the unconscious mind and way out of the range of conscious
control. How can you relax tensions that are not within conscious
control? By observing them with skill. "Skill" means heightened
awareness, a sense of accepting the tension as is. Bottom-to-top
relaxation is an attitude. You watch the tension very, very carefully. You
get very specific in terms of location, shape, flavor, rates of change, etc.
You just keep pouring awareness and equanimity, awareness and
equanimity on the tension pattern.
That tension pattern is a conduit into the unconscious mind. By flooding
the tension area with the "super-adult" qualities of "witness awareness"
you are helping the unconscious infant/animal levels of the mind to untie
their own "knots". The tension pattern will start to break up on its own.
Paradoxically, the quickest way to have it break up is to stop wanting it
to break up. The attitude of wanting it to break up adds subtle new knots.
For the really deep relaxation, a person has to be willing to watch
tension in a skillful way, without desiring relaxation.
--Shinzen Young, in an interview with Charles Tart
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 30, 1999

The Test for Meditation in Action, by Shinzen Young
When we first come into this life we form a self in order to cope with the
world. The baby has a rather scant self and commensurately little ability
to deal with the world. We develop a self to deal with the world, but we
also develop the habit of solidifying that self, and that solidifying habit
congests the flow of nature, leading to suffering. The process of going
from infancy to adulthood could therefore be called the process of
forming a solidified sense of self. Some adults decide to start growing
again, that is, to go from being an adult to being a super-adult. In order
to do that, one has to learn the process of unsolidifying the sense of self.
The unsolidified self (which could be called the big self or the no-self)
begins to arise within the super-adult. That no-self has to gradually learn
how to deal with more and more complex aspects of life, just as the
solidified self did. At the beginning, the no-self may not be able to do
anything except sit there --or maybe chant. Gradually the no-self learns
how to do more complex things, like, maybe, sweep the yard. Eventually
it learns how to talk, how to drive a car, how to carry on contract
negotiations, and anything else that needs to be done. But, just as for
the self, it takes a while for that no-self to learn how to do things.
Eventually most of ego's activities get taken over by the no-self activity.
The no-self knows full well how to get out of the way of trucks. There
are two ways that people can fool themselves. One is "I have to sit in a
certain posture, and have the body absolutely aligned perfectly in order
to meditate". The second is "I don't ever need to sit in a posture like that;
I meditate in daily life". The way that you know if you're meditating in
action is to see if you can stop on a dime any time you want. You should
be able to go, at any time, into an absolutely stable, motionless state
without struggle if you're really "meditating in daily life." --Shinzen
Young, from an Interview with Charles Tart
Published at www.ijourney.org on May 03, 2011

Mighty in Contradiction: Love Powerfully, by Patty De Llosa
As we see more deeply into our inner drives and defenses, we discover
that the choices we are faced with aren't all black and white. Life teaches
us that our decisions aren't necessarily based on "this" or "that." We
come to understand the truth of "both/and."
The assumption that things are either good or bad, true or false, that I'm
either happy or miserable, lovable or hateful, has been replaced by
astonishing new facts: I both want to be good but my efforts can have
bad effects; there's falsehood mixed in with my truth; I want and don't
want whatever is my current desire; and I can both love and hate
another person at the same time.
What about the two primary human drives, love and power? I used to
think the opposite of love was hate. But life experience tells me that's not
true. Hate is so tinged with other emotions, including love! No. In my
understanding the opposite of love is power. Love accepts and
embraces. Power refuses and crushes opposition. Love is kind and
knows how to forgive. Power is competitive and takes others into
account only when it stands in the Winner's Circle.
What's most disturbing is that both of these feelings can exist in me at
the same time. Power seeks dominion. It's about winning, owning,
controlling, running the show; while love is about caring, taking in the
message, finding what's needed, seeing what wishes to appear and
helping it to flower.
Yet, if I'm honest, both live in me. That means there can be a drive for
power behind the caring, helpful person, the one who wants to please,
as well as in the take-charge kind of guy. We are lovers in love with love
but also in love with power.
Perhaps Martin Buber said it best:
"We cannot avoid using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion
To afflict the world.
So let us, cautious in diction
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully."
--Patty De Llosa
Published at www.ijourney.org on Oct 25, 2010

Making a New Start, by Patty De Llosa
Making a new start isn't starting 'again.' There's no 'again' about it. New
is new. But by now I've learned how quickly I slip back into the old, so
making a new start needs constant renewing. That means I have to work
at the 'new' part when everything calls me back to old ways. As F. M.
Alexander said, "Change involves carrying out an activity against the
habits of life."
I'm hard put to find words to describe this active work of renewal, so I'll
try to recount the experience itself. First, there's the moment of truth: I've
connected with my life on a deeper level than before. Then there's the
vision awakened by the experience. I've understood something and been
given a new opportunity to live by it, to base my life on that vision.
However, clarity fades away like a receding tide as old habits of thought
and feeling come flooding back in. How to withstand their undertow? Is
direct combat a viable solution? I've tried it, of course, but it's like doing
battle with a big wave rather than diving through it and I've been swept
away many a time.
I call my new way to work with it "planting seeds of change." Every time
I wake up to the Old, I find some way to plant a seed of New, even if
there's little else I can do against the force of habit. For example, this
morning I noticed my demandingness, the Autocrat in action, and tried to
take a step back, an inner withdrawal of belief in him. I'm not trying to
shoot him down. He's too powerful for that! But I'm separating out from
him - into him and me - as I take notes on what he wants. When his aims
become clear, I ask myself, "Do I want what he wants?" Perhaps not. A
seed has been planted.
Or let's say my old nemesis, Mrs. Rigid, appears, clutching her rulebook
and telling me just how things ought to be done. I take a step away
before she has a chance to swallow me up, and remind myself how
terrified she is of change. That's what makes her rigid. But I don't have to
be stuck in her narrow-minded world, or follow the same laws she does.
Another seed.
When will these new seeds sprout? How big will the fruit or flower be?
No idea. Perhaps it's not for me to know at my level of engagement. But
I decide to trust that planting new seeds into the old way of doing things
will say 'yes' to the deep wish to live differently. The wish touched me as
lightly as the brush of a butterfly's wing, or the swish of my cat's tail to let
me know he's gone by.
A new beginning needs food. You have to nourish it each day. Easier
said than done, of course! My head can make lists with Meditation and
Walks in the Park in capital letters, but making lists is easy. So the
question is, how to awaken that new vision right in the middle of the
action?
--Patty De Llosa
Published at www.ijourney.org on Jan 25, 2011

Individual and Social Ethics, by Bertrand Russell
Misers, whose absorption in means is pathological, are generally
recognized to be unwise, but minor forms of the same malady are apt to
receive undue commendation. Without some consciousness of ends, life
becomes dismal and colorless; ultimately the need for excitement too
often finds a worse outlet than it would otherwise have done, in war or
cruelty or intrigue or some other destructive activity.
Men who boast of being what is called "practical" are for the most part
exclusively preoccupied with means. But theirs is only one-half of
wisdom. When we take account of the other half, which is concerned
with ends, the economic process and the whole of human life take on an
entirely new aspect. We ask no longer: what have the producers
produced, and what has consumption enabled the consumers in their
turn to produce? We ask instead: what has there been in the lives of
consumers and producers to make them glad to be alive? What have
they felt or known or done that could justify their creation? Have they
experienced the glory of new knowledge? Have they known love and
friendship? Have they rejoiced in sunshine and the spring and the smell
of flowers? Have they felt the joy of life that simple communities express
in dance and song?
Once in Los Angeles I was taken to see the Mexican colony - idle
vagabonds, I was told, but to me they seemed to be enjoying more of
what makes life a boon and not a curse than fell to the lot of my anxious
hard-working hosts. When I tried to explain this feeling, however, I was
met with a blank and total lack of comprehension.
People do not always remember that politics, economics, and social
organization generally, belong in the realm of means, not ends. Our
political and social thinking is prone to what may be called the
"administrator's fallacy," by which I mean the habit of looking upon a
society as a systematic whole, of a sort that is thought good if it is
pleasant to contemplate as a model of order, a planned organism with
parts neatly dovetailed into each other. But a society does not, or at least
should not, exist to satisfy an external survey, but to bring a good life to
the individuals who compose it. It is in the individuals, not in the whole,
that ultimate value is to be sought. A good society is a means to a good
life for those who compose it, not something having a separate kind of
excellence on its own account.
--Bertrand Russell, in "Authority and the Individual"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Dec 21, 2010

