Hope, Courage, Patience, Perseverance

    "I believe that there’s an intelligence, a spiritual power that I don’t understand. I call it God because I don’t know what else to call this great spiritual power. It gives me strength. 
    I’ve also had amazing times alone in nature when for a moment you forget you’re human. Your humanness goes away, and you’re part of that natural world. It’s the most amazing and wonderful and beautiful feeling .....
    Traditional faith will have you believe in a loving God, and when I look at what’s happening on the planet, I think if there is a God like that, is he playing with us? Are we living in some great experiment? How can you believe in a loving God when you see the horrors that are perpetrated against nature, against animals, against each other? I sometimes think it is like an experiment which has culminated in this strange, confused creature that is human beings, and we seem to be lost. Who are we? What are we? Why are we here? I don’t know what the meaning of life is. 
    The meaning of my life is to give people hope because without hope you give up."  
    Jane Goodall PhD 1934-2025 

    There's a lot to unpack in Jane Goodall's heart-felt words. So what does she mean by "amazing times alone in nature when for a moment you forget you’re human"? 
    I understand that momentarily forgetting you're human refers to going beyond or deeper than your surface identity of name, address, history, likes / dislikes, virtues / neuroses etc, and opening up to / remembering our primal intimate Oneness & Source.      

    Goodall clearly contrasts what many of us see as human civilization blindly rushing towards self-destruction, with her sense that there is still hope, because human beings are also capable of experiencing, nurturing & sharing awe, wonder, & beauty. 

    Iain McGilchrist has been clearly explaining how human society's current tendency is "left-hemisphere-dominant" - seeing the world in a very pragmatic, abstract, detached, transactional manner: seeing only lumber when looking at a great forest, seeing only mining opportunities when looking at a majestic mountain, seeing only harvesting of fish, oil & natural gas when looking at the great oceans - focused only what they can quickly grab for short-term gain for themselves. Some, much like the tobacco industry a few decades ago, flatly deny that this way of seeing is "perpetrating horrors against nature, against animals, against each other." Many CEOs, populist politicians / dictators, billionaires, etc CAN BE clever, AND YET display no evidence at all of wisdom. 

    From a neuroscience perspective, McGilchrist would say that we are able to see things in balanced way when the left-hemisphere's exclusive emphasis on grabbing, controlling & surviving is not running the whole show. One way to facilitate this balanced, healthy, holistic perspective is being alone (and at peace) in nature. Then we more easily appreciate the right-hemisphere's way of seeing the world: appreciating our intimate inter-connectedness with everyone & everything, love, beauty, truth, the arts, mystery, spirituality, meaning, metaphor, humor, paradox, etc - AS WELL AS - the practical, limited role of the left-hemisphere. To have a clearer understanding of these two, ideally complementary ways of seeing and being in the world, I highly recommend one of McGilchrist's excellent interviews, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuqz0MO9mX0

    To paraphrase Einstein, our (left-hemisphere dominant) way of seeing / level consciousness that got us into this dire mess CANNOT possibly lift us out of it, into a better future. Our exclusive left-hemisphere ways: estranged, adversarial relationship with our own hearts, each other & Nature is what's so painfully unnatural & unsustainable. 
    Chronic fear, anxiety & anger has for too long, been drowning out our patience, wisdom & kindness. We desperately need to cultivate a FAR wiser balance.

    So can we gain some freedom from chronic fear & anxiety - when "being well-adjusted to a toxic situation is no measure of health"? 
    Well, we know that our executive function is easily shut down when we're stressed - ie stress tends to impair good judgment. 
    We also know that many are able to operate under high-stress life-or-death situations with amazing calm & competence: fire-fighters, police officers, paramedics, surgeons, psychiatrists, air traffic controllers, pilots, military personnel, martial artists, etc. 

    Common knowledge would incorrectly tell us that our level of stress is directly proportional to the degree to which we lack total control of our present situation. 
    Actually, our level of stress is mostly based on catastrophizing ie anxiously, vividly imagining the worst possible future outcome, which very rarely if ever materializes and / or being stuck re-living the past.
    The secret of the "grace under pressure" exemplified by fire-fighters etc is staying in the reality of the present moment and responding appropriately. Clearly, knowledge, training & practice in knowing what to do in challenging present situations is a basic necessity ALONG WITH knowing how to remain present, focused & grounded ie Mindful.