Storyteller Consciousness, by Charles Eisenstein
For words to truly be powerful, we must align them with our creative
intention. Only then can we create the stories of our lives.
Unconscious lying sabotages our credibility to ourselves and others. If
we cultivate the habit of speaking truthfully and treating our word as
golden, then when we declare great things, they will come to pass. The
more we realize the power of our words, the more mindful our speech
becomes; the more mindful our speech, the greater the power of our
words. We condition ourselves to our words always coming true, and
foster a deep confidence in the magical creative power of our speech.
Whether on the collective or personal level, storyteller consciousness is
inseparable from the new sense of self that defines the Age of Reunion.
It depends on a blurring of the defining distinction of the Age of
Separation, between the observer in here and the objective world out
there. It will emerge spontaneously, in tandem with the crisis-induced
disintegration of the illusion of separation. The story of powerlessness
and separation simply won't be captivating anymore! In its place we will
have a story of connectedness, of interbeing, of participation in the
all-encompassing circle of the gift. And part of this story is actually a
meta-story, a story about stories that invests all of our stories with
creative power and motivates us to be conscious in their telling.
If I have been vague about what this will actually look like in the future, it
is probably because the society that may be built around storyteller
consciousness centuries hence is so unlike what we have today that I
hardly dare describe it on paper. Instead of the present demarcation
between drama and real life, future society will consist of stories within
stories within stories, plays within plays within plays without any sense
that one is "for real" and one is not. Life will be all play, and all play will
be in earnest. We might commit to some of these stories as deeply as a
human being can commit to anything, as passionately as the greatest
artist cares about his greatest masterpiece. Each life will be a
masterpiece, and some of our collective projects will span generations
and alter the fabric of (what we call) reality. [...] It is happening already.
Have you heard the casting call? A beautiful life is being offered, if we
can only find the courage.
--Charles Eisenstein, in _Ascent of Humanity [1]_
Links:
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[1] http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter7-10.php

Reality Poses No Danger, by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Things that are real pose no danger to the mind. The real dangers in the
mind are our delusions, the things we make up, the things we use to
cover up reality, the stories, the preconceived notions we impose on
things. When we're trying to live in those stories and notions, reality is
threatening. It's always exposing the cracks in our ideas, the cracks in
our ignorance, the cracks in our desires. As long as we identify with
those make-believe desires, we find that threatening. But if we learn to
become real people ourselves, then reality poses no dangers.
This is what the meditation is for, teaching yourself how to be real, to
get in touch with what's really going on, to look at your sense of who you
are and take it apart in terms of what it really is, to look at the things that
you find threatening in your life and see what they really are. When you
really look, you see the truth. If you're true in your looking, the truth
appears. [...]
Truth is a quality of the mind that doesn't depend on figuring things out
or being clever. It depends on having integrity in your actions and in your
powers of observation, accepting the truth as it is. It means accepting
the fact that you play a role in shaping that truth, so you have to be
responsible. You have to be sensitive both to what you're doing and to
the results you get, so that you can learn to be more and more skillful.
Many people think that self-acceptance means celebrating what's there
already: that you're good enough, that you don't have to make any
changes. That's not the case at all.
Acceptance means accepting the fact that you're responsible for a lot of
your experience right now. You can't blame anybody else. And ultimately
that's a good thing. If other people were ultimately responsible for
shaping your experience, what could you do? You'd have to go around
pleasing them all the time. But the key fact is that you're shaping your
pleasures and pains here in the present moment. Some of your
experience comes from past actions, but a lot comes from the way you
shape things with each present intention.
So learn to be open and honest about the role you're playing in this
moment.
--Thanissaro Bhikkhu, from "_Meditations 3_"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Oct 04, 2010

But It Is There, by Kent Nerburn
We are all born with a belief in God. It may not have a name or a face.
We may not even see it as God. But it is there.
It is the sense that comes over us as we stare into the starlit sky or
watch the last fiery rays of an evening sunset. It is the morning shiver as
we wake on a beautiful day and smell a richness in the air that we know
and love from somewhere we can't quite recall. It is the mystery behind
the beginning of time and beyond the limits of space. It is a sense of
otherness that brings alive something deep in our hearts.
Some people will tell you that there is no God. They will claim that God
is a crutch for people who can't face reality, a fairy tale for people who
need myths in their lives. They will argue for rational explanations of the
origin of the universe and scientific explanations of the perfect
movements of nature. They will point to evil and injustice in the world,
and cite examples of religion being used to start wars or to hurt people of
different beliefs.
You cannot argue with these people, nor should you. These are the
people the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu spoke about when he said,
"A frog in a well cannot be talked to about the sea."
If you have any sense of the mystery of the universe around you, you
are hearing the murmur of the sea. Your task is to leave the well, to step
out into the sun, and to set out for the sea. Leave the arguing to those
who wish to discuss the size and shape of the walls that close them in.
If you hear the call of the distant sea, do not be turned away by the
naivets and contradictions of the beliefs around you. There are many
paths, and the sea looks different from each of them. Your task is not to
judge the paths of others, but to find a path that will lead you ever closer
to the murmurings that you hear in your heart.
Begin by accepting where you are.
--Kent Nerburn
Published at www.ijourney.org on Aug 30, 2010

Believers in Small Graces, by Kent Nerbern
There are those who search God in the quiet places -- no churches, no
public displays of piety, no dramatic or flamboyant rituals.
They may be found standing in humble awe before a sunset, or weeping
quietly at the beauty of a Bach concerto, or filled with an overflowing of
pure love at the sight of an infant in the arms of its mother.
You may meet them visiting the elderly, comforting the lonely, feeding
the hungry, and caring for the sick.
The greatest among them may give away what they own in the name of
compassion and goodness, while never once uttering the word "God" out
loud. Or they may do no more than offer a smile or a hand to someone in
need, or quietly bow their heads at a moment of beauty that passes
through their lives, and say a simple prayer of gratitude to the spirit that
has created us all.
They are the lovers of the quiet God, the believers in the small graces of
ordinary life.
Theirs is not the grand way, the way of the mystic or the preacher or the
zealot or the saint. Some would say that theirs is not a way at all. All they
know for certain is that life has beauty and a joy that transcends all the
darkness that surrounds us, that something ineffable lives beyond the
ordinary affairs of the day, and that without this mystery our lives would
not be worth living.
I honor those who search for the quiet God, who seek the spirit in the
small moments of our everyday life. It is a celebration of the ordinary, a
reminder that when all else is stripped away, a life lived with love is
enough.
--Kent Nerbern
Published at www.ijourney.org on Feb 08, 2011

Untested Simplicity of the Villages, by Ram Dass
Is the vision of simple living provided by this village in the East the
answer? Is this an example of a primitive simplicity of the past or of an
enlightened simplicity of the future?
Gradually I have to come to sense that this is not the kind of simplicity
that the future holds. For despite its ancient character, the simplicity of
the village is still in its "infancy".
Occasionally people show me their new babies and ask me if that
peaceful innocence is not just like that of the Buddha. Probably not, I tell
them, for within that baby reside all the latent seeds of worldly desire,
just waiting to sprout as the opportunity arises. On the other hand, the
expression on the face of the Buddha, who had seen through the
impermanence and suffering associated with such desires, reflects the
invulnerability of true freedom.
So it is with the village. Its ecological and peaceful way of living is
unconciously won and thus is vulnerable to the winds of change that fan
the latent desires of its people. Even now there is a familiar but jarring
note in this sylvan village scene. The sound of static and that impersonal
professional voice of another civilization -- the radio announcer -- cut
through the harmony of sounds as a young man of the village holding a
portable radio to his ear comes around a bend. On his arm there is a
silver wrist watch, which sparkles in the sun. He looks at me proudly as
he passes. And a wave of understanding passes through me. Just
behind that radio and wristwatch comes an army of desires that for
centuries have gone untested and untasted. As material growth and
technological change activate these yearnings, they will transform the
heart, minds, work and daily life of this village within a generation or two.
Gradually I see that the simplicity of the village has not been
consciously chosen as much as it has been unconsciously derived as
the product of centuries of unchanging custom and tradition. The
[villages] have yet to fully encounter the impact of technological change
and material growth. When the [villages] have encountered the latent
desires within its people, and the cravings for material goods and social
position begin to wear away at the fabric of traditional culture, then it can
begin to choose its simplicity consciously. Then the simplicity of the
[villages] will be consciously won -- voluntarily chosen.
--Ram Dass, in Voluntary Simplicity [1]
Links:
------
[1] http://ow.ly/T8Vq

A Neuron with Imagination, by Francisco Ramos Stierle
The old paradigm of life tells us that we are a collection of separate
objects. We focus our attention, but in doing so, we often dissect a part
of the whole without taking into account the visible, and often invisible,
connections. As a result, we miss seeing relationships and only see the
effects, the "what". In this old paradigm, knowledge comes from
analyzing a static Nature -- a "stuff-based" view of reality. Because
reality isn't experienced dynamically, we relate to things with a sense of
conquest. In this paradigm, power is something you acquire as a
top-down force that is exerted over other life.
To be vulnerable, then, is seen as a sign of weakness. That's why being
"invulnerable" is about finding security by shattering your enemies; I
create defenses and walls and borders to isolate me from the "danger"
of being violated. A dramatic image for this view of life is the single
neuron that tries to build higher and stronger walls to stop
communication with its "dangerous" surroundings. In this ill-conceived
notion of reality, it is a matter of time before the neuron atrophies in
isolation and dies prematurely.
In the new paradigm, though, the entire Universe is in communion. It is
a science of relationships in all dimensions, and life is experienced as a
flow. Organisms are alive with visible boundaries, but determined by
what flows through those porous boundaries: matter, energy,
information, love. This paradigm is process oriented, and we are
constantly asking "how," not "what." And so, knowledge is dynamic and
always changing, like the flame that keeps its shape by constantly
burning. When we experience this dynamic knowledge, it turns into
wisdom and then reality cannot be confined only to the material world.
Here, power is shared in an inclusive and horizontal way, from the
bottom-up, such that its value resides in the way an organism serves the
community. Instead of looking for perfection, life looks for wholeness.
Being vulnerable with courage is my best security because I see my
security as the security of all. There are no enemies. A neuron, in this
new paradigm, is interconnected and functional. While it has clear
boundaries, it has imagination, and understands how matter, energy,
information and love flow through molecules, society, mind, family and
communities. Because of the plasticity of other connections in the brain,
when a healthy neuron dies, being loved by the community, its legacy
carries on.
--By Francisco Ramos Stierle

A Realm Beyond Measurement, by Andrew Cohen
With meditation, you can't push. Meditation is one of those things that
cannot be forced. You just have ot make yourself available, and we do
that by being still, being at ease, and paying attention. The depth you are
looking for comes from letting go, not from "pushing deeper." But in any
case, you shouldn't be so concerned with how deep your experience is.
Consciousness is infinite. You could have a more powerful, more
profound experience of it, but it is still the same infinite ground that you
are speaking about. That is why, when we try to describe the experience
of consciousness, words always fall short. We might use words like
"powerful", "profound", or "deep," but the words are only a metaphor, a
quantification of infinity, for that which cannot be measured. A little bit of
infinity or a lot of infinity -- it's the same thing.
So you shouldn't worry about how meditation is supposed to feel, or
spend too much time comparing your experience to what you may have
heard from others or even to what you may have experienced yourself in
the past. You are entering into a realm where measurement doesn't
mean anything. Dwelling upon too many ideas about what meditation is
supposed to be like is just a distraction from your own direct experience.
Just make yourself completely available and then see what happens.
The state of meditation is an immediate one. It doesn't require time. But
if you're holding on to an idea of a particular kind of experience that you
are convinced you need to have, you are not going to be able to see
deeply into the experience that you are having right now.
Meditation -- and indeed, the recognition of enlightenment itself --
doesn't have anything to do with any kind of experience that you can
imagine with the mind. The state of meditation, which is synonymous
with enlightenment, is the freedom from experience, and that freedom is
always imminent. But it does require a ceaseless willingness to
relinquish any ideas you have about how it is supposed to feel. Then you
will discover the englightened mind. It's right here. It is always already
the ground of your experience in each and every moment.
--Andrew Cohen, in "Being and Becoming"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 01, 2010

Freedom Manifests in Action, by Rabindranath Tagore
The more man acts and makes actual what was latent in him, the nearer
does he bring the distant Yet-to-be. In that actualisation, man is ever
making himself more and yet more distinct, and seeing himself clearly
under newer and newer aspects in the midst of his varied activities, in
the state, in society. This vision makes for freedom.
Freedom is not in darkness, nor in vagueness. There is no bondage so
fearful as that of obscurity. It is to escape from this obscurity that the
seed struggles to sprout, the bud to blossom. It is to rid itself of this
envelope of vagueness that the ideas in our mind are constantly seeking
opportunities to take on outward form. In the same way our soul, in order
to release itself from the mist of indistinctness and come out into the
open, is continually creating for itself fresh fields of action, and is busy
contriving new forms of activity, even such as are not needful for the
purposes of its earthly life. And why? Because it wants freedom. It wants
to see itself, to realise itself. [...]
Thus is man continually engaged in setting free in action his powers, his
beauty, his goodness, his very soul. And the more he succeeds in so
doing, the greater does he see himself to be, the broader becomes the
field of his knowledge of self. [] Those who have fully realised the soul
have never talked in mournful accents of the sorrowfulness of life or of
the bondage of action. They are not like the weakling flower whose
stem-hold is so light that it drops away before attaining fruition. They
hold on to life with all their might and say, "never will we let go till the fruit
is ripe." They desire in their joy to express themselves strenuously in
their life and in their work. Pain and sorrow dismay them not, they are
not bowed down to the dust by the weight of their own heart. With the
erect head of the victorious hero they march through life seeing
themselves and showing themselves in increasing resplendence of soul
through both joys and sorrows. The joy of their life keeps step with the
joy of that energy which is playing at building and breaking throughout
the universe. The joy of the sunlight, the joy of the free air, mingling with
the joy of their lives, makes one sweet harmony reign within and without.
--Rabindranath Tagore, from "Realisation in Action"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Mar 08, 2011

Balancing Vision and Routine, by Bhikkhu Bodhi
All human activity can be viewed as an interplay between two contrary
but equally essential factors--vision and repetitive routine. Vision is the
creative element in activity, whose presence ensures that over and
above the settled conditions pressing down upon us from the past we
still enjoy a margin of openness to the future, a freedom to discern more
meaningful ends and to discover more efficient ways to achieve them.
Repetitive routine, in contrast, provides the conservative element in
activity. It is the principle that accounts for the persistence of the past in
the present, and it enables the successful achievements of the present
to be preserved intact and faithfully transmitted to the future. [...] When
one factor prevails at the expense of the other, the consequences are
often undesirable. If we are bound to a repetitive cycle of work that
deprives us of our freedom to inquire and understand things for
ourselves, we soon stagnate, crippled by the chains of routine. If we are
spurred to action by elevating ideals but lack the discipline to implement
them, we may eventually find ourselves wallowing in idle dreams or
exhausting our energies on frivolous pursuits. It is only when
accustomed routines are infused by vision that they become
springboards to discovery rather than deadening ruts. And it is only
when inspired vision gives birth to a course of repeatable actions that we
can bring our ideals down from the ethereal sphere of imagination to the
somber realm of fact. It took a flash of genius for Michelangelo to behold
the figure of David invisible in a shapeless block of stone; but it required
years of prior training, and countless blows with hammer and chisel, to
work the miracle that would leave us a masterpiece of art. [...] Though
the emphasis may alternate from phase to phase, ultimate success in
the development of the path always hinges upon balancing vision with
routine in such a way that each can make its maximal contribution.
However, because our minds are keyed to fix upon the new and
distinctive, in our practice we are prone to place a one-sided emphasis
on vision at the expense of repetitive routine. Thus we are elated by
expectations concerning the stages of the path far beyond our reach,
while at the same time we tend to neglect the lower stages -- dull and
drab, but far more urgent and immediate -- lying just beneath our feet.
--Bhikkhu Bodhi
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 30, 1999

Stop Eating Our Corn!, by Akinori Kimura
[ _Fascinated by machinery, a Japanese farmer bought a big foreign
tractor to grow his corn and apples in northern Japan. Thirty years ago
he had a conversion, however, to growing organically, a conversion that
involved learning about sharing, about participating in nature's gift
economy. Below is one of his experiences._ ]
The giant tractor transformed the overgrown waste land into fields at an
amazing speed. The power was sensational. Neat fields of corn of the
sort found in those foreign magazines appeared amongst the dense
thickets. They were the Honey Bantam variety. It was probably thanks to
the fertile soil that they grew so well.
However, he was troubled by the damage caused by racoon dogs. Just
when they were ready to be harvested, the plump sweet corn was
ravaged.
'I placed traps in several places around the fields, but ended up trapping
a young raccoon dog. The mother stayed next to it, and didn't run away
when I approached. When I tried reaching out to release the trap, the
young raccoon dog bared its teeth and got really upset. It seems harsh,
but I held its head down with my rubber boot as I released it from the
trap. It didn't run away though. Right in front me, the mother started
licking the young one's wounded leg. Seeing that, I felt I'd committed an
awful crime.
I told them 'Stop eating our corn!'. But then I started leaving small piles
of second-rate corn around the edges of the fields. When you produce
corn you end up with quite a bit of corn that looks something like my
toothless mouth. They're not good enough to sell. I left it all. The next
morning when I went to the fields, they'd completely disappeared. But
the raccoon dogs had caused no other damage at all. So at harvest time
I decided to stop using the traps and put out the cobs with kernels
missing. After that, damage by the raccoon dogs stopped almost
completely. So I figured that farmers suffer this sort of damage because
they take everything. That was what came to mind. After all, we'd turned
what used to belong to the raccoon dogs into fields. I worried that if I
actually fed them, the raccoon dogs would end up being even more
bother, but that didn't happen. Which I thought was strange. I suppose
you could say that my eyes were opened to the mysteries of nature.
Anyway, I realized that nature didn't work in the way that most people
thought. This was probably the turning point as far as my ideas about
so-called 'efficient' agriculture were concerned.
--Akinori Kimura, in Miracle Apples [1]
Links:[1] http://imaginepeace.com/miracleapples/?p=62
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 22, 2010