    Mindfulness training IS PRACTICING staying in the reality of the present moment and responding appropriately. It's best started under stress-free conditions eg being peacefully alone in nature, or in your own home away from distractions. Start by sitting, standing or lying down and remaining still, for a set period of time eg just 5 minutes at first, with eyes closed, and just quietly observe what goes on, mainly inside of you. 

    "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."  Blaise Pascal, French philosopher

     With patience, a bit of courage, and a lot of perseverance, a sustained regular practice will result in you being able to remain surprisingly calm, grounded & wisely responsive (rather than impulsively reactive in a way that everyone will later regret) to even the most serious challenges. You will also learn humility & empathy for yourself & others, because you will remain perfectly imperfect. Interestingly & a bit annoyingly, after decades of practice, you too might find major challenges surprisingly easy to accept, while small, meaningless events might still provoke you briefly. 

    So this is a life-long practice, with continual growth in wisdom, and less & less sabotaging interference by neuroses & traumas. Your quality of life, and the quality of life of those around you, will definitely progressively improve well beyond your current understanding.

“We are not isolated individuals. 

We are cells in the body of humanity, and what we do to one another we do to ourselves. 

The new story is one of interdependence, shared purpose, and sacred relationship with all Life.” 
Nancy B. Roof PhD 1929-2025

 

Another World is Possible www.kosmosjournal.org

Suffering - a MUCH Bigger Perspective

    “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” Joe Klaas

    "Man is not destroyed by suffering, he is destroyed by suffering without meaning." Victor E. Frankl

    “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Viktor E. Frankl, "Man’s Search for Meaning" 

 

     “Dear ones, you who are trying to learn the miracle of love through the use of reason, I am terribly afraid you will never see the point.” Hafiz

    "The small man builds cages for everyone he knows. While the sage keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful, rowdy prisoners." Hafiz

    Most feel the need for strict boundaries to feel safe from life's uncontrollable changes. Prisoners are known to re-offend just to get back into the tightly structured life of a prison. It takes deep self-reflection to become aware of the invisible, yet tightly constraining prison walls - cages - others have built around us, as well as ones we've built for ourselves & carefully maintain, as if these could protect us. The only thing they "protect us" from is growing up - especially spiritually!
     
    Below are excerpts from Tami Simon's recent interview with author & philosopher Christopher Bache, who shares his personal journey through psychedelic exploration and academic research, revealing how these experiences have shaped his understanding of the soul’s evolution. Together, they discuss how embracing the possibility of reincarnation can transform our relationship to suffering, purpose, and each other.

    Tami Simon asked why anyone would choose a life that had so much suffering in it?
    Christopher Bache: "I don’t want to make light of any suffering. I get very angry when I hear people pronounce how suffering works, or make large metaphysical pronouncements on it. 
    I think we have to be very respectful of suffering, and yet at the same time, hold out the hope that this suffering has significance, that this suffering is meaningful in a larger landscape. 
    I take great encouragement as I studied the past life therapeutic literature, and I watched therapists basically following a present pain in a person’s life and letting it unfold into a deeper story that has been moving through several lifetimes up to this lifetime time. 
    People have been able to take their pain to its source in which it’s anchored in experiences that they don’t remember having, but because they come from another lifetime, and in that remembering, it provides a freedom and a release from suffering in their current lifetime. So when you see that happening over and over again, it supports the conclusion that this suffering is - I don’t want to say intentional,*** *** but it’s accepted as a circumstance of learning." 
    *** (Watch Natalie Sudman's talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8lQs1MccoU)
    *** (During meditation retreats, I've had a couple of experiences of such intense pain that I assumed it couldn't possibly be just my own 'stuff' I was processing, but that I was surely helping to process all of humanity's 'stuff.' It's essential to state that I was well aware that simply getting up from sitting meditation would instantly have ended the pain ie working through this was entirely voluntary, transcended the personal AND as soon as I recognized the fact that I was no longer alone & it was no longer just about my small, separate self, but about everything - Self, the suffering immediately ended, leaving only joy & ease. 

    “The true significance of (any of) Buddha’s radical instruction ‘Just sit’ cannot be realized except in the context of the vow to save all living beings.” Reb Anderson. “Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains. Dharma Talks on Zen meditation.” Rodmell Press, 1999.