Building a Creative Temple, by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Whenever you set out to build a creative temple, whatever it may be,
you must face the fact that there is a tension at the heart of the universe
between good and evil. Hinduism refers to this as a struggle between
illusion and reality. Platonic philosophy used to refer to it as a tension
between body and soul. Zoroastrianism, a religion of old, used to refer to
it as a tension between the god of light and the god of darkness.
Traditional Judaism and Christianity refer to it as a tension between God
and Satan. Whatever you call it, there is a struggle in the universe
between good and evil.
Now not only is that struggle structured out somewhere in the external
forces of the universe, it's structured in our own lives. Psychologists
have tried to grapple with it in their way, and so they say various things.
Sigmund Freud used to say that this tension is a tension between what
he called the id and the superego. Some of us feel that it's a tension
between God and man. And in every one of us this morning, there's a
war going on. It's a civil war. I don't care who you are, I don't care where
you live, there is a civil war going on in your life. And every time you set
out to be good, there's something pulling on you, telling you to be evil.
It's going on in your life. Every time you set out to love, something keeps
pulling on you, trying to get you to hate. Every time you set out to be kind
and say nice things about people, something is pulling on you to be
jealous and envious and to spread evil gossip about them. There's a civil
war going on. There is a schizophrenia, as the psychologists or the
psychiatrists would call it, going on within all of us. And there are times
that all of us know somehow that there is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in
us. [...] There's a tension at the heart of human nature. And whenever
we set out to dream our dreams and to build our temples, we must be
honest enough to recognize it.
In the final analysis, God does not judge us by the separate incidents or
the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives. In
the final analysis, God knows that his children are weak and they are
frail. In the final analysis, what God requires is that your heart is right.
Salvation isn't reaching the destination of absolute morality, but it's being
in the process and on the right road.
And the question I want to raise this morning with you: is your heart
right? If your heart isn't right, fix it up today. Get somebody to be able to
say about you, "He may not have reached the highest height, he may not
have realized all of his dreams, but he tried." Isn't that a wonderful thing
for somebody to say about you? "He tried to be a good man. He tried to
be a just man. He tried to be an honest man. His heart was in the right
place." And I can hear a voice saying, crying out through the eternities, "I
accept you. You are a recipient of my grace because it was in your
heart. And it is so well that it was within thine heart."
I don't know this morning about you, but I can make a testimony. You
don't need to go out this morning saying that Martin Luther King is a
saint. Oh, no. I want you to know this morning that I'm a sinner like all of
God's children. But I want to be a good man. And I want to hear a voice
saying to me one day, "I take you in and I bless you, because you try. It
is well that it was within thine heart."
--Martin Luther King. Jr.
Published at www.ijourney.org on Dec 07, 2010

Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, by Martin Luther King, Jr.
First, it must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method
for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this method because she/he is
afraid or merely because she/he lacks the instruments of violence,
she/he is not truly nonviolent. This is why Gandhi often said that if
cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight The
method is passive physically, but strongly active spiritually. It is not
passive nonresistance to evil, it is active nonviolent resistance to evil.
A second basic fact that characterizes nonviolence is that it does not
seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win her/his friendship
and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express her/his
protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but she/he realizes that
these are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a
sense of moral shame in the opponent The aftermath of nonviolence is
the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is
tragic bitterness.
A third characteristic of this method is that the attack is directed against
forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the
evil We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be
unjust.
A fourth point that characterizes nonviolent resistance is a willingness to
accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent
without striking back. 'Rivers of blood may have to flow before we gain
our freedom, but it must be our blood,' Gandhi said to his countrymen.
The nonviolent resister does not seek to dodge jail. If going to jail is
necessary, she/he enters it 'as a bridegroom enters the bride's chamber'
"What is the nonviolent resister's justification for this ordeal to which
she/he invites men, for this mass political application of the ancient
doctrine of turning the other cheek?" The answer is found in the
realization that unearned suffering is redemptive. Suffering, the
nonviolent resisted realized, has tremendous educational and
transforming possibilities.
A fifth point concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only
external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. The
nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot her/his opponent but she/he
also refuses to hate him. At the center of nonviolence stands the
principle of love
A sixth basic fact about nonviolent resistance is that it is based on the
conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. Consequently, the
believer in nonviolence has deep faith in the future. This faith is another
reason why the nonviolent resister can accept suffering without
retaliation. For she/he knows that in her/his struggle for justice she/he
has cosmic companionship a creative force in this universe that works to
bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole.
--Martin Luther King. Jr., in _Stride Towards Freedom_ [1]
Links:
------
[1] http://salsa.net/peace/conv/8weekconv4-4.html
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 30, 1999

Entertainment Vs. Art, by Lariv Athem
In the increasingly information-heavy times in which we live, distractions
abound. The word distraction literally points back to a certain losing (dis)
of control (traction). We start off with an intention to focus on something,
but then a momentary lapse of clarity leads us astray. The drifting isn't
just arbitrary - there is a subtle attraction, and our attention finds itself
diverted. It doesn't help that there are many things vying for our time,
some of them designed specifically to reel us in. And then there are
times when we actually want to mentally check out. This is what a
mindset of entertainment is, seeking amusement over engagement, and
appearance over essence.
Of course, there is a major distinction between entertainment and art.
Both operate in the domain of aesthetics - but the difference is the depth
with which we experience and explore. At its crux, art is about
recognizing, knowing, and appreciating beauty. It implicates us in ways
we don't even realize. Consciously practicing this kind of engagement
with art is to hold a certain mindset. "Art is an attention to everyday
living," a dear friend once told me. Is there art in the way we make our
beds, or the way we cut fruit? In the way we see the sunlight bathing the
hillside? Bringing this kind of understanding is really about recognizing
that we have access to that beauty exactly where we are. It makes the
ordinary, extra-ordinary and also, the extra-ordinary, significant. In that
sense, art can bring us deeper into our experience of the moment,
enriching our perception, and deepening our awareness of the
previously unknown, and perhaps even previously unknowable.
Something about the process of engaging in this way not only changes
what we perceive, it changes how we perceive. Ultimately, whether we
approach an experience with a mindset of entertainment or art is
determined largely by what we practice. Entertainment can be
repeatedly experienced, but it can't be practiced. Art can. It is conscious,
reverent, and limited only by our imagination.
--Lariv Athem
Published at www.ijourney.org on Jan 11, 2011

Worms Are, Therefore I Am, by Satish Kumar
Perhaps the reason that we do not get enough enlightenment these
days is because we do not take the time to sit under a tree.
To be an Earth Pilgrim is to revere Nature as our sacred home, and see
all our life as a sacred journey to become at one with ourselves, with
others and with Nature. The starting point for being an Earth Pilgrim is
humility in the face of Nature's immense generosity and unconditional
love. Take the apple tree. We eat the fruit that has been freely given --
and finding a bitter pip, we spit it out. Here the pip immediately starts to
cooperate with Nature. The soil provides hospitality for the seed, which
is nourished by the rain and the sunshine. Soon the pip has literally
grounded itself and realised itself as another tree bearing innumerable
apples and countless pips. When people ask me about reincarnation, I
point to the apple tree. And when offering its fruit, the apple tree does
not discriminate between human and animal, educated and uneducated,
between black or white, man and woman, young and old. All are equal,
and all receive.
Over the past century, we have struggled to rid the world of many -isms:
imperialism and the rule of one people over another; sexism and the
subjugation of women by men. But one mighty -ism still remains:
species-ism, by which humanity claims the right of domination over the
rest of creation. Yet the Earth is a community, where no one species is
inferior or superior. All species are our kith and kin, as St Francis
appreciated when he reached out to Sister Water and Brother Fire. In
our modern world, the assertion of human superiority has been
reinforced by the misperception that we are somehow separate from
Nature, that the environment is something outside of us. But the root of
the word Nature is from the Latin to be born -- just like the Nativity -- and
when we are born we become part of Nature. Instead of the arrogance of
Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am', we need to broaden our horizons.
Without our parents, our friends as well as distant strangers, our lives
would be impossible -- so 'You are, therefore I am'. And without Nature,
we could not live -- and so we should truly say 'the Earth is, therefore I
am'. Gerald Manley Hopkins praised the less lovely parts of Nature:
"long live the weeds and the wilderness yet", he wrote. As a gardener, I
have a particular debt of gratitude towards the humble worm, so I say
"long live the worms" and make my own declaration of dependence,
"The worms are, therefore I am."
--Satish Kumar
Published at www.ijourney.org on Jan 18, 2011

Ancient Law of Hospitality, by Thomas Berry
Perhaps our greatest resource for peace is in an awareness that we
enrich ourselves when we share our possessions with others. We
discover peace when we learn to esteem those goods whereby we
benefit ourselves in proportion as we give them to others. The very
structure and functioning of the universe and of the planet Earth reveal
an indescribable diversity bound in an all-embracing unity. The heavens
themselves are curved over the Earth in an encompassing embrace.
Here I would recall the experience of Henry David Thoreau, an
American naturalist the mid-nineteenth century who lived a very simple
life with few personal possessions. At one time he was attracted to the
idea of purchasing an especially beautiful bit of land with a pasture and a
wooded area. He even made a deposit. But then he realized that it was
not necessary to purchase the land because, he reasoned, he already
possessed the land in its wonder and its beauty as he passed by each
day. This intimacy with the land could not be taken away from him no
matter who owned the land in its physical reality. So indeed that same bit
of land could be owned in its wonder and beauty by an unlimited number
of persons, even though in its physical reality it might be owned by a
single person.
Such was the argument of Mencius, the Chinese Confucian writer who
taught the emperor that he should open up the royal park for others,
since it would be an even greater joy to have others present with him,
just as at a musical concert we enjoy the music without diminishing, but
increasing, our own joy as we share it with others. So too for those in the
Bodhisattva tradition of India, where those such as Shanti Deva, in the
fifth century of our era, took a vow to refuse beatitude itself until all living
creatures were saved. For only when they participated in his joy could he
be fully caught up in the delight of paradise.
It has taken these many centuries for us to meet with each other in the
comprehensive manner that is now possible. While for the many long
centuries we had fragments of information concerning each other, we
can now come together, speak with each other, dine with each other.
Above all we can tell our stories to each other.
Tonight we might recall the ancient law of hospitality, whereby the
wanderer was welcomed.
--Thomas Berry, in '_Evening Thoughts_'
Published at www.ijourney.org on Dec 14, 2010