    Neither *** or *** above make sense, and may even be met with anger, while lost in separate-self concern ie left-hemisphere dominant perspective.
    However, the shift that occurs from personal suffering to the realization that this must be universal human suffering & willingness to somehow help humanity relieve this IS ALSO the shift from exclusively left-hemisphere to a balanced right-hemisphere dominant way of seeing & being.)

 

     "And then we would ask, why would we ever want to learn? What do we have to learn from those horribly, depleted or compromised lives? And I think we have to make a transition of thinking like a human being and start thinking like a soul or thinking about our lives from God’s perspective, because things that may look meaningless from the human perspective, from the individual life perspective, can be saturated with meaning at a larger metaphysical level, a larger spiritual level. 
    And sometimes I think, for example, some people have voluntarily taken on pain memories, which are not part of their personal karmic lineage sometimes. In my psychedelic practice, I found that a lot of the work I was doing, a lot of the purging of negative karma was not personal. It was collective. And I think many of us are actually living lives, which are serving the release of trauma from the collective psyche, which goes beyond simply healing the personal psyche.
    So I think we have to learn to think in a much more expanded framework to even address suffering.
 

    Ian Stevenson PhD, at the Division of Perceptual Studies, University of Virginia, is considered the Charles Darwin of Reincarnation research. He's had 11 books published documenting 3,000 detailed studies of children from around the world who have spontaneous memories of previous lives. And he was able to document, verify or falsify their memories. That just turned my mind around. And then later, as I began to move into my own self-exploration, both in the LSD work and also with hypnotherapy, I encountered a number of my own former lives and worked with them. So at first it was an intellectual encounter with Ian Stevenson’s work, then later, a personal experiential encounter.
    Despite the very compelling research, it's hard to accept reincarnation first of all because the effects of reincarnation are subtle. The ending of a life at death is definitive. The beginning of life at birth is kind of clear, but the carryover, the continuities of reincarnation are subtle. 
    But I think the most important reason that it’s hard for many of us to see it is because basically science is the religion of our era. And science in its early stages has been wedded to the concept that 'matter is the only thing that’s real.' There is nothing in the universe that we can’t explain by reducing it to its material substrate. And this belief basically suggests that our mind is generated by our brain. And when our brain disappears, our mind disappears too, like a light bulb that goes out. And so with this belief that everything is material, that there is no independent spiritual universe, and that our mind reduces to brain, then we basically undercut any possibility of allowing the existence of reincarnation because reincarnation assumes a parallel dimension of spiritual reality. 
    And that makes it hard for (dogmatic materialists) to even look at the evidence seriously, because they have such countervailing belief systems."

    Tami Simon: "Once seen, reincarnation changes everything. Even now as we’re going deeper into the interviews in this series, I’m noticing the impacts that it’s having on how I view my life ... a level of relaxation that’s starting to come in that previously was unknown. And I’m curious how this taking on of a reincarnation view instead of, as you call it, a one timer’s perspective, how it’s changed things for you?"

    Christopher Bache: "Yeah, well, there are lots of spinoffs on that question. It does change everything. And as you live within a Reincarnational worldview, and kind of think through it, live through it and apply it to your life circumstances, it deepens. And so what stands out in the early years is different from what stands out in the later years. 
    It all hinges upon an understanding that we have a vast quantity of time in which to live, develop & grow within the universe. We aren’t simply a 100-year project adjacent to the universe’s multi-billion year project. But we are actually ancient beings who have been reincarnating for millennia, hundreds of thousands of years. 
    And as such, we are part of the universe’s extensive development. As a philosopher, that means a great deal to me because when I look at the magnificent photographs coming out of the Hubble or other space telescopes, and see this magnificent universe massive & vast in its depth and beauty, if I only live one time through, I basically a part-time player in this, a sideshow in this universe. 
    But once we understand that the intelligence within & behind nature has found a way not only to evolve whole species as we think in evolution, but to evolve individuals within certain species, as in human beings. Then I think we have a new starting point. It’s a new starting point. 
    It changes your understanding of your identity because it’s beautiful and it’s important, uh, as our individual body mind awareness is. Our ego is, it’s just one facet of the diamond that the soul is. There are other facets we can encounter, we can meet, and which we will become, uh, part of this larger diamond as we die or even as we wake up. 
    On this planet, it changes your relationships to your children, so you stop seeing them as somehow an extension of your genetic & your wife’s genetic heritage. You begin to see that your genetic matrix is a nest, which catches an incoming soul. And so the child that you’re holding may be thousands of years older than you are in a soul perspective. 
    And so I don’t see children as children anymore, and I don’t see old people as old people anymore. I tend to think in terms of souls and there are some children who are very old souls and some adults who are very young souls in, in their foolishness. So it’s a fresh starting point. Always paired with reincarnation is the concept of karma - cause & effect, and that there is a cause and effect that derives from the choices that we make.
    Extended in our extended lives that those choices carry over and set up the conditions within which I’m living in this lifetime. And then when you explore the data more carefully, you learn that there is a great deal of evidence that suggests that we choose the life that we are born into. And that makes an enormous difference because when we look at our life, and it may be a life of pain & suffering, it may be of unexpected hardship, it may be a life of ease. (Do read at least "The Bus Stop Conversation" - by Sue Morter, in: http://www.johnlovas.com/2023/01/the-nearly-unforgivables.html)
    To understand that we chose this life at a time when we knew more than we know now. We chose this life that tends to deepen our commitment to working with the conditions of this life, trusting in a deeper intelligence that brought us into these circumstances. So to me it, it’s, it’s an absolutely fresh starting point in philosophy. 
    Your whole philosophical insights diverge between one road, which says we only incarnate once, and another road, which says, no, we incarnate many times. They go in very different directions."
     "Christopher Bache: Deep Time and the Birth of the Diamond Soul — Sept 23, 2025"
     Audio (at 34-38min): https://resources.soundstrue.com/podcast/christopher-bache/?utm_source=%5BKL%5D%200-180%20Day%20Engaged&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=N250928-Bache%20%2801K60R1QNHVRW70WEMVXPM2EMZ%29&tw_source=Klaviyo&tw_profile_id=JsSQsZ&tw_medium=campaign&_kx=oubFt43NAjNBb0_NppHaGCF951bovtuCAx1o4i41Tys.JMDgaq
    Transcript: https://resources.soundstrue.com/transcript/christopher-bache-deep-time-and-the-birth-of-the-diamond-soul/

    Curiosity & open mind / heartedness seem to be key even in, and perhaps especially during, the most severely challenging times.

    “... man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes – within the limits of endowment and environment – he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”
    Viktor E. Frankl. “Man’s Search for Meaning. An Introduction to Logotherapy.” ed 3, Simon & Schuster, 1984.

    “What is a poet? A poet is an unhappy being 
     whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but 
     whose lips are so strangely formed that when 
     the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound 
     like beautiful music.” Kierkegaard, Either/Or

     Each one of us is a poet.
    Every one of us carries a heavy load.
    And each of us is called to make beautiful music.

    "When a system is far from equilibrium, 
     small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos 
     have the capacity to lift the system 
     to a higher order." Ilya Prigogine - physical chemist and Nobel laureate 

    “The real question is: Are you willing, whether your experience is tranquil, turbulent, ecstatic, tragic, opulent, or austere, to give yourself wholeheartedly to what is truly alive in you?”
    Amoda Maa. “Embodied Enlightenment. Living Your Awakening in Every Moment.” Reveal Press, 2017. HIGHLY-RECOMMENDED WISE, VALUABLE BOOK

    “What is Buddha’s (OUR) work in the middle of the cold? Have a dialogue with the cold, a dialogue with emptiness. Stare at the cold, stare at the not-you. If you look at it long enough, it will look back at you. The cold mountains will smile.” Reb Anderson. “Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains. Dharma Talks on Zen meditation.” Rodmell Press, 1999.

 

AwakeningArtsAcademy.com

 

Mysterious and Wonderful

    We're indoctrinated with the dogma that if science can't prove something then it doesn't & can't possibly exist, and you should run the other way! This is NOT real science BUT a belief system called scientism - the secular pseudo-religion that holds that if science can't understand & control everything yet, very soon it will, and that outside of science, nothing exists except wishful thinking & delusion. 