New Atoms Doing the Same Dance, by Richard Feynman
I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing
waves ... mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own
business ... trillions apart ... yet forming white surf in unison.
Ages on ages ... before any eyes could see ... year after year ...
thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what? ... on a
dead planet, with no life to entertain. Never at rest ... tortured by energy
... wasted prodigiously by the sun ... poured into space. A mite makes
the sea roar. Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one
another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like
themselves ... and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity ... living things, masses of atoms, DNA,
protein ... dancing a pattern ever more intricate. Out of the cradle onto
the dry land ... here it is standing ... atoms with consciousness ... matter
with curiosity. Stands at the sea ... wonders at wondering ... I ... a
universe of atoms ... an atom in the universe.
The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, come again and again
when we look at any problem deeply enough. With more knowledge
comes deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate
deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may prove disappointing,
but with pleasure and confidence we turn over each new stone to find
unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and
mysteries -- certainly a grand adventure! [...]
This is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the
atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms, to note that the thing
which I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance. The atoms come
into my brain, dance a dance, then go out; always new atoms but always
doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday. [...]
What, then, is the meaning of it all? What can we say to dispel the
mystery of experience? If we take everything into account, not only what
the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn't know,
then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know. But in
admitting this, we have probably found the open channel.
--Richard Feynman, in Value of Science [1]
Links:
------
[1] http://alexpetrov.com/memes/sci/value.html


Embracing the Mystery of Uncertainty, by Alan Briskin
A Zen parable captures the mysterious connection between attending to
our own consciousness and the external events that enfold us. A
respected teacher was asked by members of a village if he could come
and bring rain to their dry fields. They had tried many different
approaches, including soliciting the help of a number of rainmakers, but
still no rain came. When the teacher agreed to come, he asked only that
he be given a small house and a garden he could tend. Day in, day out,
he tended his small garden, neither performing incantations nor asking
anything further of the villagers. After a while, rain began to fall on the
parched earth. When asked how he could achieve such a miracle, he
answered humbly that when he came to the village, he sensed
disharmony within himself. Each day by tending his garden, he returned
a little more to himself. As to the rain falling, he could not say. The
garden is a wonderful metaphor because it suggests that if there is a
safe place for something to grow, then harmony may be restored
elsewhere. To care for the soul suggests a return to the self, but a self
that interacts with the world around us. Every day we enter situations
that are inherently uncertain but still marked by underlying patterns.
These patterns maybe emotional fields, dry because there is little
nourishment or turbulent because of unresolved feelings of anger,
disappointment or frenzy. When we come in contact with each other,
some aspect of the underlying field affects us. Like the teacher in the
story, we can come to recognize the disharmony in ourselves and begin
to make a place where the particulars can be tended. Yet to embrace the
idea that our own consciousness is influenced by and influences what is
around us, we must honor the overlap of self and other. We must look
for unity of what happens and how it happens as inseparable from each
other, without forcing a causal link to explain the occurrence. --Alan
Briskin, in 'The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace'
Published at www.ijourney.org on Dec 28, 2010

The Mystery of Love, by Kent Nerburn
Remember that you don't choose love. Love chooses you. All you can
really do is accept it for all its mystery when it comes into your life. Feel
the way it fills you to overflowing, then reach out and give it away. Give it
back to the person who brought it alive in you. Give it to others who
deem it poor in spirit. Give it to the world around you in any way you can.
There is where many lovers go wrong. Having been so long without
love, they understand love only as a need. They see their hearts as
empty places that will be filled by love, and they begin to look at love as
something that flows to them rather than from them.
The first blush of new love is filled to overflowing, but as their love cools,
they revert to seeing their love as a need. They cease to be someone
who generates love and instead become someone who seeks love. They
forget that the secret of love is that it is a gift, and that it can be made to
grow only by giving it away.
Remember this and keep it to your heart. Love has its time, its own
season, its own reason for coming and going. You cannot bribe it or
coerce it, or reason it into staying. You can only embrace it when it
arrives and give it away when it comes to you. [...] Love always has been
and always will be a mystery. Be glad that it came to live for a moment in
your life.
--Kent Nerburn
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 30, 1999

Help Comes From the Strangest Places, by David Brooks
Help comes from the strangest places. We are living in the middle of a
revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists,
neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others
have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the
human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the
rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows.
They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases,
longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely
those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science
helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.
A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of
our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making
sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other,
more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years
provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the
relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over
individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over
I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to
go along with the conventional surface one. To give a sense of how this
inner story goes, let's consider a young member of the Composure
Class, though of course the lessons apply to members of all classes. I'll
call him Harold. His inner-mind training began before birth. Even when
he was in the womb, Harold was listening for his mother's voice, and
being molded by it. French babies cry differently from babies who've
heard German in the womb, because they've absorbed French
intonations before birth. Fetuses who have been read "The Cat in the
Hat" while in the womb suck rhythmically when they hear it again after
birth, because they recognize the rhythm of the poetry.
As a newborn, Harold, like all babies, was connecting with his mother.
He gazed at her. He mimicked. His brain was wired by her love (the
more a rat pup is licked and groomed by its mother, the more synaptic
connections it has). Harold's mother, in return, read his moods. A
conversation developed between them, based on touch, gaze, smell,
rhythm, and imitation. When Harold was about eleven months old, his
mother realized that she knew him better than she'd ever known
anybody, even though they'd never exchanged a word.
--David Brooks, in Social Animal [1]
Links:
------
[1]
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks

Giving and Receiving, by Jaggi Vasudev
Giving and receiving is the basis of all transactions. No interaction can
take place without these two. Nowadays, we are constantly trying to
elevate one to a place of sanctity and the other to subordination. One is
considered superior and the other inferior. Today, we feel we must
emphasize the importance of giving only because taking happens in
large volumes and giving has become scarce.
In reality, however, there is no giving or taking. With a little deeper
perception of life, one can see that there is no such thing as giving and
taking. It is just life rearranging itself constantly. Modern science agrees
with this today. There is no giving and taking, no adding or subtracting,
just a rearrangement of the same energy. If you see everything as yours,
you just rearrange as necessary.
When you realize that the essential process of life is a constant
transaction, you will realize that for an iota of offering that you make,
there are a trillion things to receive all the time. Think of the forces of
existence and the zillions of creatures working, knowingly or
unknowingly, within your body and outside of it, to make life possible.
Everything in the existence is somehow collaborating to keep you alive
and well. Only a fool thinks of himself as a giver. Just to be alive is to
receive in great abundance.
--Jaggi Vasudev, in Is Philanthropy Outdated [1]
Links:
------
[1]
http://www.livemint.com/2011/01/20233659/Is-philanthropy-outdated-in-o
u.html?h=B
Published at www.ijourney.org on Feb 15, 2011

Before You Know What Kindness Really Is, by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
--Naomi Shihab Nye, from _The Words Under the Words_
Published at www.ijourney.org on Apr 19, 2011

A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted, by John O'Donohue
When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,
The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.
Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.
The ride you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.
You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.
At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.
You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.
Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.
Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.
--John O'Donohue, from "Blessings"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 30, 1999

Rest and Be Taken, by Adyashanti
When there is deep abundance
there is nowhere to abide.
There is nowhere to rest
or grasp onto
and yet there is rest
The sky abides
yet it never rests.
Neither can we say that
the sky is not always at rest.
We talk about the sky
as if it were something
as if it actually exists -
and yet we cannot say that
the sky does not exist.
The sky is nothing but
coming and going.
Everything is perfectly spontaneous.
The coming and going arise mutually
instantaneously.
If the true I is asleep
you will miss the point entirely
and you will continue to dwell
in the world of opposites.
So see the two as one
and the one as empty
and be liberated
within the world of duality.
At first it seems
as if begoing follows becoming.
But look even closer
and you will see
that there are only
flashes of lightning
illuminating the empty sky.
Life and death
becoming and begoing
are only words.
In order to save your life
you must see that you die
instantaneously
moment to moment
instant to instant.
Now where are you going to abide?
And where are you not abiding already?
Indeed there is nowhere
to rest your head
and there is nothing but rest.
So let go of all ideas
about permanence and impermanence
about cause and effect
and about no cause and no effect.
All such notions are dualistic concepts.
The Truth of what you are
is completely beyond all duality
and all notions of non-duality,
and yet it includes duality
and non-duality alike.
Like an ocean
that is both waves and stillness
and yet un-definable
as waves or stillness.
The truth of being
cannot be grasped by ideas
or experiences.
Both waves and stillness
are the manifest activity
or your own self.
But self cannot be defined
by its activity
nor by its non-activity.
The truth is
all-transcendent
ungraspable, all-inclusive
and closer than your own skin.
A single thought about it
obscures its essence.
The perfume of true life
is right in your nose.
There is nothing you can do
to perceive it
and yet you must do something.
I say:
Rest and be taken.
Rest and be taken.
--Adyashanti, from "My Secret is Silence"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 30, 1999