    Iain McGilchrist MD - retired Oxford professor of literature, psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher & author - in an excellent interview says:
     “First of all I’m a process philosopher ... so I believe that everything is in process. So there is no one truth that is ‘the Truth’ sitting there waiting for us to find it. There is only a pathway towards what is truer. ... I suggest that there are 4 important paths that we should be thinking of towards truth. And ... for all but one of them (science), the right hemisphere is the better one to rely on. But what are those four paths? 
    I think that they’re the paths of science, of reason, of intuition and of imagination. And we live in a world in which intuition & imagination have been systematically attacked & devalued. And I’d almost say there’s a sort of war of those who, in my view, are rather narrowly hypnotized by the undoubted importance & success of science & reason, into believing that that is all that will help us.  
    Science in particular cannot do that because science entirely starts out from certain beliefs or positions. Any methodology must do that. And part of its methodology is it will not consider values and it will not consider purpose. And that’s perfectly respectable, and it’s paid certain dividends. The only thing science can’t do at the end of this process is solemnly announce that it has found there are no purposes & there are no values. Of course it can’t say that because it’s left those out of its whole purview. 
    And I love this remark by C.S. Lewis, that it’s rather like a policeman stopping all the traffic in the street, and then solemnly writing in his notebook that 'the silence in this street is very suspicious.' So they can’t talk to us about that. And people used to think that they could.  
    Biologists used to tie themselves in knots to say things like, the turtle comes on shore and lays its eggs, not the turtle comes on shore to lay its eggs. I think they got over that phase now and have decided that it’s perfectly okay to accept that the whole of biology is pregnant with purpose. You only have to do what as a child I did - look at pond water under a microscope, to see that there are all sorts of organisms acting in a very purposeful way. 
    The scientific method takes things apart and tries to find what they’re made of, make them explicit and break them up into pieces. Unfortunately, there are certain things that the value of them is only present when they are a whole, and is only present implicitly. So science is impotent to give us a handle on all the things that really matter ...
    In ancient Greece there were two words for truth. One was logos, which we hear about, but the other was ‘mythos’ or ‘muthos.’ And of logos & muthos, muthos was much the greater. So muthos had the role of being able to convey the really big truths, the important truths about the Cosmos, humanity, life. 
    Logos was a sort of logic chopping thing that was fine as far as it went, but it was the sort of thing that you would find in a court of law where two people were disputing about a sum of money. There it had its use, but it didn’t have the capacity to tell us about the big things. ... unfortunately the message we got from Plato, and possibly even more from Aristotle, is that ‘a thing and its opposite can never be true’ – which is blatantly a lie, and is known to all wisdom traditions. Metaphors are not lies, myths are not lies, and values are not made up by us. I mean individual value judgments may well be, but the existence of goodness, beauty and truth for example, are not something we made up. 
    Even Darwin beautifully in his work is constantly asking, ‘Okay, beauty can be used for natural selection, but what is beauty? Where does it come from? Why do birds find certain things beautiful in the first place, in order for that to be useful, to tag onto something?’ 
    I wish people had that breadth that the great scientists of the past used to have – an understanding of the importance of philosophy and of the imagination. I’m absolutely happy with saying there are certain realms, and above all there are those of whatever you like to call it – the Divine, the Spiritual, which most people, 95% of people say exists beyond what science and reason can tell us. Only about 10% of people in this country belong to a religion, but 90% of people, if asked, ‘Do you think there’s more to existence than is summed up by science and reason?’ - they say yes. I think it’s a very deep sense we have, and that has to be something that mythology, poetry, the great stories, indeed music for me, tells me, and there’s nothing that’s negative or diminished about that. Indeed those are the royal roads to truth.” Iain McGilchrist MD
    The Sacred Power of Story - Marc Gafni & Iain McGilchrist moderated by Zak Stein. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf1jhsL3dvc

 

    David Whyte - well-known, published poet - had this to say in a recent interview:
    “Poetry was always something that I felt was a secret code to life. 
    I don’t know if you remember when you were a child, listening to the adult world? You’d often feel, ‘These people are actually crazy. These people are insane. They’ve lost the primary perspectives of life and their priorities are all upside down. I felt like this all the time as a child.
    So I actually felt that becoming an adult was a form of amnesia, forgetting the primary experience and vision that a child had. Now, I’m not saying a child’s perfect. You need a mature adult body to hold that vision. But when I started to read proper adult poetry - not the kind of poetry given to younger people - I said, ‘Oh my God, here are adults who have kept the visions and acuity of childhood alive into adulthood.’ ” 
    Inside the Mind of a Master Writer — David Whyte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N_ofS9aM24&t=610s 

     From early childhood, I was aware that ordinary thinking was only part of the my approach to understanding this strange, complex, challenging life. I was forced to rely on all of my intelligences when at age 8, we moved from Hungary to Ireland, and neither my parents nor I could speak or understand a single word of English. Two years later, we moved to Quebec city, and again initially, neither my parents nor I could speak or understand a word of French.  
    Young children learn surprisingly quickly when immersed in an entirely new language, probably in large part because all of their intelligences are still open & working. As Iain McGilchrist said, their intuition & imagination (and other intelligences) had not yet been attacked & extinguished.