Living With a Rebel Within, by Dzogchen Ponlop
Your true mind is a mind of joy, free from all suffering. That is who you
really are. That is the true nature of your mind and the mind of everyone.
But your mind doesn't just sit there being perfect, doing nothing. It's at
play all the time, creating your world. If this is true, then why isn't your
life, and the whole world, perfect? Why aren't you happy all the time?
How could you be laughing one minute and in despair the next? And
why would "awakened" people argue, fight, lie, cheat, steal, and go to
war? The reason is that, even though the awakened state is the true
nature of the mind, most of us don't see it. Why? Something is in the
way. Something is blocking our view of it. Sure, we see bits of it here
and there. But the moment we see it, something else pops into our mind
-- "What time is it? Is it time for lunch? Oh, look, a butterfly!" -- and our
insight is gone. [...] This busy mind is who you think you are. It is easier
to see, like the face of the person standing right in front of you. For
example, the thought you're thinking right now is more obvious to you
than your awareness of that thought. When you get angry, you pay more
attention to what you're angry about than to the actual source of your
anger, where your anger is coming from. In other words, you notice what
your mind is doing, but you don't see the mind itself. You identify yourself
with the contents of this busy mind -- your thoughts, emotions, ideas --
and end up thinking that all of this stuff is "me" and "how I am." When
you do that, it's like being asleep and dreaming and believing that your
dream images are true. [...] On the one hand, we're used to our sleep
and content with its dreams; on the other hand, our wakeful self is
always shaking us up and turning on the lights, so to speak. This wakeful
self, the true mind that is awake, wants out of the confines of sleep, out
of illusion-like reality. While we're locked away in our dream, it sees the
potential for freedom. So it provokes, arouses, prods and instigates until
we're inspired to take action. You could say we are living with a rebel
within. --Dzogchen Ponlop, from "Rebel Buddha"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 30, 1999

You Are Not a Prisoner, by Andrew Cohen
Q: Why is it important to practice meditation consistently? A: You
meditate to remind yourself that you are not a prisoner. If there is power
in your meditation, if your experience of the Ground of Being is deep and
profound, you will discover and discover, over and over and over again,
that you are not a prisoner. You are not held captive by your own mind,
and nor are your imprisoned by your emotions. It sounds simple, but its
so easy to forget. If all you're aware of is the endless roller coaster ride
of thoughts and feelings, of course you will believe you are trapped.
The Ground of Being is a deeper, infinitely more subtle dimension of
your own consciousness that simply cannot be perceived by gross
faculties of the conditioned mind and ego. You can't see it; you can't
taste it; you can't touch it. So even if you have directly experienced the
unconditioned freedom of that empty ground, when you return to the
world of conditioned mind and ego, you are likely to doubt it. The mind
simply cannot cognize this ground, and the ego cannot know it. That's
why its very important to meditate as much as you can. If you meditate
regularly, with a strong intention, you will keep rediscovering that you are
not a prisoner. You cannot recognize that enough. Until your conviction
in your own freedom is unwavering, and you're able to prove it through
unbroken consistency in the way that you live, you should meditate
everyday as if your life depended on it. You 'need' to keep having that
experience. Each and every time you realize that you're not a prisoner,
you gain a deeper confidence in the limitless, inherent freedom of that
empty ground that is your own deepest Self. It builds a conscious
conviction in no-limitation, and, as I teach it, this is the most significant
purpose of meditation. --Andrew Cohen
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 30, 1999

A Deep, Uncritical Love, by Bhante Gunaratana
You can't make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin
to see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you do that, changes
will flow naturally. You don't have to force anything, struggle, or obey
rules dictated to you by some authority. It is automatic; you just change.
But arriving at that initial insight is quite a task. You have to see who you
are and how you are without illusion, judgment or resistance of any kind.
You have to see your place in society and your function as a social
being. You have to see your duties and obligations to your fellow human
beings, and above all, your responsibility to yourself as an individual
living with other individuals. And finally, you have to see all of that clearly
as a single unit, an irreducible whole of interrelationship. It sounds
complex, but it can occur in a single instant. Mental cultivation through
meditation is without rival in helping you achieve this sort of
understanding and serene happiness. [...] Meditation is intended to
purify the mind. It cleanses the thought process of what can be called
psychic irritants, things like greed, hatred and jealousy, which keep you
snarled up in emotional bondage. Meditation brings the mind to a state
of tranquility and awareness, a state of concentration and insight.
Meditation is called the Great Teacher. It is the cleansing crucible fire
that works slowly but surely, through understanding. The greater your
understanding, the more flexible and tolerant, the more compassionate
you can be. You become like a perfect parent or an ideal teacher. You
are ready to forgive and forget. You feel love toward others because you
understand them, and you understand others because you have
understood yourself. You have looked deeply inside and seen
self-illusion and your own human failings, seen your own humanity and
learned to forgive and to love. When you have learned compassion for
yourself, compassion for others is automatic. An accomplished meditator
has achieved a profound understanding of life, and he or she inevitably
relates to the world with a deep and uncritical love. --Bhante
Gunaratana, from "Mindfulness in Plain English"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Mar 22, 2011

Practically Preposterous, by Pavithra Mehta
_"Well, I was just inventing a new way of getting over a gate -- would
you like to hear it?" _
_"Very much indeed," Alice said politely. _
_"I'll tell you how I came to think of it," said the Knight. "You see, I said
to myself 'The only difficulty is with the feet: the head is high enough
already.' Now first I put my head on top of the gate -- then the head's
high enough -- then I stand on my head -- and the feet are high enough,
you see -- then I'm over, you see?" _-- Lewis Carroll, Through the
Looking Glass
And when was the last time you came across something as Practically
Preposterous as that? :-) Just realized right there that that's a Paradox.
Practically Preposterous. (And I think I've learned somewhere along the
way to pay attention to paradoxes. They put the truth before the
explanation and its up to us to get from one to the other. And the journey
that starts in perplexity usually ends in some form of wisdom).
Practically Preposterous ... that's kind of like Mission Impossible. A
Mission being something you set out to Do. Impossible being something
that just Can't be Done.
Practically Preposterous ... and that's actually a double paradox.
Because the word Preposterous comes straight from the Latin word
"praeposterus" -- a curious conjunction of "prae" meaning "before" and
"posterus", meaning "coming after." So put them together and you've got
the before coming after. And that could mean doing things backwards --
or it could just mean starting from where you want to get to. It could just
mean Living the Dream instead of Dreaming a Life. And maybe that's
what he meant by Being the Change.
He was -- if you think about it -- a pretty preposterous man. Gandhiji.
Because everyone knew you exchanged blows to fight a battle to win
your peace until he came along and placed peace before the battle and
the battle before the blows (and the whole point was that you never got
that far). Doing things backwards. Practically Preposterous!
[...]
Maybe part of the problem is we don't prompt ourselves enough towards
faith in the preposterous. Maybe it's time then to start cultivating the Red
Queen's practice ...
'"I can't believe that!" said Alice. "Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying
tone. 'Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes. Alice laughed:
"There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I
daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was
younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've
believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Six impossible things.
Your Time Starts Now :-)
--Pavithra Mehta, in _Practically Preposterous [1]_
Links:
------
[1] http://www.charityfocus.org/blog/view.php?id=2307
Published at www.ijourney.org on Mar 15, 2011

Giving Within For-Give-Ness, by Michael Bernard Beckwith
People often say that Jesus taught, "You should turn the cheek if
someone smites you; you should turn the other cheek if they wrong you."
Many people interpret this as saying that if someone hits you, you should
turn the other cheek and let them hit you again. I don't think he meant
that. I think he meant that you are supposed to give back a different form
of energy. If you are given hate or indifference, you are to give back
love, patience and compassion. Turning the other cheek means you're
giving back another energy. If someone gives you negative energy, you
give back positive, affirmative energy -- such as forgiveness. If someone
has done something wrong or destructive to you, you give another
energy back. Instead of "giving as good as you get," you give back a
higher form of energy. This is the giving within for-give-ness. You
should disengage then from the ego's point of view, which is always
saying that you're right, and that as you've been given negative, so you
should double it back on the other person. This is oftentimes where
nations live: in revenge. But the practice of forgiveness is a higher state
of consciousness because you're acknowledging that someone may
have done something wrong, destructive, or not life-enhancing, but you
are still going to give back an affirmative energy in their direction.
--Michael Bernard Beckwith, in _Beyond Forgiveness_
Published at www.ijourney.org on Apr 26, 2011

Fool Realization, by Steve Bhaerman
In the Greek tradition, tragedies were four act plays that ended sadly
and badly -- kind of like situation comedies without the laugh track.
Comedies, on the other hand, had a fifth act where the sad or bad
circumstance that ended Act IV is resolved. So ... comedy encompasses
tragedy, thanks to an Act V. Thinking of life as a comedy in this sense
would seem counterintuitive. Far, far more humans exit this world
suffering than do laughing. However, the presumption there is that the
end of earthly life is the end of existence. As physicists have discovered,
it seems that all of existence is "here now" -- and through our
perceptions, we the observers choose reality on a "need to exist basis."
In this sense, there is no such thing as past or future. Everything that
has ever existed or ever will exist is in existence now. Meanwhile, we
have the numerous and often similar reports of "near death
experiences," where those who return report seeing blinding light, feeling
overwhelming love, meeting divine entities and loved ones. Are these
experiences "real?" Are they just a function of brain chemistry offering
one last chemical impulse? Of course, our current dominant paradigm
of scientific materialism would have us believe that these experiences
are purely chemical. On the other hand, we have thousands of years of
human spiritual tradition that tells us otherwise. Among those stories is
the story of a Tragedy, and a Comedy. The story of the crucifixion would
have been a tragedy ... had it ended there. However, a fifth act has been
added on to the story. The Resurrection transforms the tragedy into a
Comedy. Whether or not you buy the body of beliefs that comprise
Christianity, don't you think it's significant that the leading western
religious authority all but proclaims that life is a comedy? And if that's the
case, why aren't they laughing? Why aren't we laughing? We aren't
laughing because we have been conditioned to believe that life is
serious. Perhaps this conditioning to seriousness is why the world is in
such serious condition. Perhaps to get to both the "ha ha" that is the
punch line to life, and the "aha" we get when we awaken in the wake of
cosmic laughter, we need to look at life itself as a journey to "fool
realization." --Steve Bhaerman a.k.a. Swami Beyondananda, from
"Wake up Laughing"
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 30, 1999

Cultivation of that Dormant Love, by Radhanath Swami
Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language
understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards,
cobras, monkeys, rivers and trees; they all served as my teachers when
I lived as a wanderer in the Himalayan foothills. They shared the kind of
lessons that elevate the spirit.
One particularly illuminating lesson from the forest comes in the form of
the Himalayan musk deer. The musk deer is referenced in Sanskrit
poetry and philosophy owing to its peculiar behavior. Prized by the
perfume industry for its exceptional aroma, musk is one of the world's
most expensive natural products, fetching more than three times its
weight in gold. The aroma of musk is so alluring that when the stag's
sensitive nose catches wind of it he roams the forest day and night in
pursuit of its source. He exhausts himself in a fruitless quest, never
realizing the bitter irony: the sweet fragrance he was chasing resided
nowhere but within himself. Musk, you see, is produced by a gland in the
stag's very own navel: it was searching without for what was all along
lying within.
The sages of India found in the musk deer an apt description of the
human condition. We are all pleasure-seeking creatures wandering a
forest of some sort -- replete with pleasures and perils alike. Moreover,
we are prone to the same type of folly as the deer: we seek our
happiness externally. Misconceiving our true needs, we wrongly equate
our fulfillment and self-worth with possessions, positions, mental and
sensual thrills. We are often drawn into superficial relationships which
hold the promise of lasting satisfaction, yet leave us feeling empty.
The true treasure lies within. It is the underlying theme of the songs we
sing, the shows we watch and the books we read. It is woven into the
Psalms of the Bible, the ballads of the Beatles and practically every film
ever made. What is that treasure? Love. Love is the nature of the Divine.
Beneath the covering of the false ego it lies hidden. The purpose of
human life is to uncover that divine love. The fulfillment that we're all
seeking is found in the sharing of this love.
The power of love is most profound. It has various levels. In its crudest
sense, the word love refers to acts of physical intimacy, and its influence
over society is obvious. But on a deeper, more emotional level, not
simply of the body but of the heart, there is no greater power than love.
For the sake of money and prestige, one may be willing to work long
hours, weekends, even holidays. A mother's love, on the other hand, is
selfless and unconditional. There's nothing she won't do for the
well-being of her child, and she asks for nothing in return.
When love is pure, it has the power to conquer. Lover and beloved
conquer each other by their affection. [We are] willing and eager to not
only be touched by love, but to be conquered by it. The cultivation of that
dormant love is called the path of devotion.
--Radhanath Swami
Published at www.ijourney.org on Apr 05, 2011

A 9-Year-Old's Hidden Self, by Jacob Needleman
The quality and strength of Lobsang's inner being was also brought
home to me through an event that took place in my home. After one of
his weekends working with our translation group, he stayed for a few
days as a guest in my house in San Francisco. One morning at the
breakfast table we were discussing this and that, I don't remember what.
My nine-year-old daughter, Eve, was present. Ordinarily, she tended to
be shy, especially when strangers or guests were present. But at one
point in the conversation, during a brief pause, she looked up at Lobsang
and without any preamble she asked him: "What happens when people
die?"
I was startled and a certain warmth rose up in me. It was obvious she
had been keeping this question for a long time inside herself, without
letting anyone know. My own attempts to make room in our relationship
for this kind of question had not gone anywhere, or so it has seemed to
me. But now, suddenly, I felt her hidden self and felt that strength of its
need. How would Lobsang respond? I set myself to listen to him with as
much eagerness as my daughter.
Lobsang turned toward her with his warm, brown face and his lucent
black eyes and began talking to her as though she were, like him, simply
a normal human being for whom such questioning was as natural and as
important as eating, a human being who was, like him and like all of us,
someday going to die. I don't remember the content of what he said to
her; I do remember thinking that what he said was not extraordinary --
things that any serious adult might say to a serious, inquiring child. But
what I do remember as vividly as though it were yesterday was the
"resonance" of his voice, the stillness of his body and the warm attention
in his face. I remember sensing the vibration of a certain kind of energy
passing between Lobsang and my daughter that served more as answer
to her question than any words by themselves could have. I saw her
eyes deepen as though they were seeing something strong and new --
not outside herself, but inside herself.
Perhaps she did not realize what was happening inside herself. Maybe
she still doesn't know. But I saw it. A quality of attention was passing
between Lobsang and my daughter that is becoming more and more
rare in our common world. And it is this "something" that desperately
needs to pass between people. It is the mutual flow of this special quality
of attention between human beings that all people, whether they know it
or not, are starved for. Not all the praise, touching, words, teaching,
smiling, sympathizing, serving good causes -- not any or all of it can do
what this quality of shared attention can do. Its lack is more of a threat to
our world than anything else -- or, rather, its increasing absence in
human relationships is at the root of all else that now threatens to
destroy or degrade us beyond recovery -- the internecine hatred and
egoism and immorality that is crowding out not only our ancient,
traditional ways of life, and the life of nature itself, but which is also
crowding out the human memory of what mankind is, and is made for.
--Jacob Needleman, in _What is God [1]_
Links:
------
[1]
http://books.google.com/books?id=YbvAgK1eDRsC&dq=god+needl
eman&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Published at www.ijourney.org on Apr 12, 2011

Live the Questions Now, by Rainer Maria Rilke
In the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful
anxiety about life, even more than I was in Paris, where everything
echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive noise that
makes Things tremble. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous
landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas,
here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those
questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for
even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words
point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable.
But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if
you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon.
If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and
that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love
for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win
the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier
for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your
conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your
innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.
You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg
you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything
unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if
they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live
everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the
future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the
answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and
forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself
for that -- but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it
comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then
take it upon yourself.
--Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Letters to a Young Poet"
Published at www.ijourney.org on May 31, 2011

Giving Somebody Your Heart, by Christopher Lowman
In every interaction you have with another human being--doesn't matter
who--you always have two main choices.
(The keyword is choice.)
One choice usually leads to logical (boring) interaction, politeness,
formalities. And, more importantly, a lack of connectivity.
The other usually leads to interesting discussion, love (yes, love),
aliveness, friendship, gift giving. And connectivity.
In every interaction you are either giving somebody else your
mind--your intellect, your intelligent points, the
who/what/where/when/why of your existence.
This is the easy thing to do. The safe thing to do. It doesn't require
much, if any, emotional strength or really expose who you are. In this
way, you can hide from others (or from your self, depending on how you
look at it) and not risk rejection by not even giving somebody the chance
to reject you.
Or, you are giving somebody your heart--the real you, your presence,
your true attention.
This is the hard thing to do. The risky thing to do. It involves an
enormous amount of emotional strength (until it doesn't). It entails
entering the present moment. And it entails pushing through the
challenging and stifling fear of doing so.
Instead of thinking about what to say or do, you let your inwardly felt
experience inform your words and actions toward others.
Think about how often you self-censor and hit the mute button. Why?
Why not just assume that what you have to say is valuable, even if it
comes out not so smooth? Then maybe you say next, "oh, that was
lame" and then laugh.
It's this kind of moment-to-moment truthfulness that is required.
It's so easy (but frightening) to practice because you always know what
to say or do in any interaction with somebody else. The problem is
having the courage to act on it.
Isn't it time to feel less anxious and less alone and less unfulfilled?
--Christopher Lowman, from "Moving Towards Peace" [1] blog
Links:
------
[1]
http://www.movingtowardspeace.com/mtpblog/dont-give-somebody-your
-mind-give-them-your-heart.html
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 30, 1999