    Gerald May MD - was a psychiatrist for twenty-five years, primarily treating addictions, then devoted his time to teaching contemplative theology and psychology at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation - wrote this in one of his excellent books:    
    “The dark night of the soul is a profoundly good thing. It is an ongoing spiritual process in which we are liberated from attachments & compulsions and empowered to live & love more freely. Sometimes this letting go of old ways is painful, occasionally even devastating. But this is not why the night is called ‘dark.’ The darkness of the night implies nothing sinister, only that the liberation takes place in hidden ways, beneath our knowledge & understanding. It happens mysteriously, in secret, and beyond our conscious control. For that reason it can be disturbing or even scary, but in the end it always works to our benefit.
    More than anything, I think the dark night of the soul gives meaning to life. It is a meaning given in not knowing, as Dag Hammarskjöld tried to describe in one of his final writings:
    ‘I don’t know Who – or what – put the question. I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.’
    The meaning revealed in the dark night is beyond understanding. As with Hammarskjöld, one cannot fully comprehend it. But one is left with an ever deepening certainty that the meaning is there, that life is much more than coping & adjustment. Mysterious as it may be, there is something wonderful at the heart of our existence, and it is about nothing other than love: love of God, love for one another, love for creation, love for life itself.”
    Gerald G. May MD. “The Dark Night of the Soul. A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth.” HarperOne, 2005.


    When Robert Thurman, after 60 years of studying & practicing Tibetan Buddhism was asked what he considered was a fulfilled life, he responded:
    “Living a fulfilled life is living happily, and hopefully, with trust in the good, in the power of the good - at whatever stage you’re able to understand it – but with faith in the power of the good, however you define it. Therefore, not giving in to fear of the bad overwhelming the good. 
    Piers Morgan asked the Dalai Lama in an interview ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to ask you, What is the meaning of life?'
    The Dalai Lama said, 'The meaning of life is happiness, joyfulness. Yes. To reason, the future is a mystery – how it’s going to be. So in the present, you have hope that there will be something better. 
    And that hope, in the present, makes you happy. And then you carry on. 
    If you admit despair, then it’s all terrible. So that’s the meaning of life.' 
    So you trust that someone - you, or Buddha, or Jesus - can make things better in the future. Buddha and Jesus tell you that you have to chip in.’”  
    Robert Thurman https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=the+lost+years+of+jesus+youtube#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:0d231144,vid:8EQG94rZ3_g,st:0 

“In ancient times, various holistic sciences 
were developed by highly evolved beings 
to enable their own evolution and that of others. 
These subtle arts were created 
through the linking of individual minds 
with the universal mind. 
They are still taught by traditional teachers 
to those who display virtue and desire to assist others. 
Students who seek out and study these teachings 
further the evolution of humankind 
as well as their own spiritual unfolding. 
The student who ignores them 
hinders the development of all beings.”

Lao Tzu

 

Bonnie Baker "Field" harvestgallery.ca

Unknown Depths of Anger

    I once knew a man who dearly loved his wife & sons, and loved to take them skiing, hiking, canoeing, fishing, camping. My family and I gladly did all of these with them. He was a very honest, hard-working, sincere, 'straight-as-an-arrow,' 'by-the-book' fellow. He'd happily chat except about anything to do with religion or spirituality. These were strictly off limits, and we never learned why. All his hard work seemed to pay off when he landed a strikingly lucrative job as one of six in-house lawyers for a multinational lumber company. But within a month or so, his boss asked him to sign off on a document that our friend knew was shady, so he refused to sign. This immediately got him fired.
    His whole world collapsed. He abandoned his family, changed his name, joined a religious cult, and moved to Europe. When his existing worldview crumbled, he 'flipped' to its opposite.  

 

David Whyte’s poem “Anger”:

    "ANGER is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.
    What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.
    Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability; anger too often finds its voice strangely, through our incoherence and through our inability to speak, but anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics: a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land or a colleague. 
    Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things - we are often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding, who have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love’s vulnerability. In their helplessness they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control.
    But anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here, it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be understood fully at the very spring of its birth: it is an invitation to find a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete and absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence."