Full Effort is Full Victory, by Eknath Eswaran
Gandhi wanted so deeply to help the world that he dedicated his life to
siphoning every trace of self-interest out of his heart and mind, leaving
them pure, radiantly healthy, and free to love. It took him nearly twenty
years to gain such control of his thinking process, but with every day of
demanding effort he discovered a little more of the deep resources that
are within us all: unassuming leadership, eloquence, and an endless
capacity for selfless service. When he was in South Africa, Gandhi
sometimes would walk fifty miles a day and sleep only a few hours a
night. Even into his seventies he wrote hundreds of letters every week;
when his right hand got tired, he learned to write with his left. Once,
while he was writing a letter, the lantern failed. Most of us would have
quit and gone to bed, but Gandhi, aware of how much his reply meant to
those who had written him, went outside and finished his
correspondence by moonlight. That kind of drive gives a glimpse of the
wellspring of vitality he tapped every day. If we were asked to live like
this, we would say, "Impossible!" Gandhi would object, "Oh, no. It is
possible, when your mind is flooded with love for all." Late in Gandhi's
life a Western journalist asked, "Mr. Gandhi, you've been working fifteen
hours a day for fifty years. Don't you ever feel like taking a few weeks off
and going for a vacation?" Gandhi laughed and said, "Why? I am always
on vacation." Because he had no personal irons in the fire, no selfish
concerns involved in his work, there was no conflict in his mind to drain
his energy. He had just one overwhelming desire -- an ambition that, like
a bonfire, had consumed all his passion. This world-famous figure, who
could have been prime minister of India and one of the wealthiest men in
Asia, declared he had no interest in becoming rich or famous. He wanted
something far greater, he said: to become zero, to place all his talents,
resources, time, and energy in a trust for the world. "Full effort is full
victory," said Gandhi. You need not be troubled if you have made
mistakes, or if your ideal has slipped away. Just continue to give your
best. If you fall, pick yourself up and march on. If you cannot run, walk. If
you cannot walk, crawl. Nothing in life is more joyful or more thrilling.
The effort alone brings a continuing wave of joy in which every personal
problem, every suffering and humiliation, is forgotten. --Eknath
Eswaran
Published at www.ijourney.org on May 10, 2011

That Which is Looking, by Adyashanti
Only when you turn attention to awareness itself, there isn't anything
behind it. That's what returning to the source means. It means that
nothing next. There's nothing behind it. With a thought there's always
something behind it. There's always the awareness of thought. So
awareness is behind it. With a feeling there's always something behind
it. With the conditioned tendency there's always something behind it.
There's always awareness behind everything that's perceivable.
Everything that's thinkable. There's always something behind it: namely
that awareness. Spirit. To 'look within' doesn't mean to look for
something really amazing to happen. To look for the states of
consciousness to change. That's not what look within means. Have any
of you looked within like that? I've spent so many hours looking within
that way - not thousands, tens of thousands of hours looking within. And
I was looking ... the same way we look outside. You know like we're
looking for something. And so you look inside. It's a great teaching, but
then what do you do? You tend to look for stuff. Look for really groovy
spiritual stuff to happen. Right? It's the same looking. It's not really
different then looking for a million bucks, or a hot looking guy or gal or
success. It's just looking for inner stuff. And there's a world of inner
things and experiences, just like there's an outer world of things to look
for. But the inner world, it's not any more real or significant then the
outer world. So to look within doesn't mean that to look within in a way
that you're looking for something. Looking for a treasure. It means to go
to the root. And the root is the looking itself. To turn within, is to turn to
that which is looking. So that we find out for ourselves that there isn't
anybody that's looking! Looking is looking. There's isn't someone there
called 'me' that's behind awareness that's aware. Awareness is aware.
It's the opposite: I'm not aware; awareness is aware of me. And this is
quite a shock when you really come upon it! This is really 'one without a
second' as Ramana (Maharshi) used to say. That the self is one without
a second, without a second means: nothing behind it. No deeper return
to go to. You've returned to your natural state. In Zen we used to call it,
'taking the backward step.' We (generally) want to take the forward step:
to pursue, to seek, to find. But the backward step is a very simple ...
return to what you are. Till that flash of recognition dawns, that
awareness itself is what you are. Just like the flash of lightning in an
empty sky - a spontaneous flash! The easiest thing in spirituality is for
it to become complex, instead of simple. But this is a very simple thing
which is why it can penetrate so deep. So quickly. So immediately.
--Adyashanti
Psychological Materialism, by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Even if you are against the materialism of society and you do not want
to support it, refusing to work is still grasping at the wrong end of the
stick. Not taking part in work and practical activity is not going to achieve
anything. More than any anything else, it will simply magnify your own
negativity. By not doing anything to help, you will merely feel the sense
of being useless in society. If you really take this kind of nonparticipation
to its logical conclusion, it means that you shouldn't eat, you shouldn't
even breathe, because the air you breath also belongs to the world and
society. This approach could become quite extreme. If you take it all the
way, it means you shouldn't exist at all. There's a great deal of
confusion about materialism and society. Just taking care of one's
business or even running a business doesn't amount to materialism.
There's nothing wrong with that at all. What really produces the
materialistic outlook towards society is psychological materialism.
Materialism has a pervasive kind of philosophy connected with it that is
passed from one person to another orally and taught to everyone
through examples. One person catches it from another. However, trying
to reject that contagion by purely not doing anything, not caring for
anything at all, simply doesn't work. Not doing anything takes the form
of laziness, and in order to be lazy we have to develop a certain kind of
intelligence. Laziness has tremendous intelligence in it, in fact. When
you are lazy, as soon as you have the urge to do anything, immediately
a kind of answer comes to you that you can present about why you don't
have to do it. Later you can say: "I didn't do it because I didn't have time.
Thus and such happened and I didn't have a chance to do it. It was
because of that." This automatic answer that comes to you is very
convenient. One has to be very intelligent to find these kinds of excuses.
There is tremendous intelligence in laziness, but it is misused
intelligence. The best way to use our intelligence is to learn to feel what
the skillful action in a situation is. To do that, we have to relate to the
earth as directly as possible. Interestingly, we call this being "grounded."
In this approach, we do not regard work as just a job but as a way of
expressing our ourselves. It could be work in the garden or work around
the house--cooking food, washing the dishes--whatever. These are not
really jobs, but they are what has to be done because nature demands
attention. It is very interesting that if you leave something undone or do
not relate to even a small matter like, for instance, cooking with full and
proper attention and clear thinking, then some kind of chaos is going to
come up. This will happen because you are not relating properly; you are
not expressing your love properly toward the earth. Either you are going
to break a dish or or you're going to spill something, or the food you're
cooking is going to turn out badly, or something else will go wrong.
Nature tends to react very sensitively this way. If you don't feel the
relationship between the work and yourself, then chaos is going to arise.
A balanced state of mind depends on the way you do things, the way
you pour a cup of tea and the way you put sugar and milk in it. It may
seem like a really insignificant thing, but it means everything. You can
always tell whether a person feels the activity she is engaged in as
dealing with the earth or whether she feels it as just some casual thing or
something she is doing because she has to. If the person is not relating
to the earth, then you can always feel a certain clumsiness, even if the
person's action appears to be smooth. This is very evident and easy to
sense. --Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Published at www.ijourney.org on Nov 30, 1999

Paradox of Noise, by Gunilla Norris
It is a paradox that we encounter so much internal noise
when we first try to sit in silence. It is a paradox that experiencing pain
releases pain. It is a paradox that keeping still can lead us so fully into
life and being. Our minds do not like paradoxes. We want things To be
clear, so we can maintain our illusions of safety. Certainty breeds
tremendous smugness. We each possess a deeper level of being,
however, which loves paradox. It knows that summer is already Growing
like a seed in the depth of winter. It knows that the moment we are born,
we begin to die. It knows that all of life shimmers, in shades of
becoming-- that shadow and light are always together, the visible
mingled with the invisible. When we sit in stillness we are profoundly
active. Keeping silent, we hear the roar of existence. Through our
willingness to be the one we are, We become one with everything.
--Gunilla Norris
Published at www.ijourney.org on May 24, 2011

Flow of Money, by David Korten
In a modern society in which most everything essential to a secure and
happy life seems to depend on money, the flow of money takes on great
significance. Where money flows there are jobs; where it doesn't flow
there are no jobs. Where it flows there is food, shelter, health care, and
education. In a modern society, where it doesn't flow there is starvation,
homelessness, disease, and illiteracy. When shared it builds community.
When not shared it creates isolation. We have heard that money is the
root of all evil. Evil is that which is destructive of life. So follow the money
and you will see the source and consequences of the evil that threatens
the viability of human societies and the biosphere. Money however, is
only evil when it becomes our master and confines us to lives of
isolation. We can eliminate its evil dimension by restructuring the
institutions of money to make money our servant--to serve the
community of life rather than to destroy it. This great work begins with
some basic questions. What is money? Where does money come from?
Who decides who gets it and for what purpose? Who decides who will
make these decisions? What is the outcome? The answers to these
questions open a window into the importance of the structure of the
institutional system that creates and allocates money. That structure
determines where money flows, what it does -- and ultimately whether
the society prospers or self-destructs. Money is a human creation. It is
nothing but a number. Most of it is simply accounting entries in computer
files. It has no existence, reality, or value outside the human mind. It is
extraordinary that we, a supposedly intelligent species that prides itself
on creating a great civilization based on popular democratic self-rule,
allow money, a system of accounting entries, to rule our lives. Has it
ever struck you how absurd it is that as a society we have so much work
that needs doing and at the same time, so many unemployed people
who would love to be doing productive work? [...] Our common future
depends on creating a democratically accountable money system that
operates as our servant, not our master. Leadership will not come from
within the Wall Street-Washington political axis. It will come only through
citizens acting in concert with their state and local governments to
advance public education and a national conversation on the agenda
outlined here. We who work to bring forth a New Economy that works in
cooperative alliance with Earth's biosphere, engage in an epic
undertaking. An ancient indigenous prophecy affirms that we have
arrived at the moment of a Great Awakening. We have the power to turn
this world around. We are the one's we've been waiting for. --David
Korten, in a talk at Green Festival [1]
Links:
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[1] http://livingeconomiesforum.org/follow-the-money

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