 

      I emailed Whyte's poem above, as well as the link to his imho wonderful interview (bottom of this page) to a relative who is on a spiritual path, as well as an old friend whose dogmatic belief is that we live in a cruel meaningless mechanical Cosmos, and who has, on a couple of previous occasions, become very angry when I suggested otherwise. I had (naively) hoped that Whyte's nuanced, compassionate understanding of anger might soften my friend's rigid armor.

    My relative's response started like this:
    "I watched 5 minutes of Whyte and stopped.
     Not because it's useless but because it resonates so well and connects with so many thinking points that I had to put some down before resuming. ..."

    My friend's response started like this: 
    "I have read the "poem". This guy, Whyte, has trouble with language. For example, when is a poem, a poem? And when is anger, anger? He keeps ..." 
    My friend made no mention of the interview - probably too angry to notice the link, or the mention of it in the subject heading of the email. Coincidentally, David Whyte is a well-known, highly-respected poet, with multiple published books, so the "trouble" may not be in Whyte's use of "language."

    Whyte's interview skillfully addresses anger about aspects of life we cannot control, and much more:

    Interviewer: “… the intersection between powerlessness and anger. When we’re made to make contact with that sense of helplessness or powerlessness, our immediate response is rage, anger. Can you unpack that?”

    David Whyte (DW): “Well you can immediately see its actual practical physical evolutionary necessity, in rage and physical defense in people you love. So the inability to actually be able to do something about something that doesn’t involve physical defense (invokes frustration & anger). What's actually needed involves another kind of deeper cradling, or holding, which our physical bodies are unable to do. We have to be able to hold another person in our heart and our mind. And that heart energy is often what we feel lies below the horizon of our inner line of resistance. So opening the heart is always a very powerful path for a human being to take. 
    Albert Camus, the great French writer & philosopher, had a beautiful invitation. It was just one simple line, ‘live to the point of tears.’ This is not an invitation to maudlin sentimentality. This is asking you to feel things, right to their Essence. If you just have an edge of dread about something, then feel that dread more, don’t resist it. Get to the center of it until it starts to change into something else. 
    The Greeks had this beautiful word, which we don’t have in modern English, which is, ‘enantiodromia,’ and it means the ability of something, once it becomes its absolute essential self, to start changing into something completely different, and quite often its complete opposite. Which is why immovability always changes into incredible fluidity, once you’ve got through that. So to be able to feel things until they actually start to have a life of their own, and start to mature … 
    This is a received understanding in psychology, that parts of us when they’re traumatized, stay stone-like inside you for good reason, and refuse to grow older, until that trauma has been resolved. The traumatized part doesn’t want to move on until it’s healed. And maybe it would be very destructive if it moved on prematurely. So finding the parts of you that are stuck – is a wonderful thing actually. It’s not a pejorative thing. And to feel the stuckness even more, to get right to the heart of your stuckness, your inability to say it, and then you start saying it, it’s quite remarkable really.”

    Interviewer: “It’s brutal though. I find that there’s something beautiful and brutal about it.”

    DW: “This is why in all real Warrior Traditions, there’s always been a parallel discipline of poetry. You look at Samurai, the Japanese tradition, Chinese tradition, Indian tradition, and in the West we have the first World War poets like Sassoon. Poetry is the way in for anyone at all, man or woman or anything in between. But for men, it’s a real doorway. We all instinctively understand what poetry represents. Even people who’ve hardly read a line of poetry in their life, will come away from a football game saying, ‘it was sheer poetry, that touchdown!’ We instinctively understand about the verve and vitality and mutability and movability and tidal forces of the world, if you can capture these in speech (poetry). And if you can capture these in movement on a football field, why couldn’t you catch it in your own voice? So I would say, besides the practical activity of something that concerns all heterosexual young men, which is getting into real conversations with young women, I would recommend poetry rather than a Maserati.

    It can be comforting for a young man to know that under this inability to speak my emotions, underneath this inability to feel what I feel, underneath this inability to bring those two poles together, feelings, emotions and articulation, there’s something really quite astonishing waiting for me. The great German speaking-poet Rilke said, ‘Stretch your well-disciplined strength between two opposing poles, because inside human beings, is where God learns.’” 
    David Whyte "Facing The Unknown And Finding Meaning" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or44UlIKQuE SUPERB interview imho - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

David Whyte - "Facing The Unknown And Finding Meaning"