What CAN We Do?

    I'm sure I'm not alone wanting a wise, big-picture overview of life, so I can live my best life.
    Mystics of all wisdom traditions, passed & living, are connected to & share this wisdom. 

    One of the wisest quotes I've come across:  
    "The most important question to ask ourselves, according to Einstein: 
    'Is the universe a friendly place or not?' ... If we believe that the universe is unfriendly ... peace will be elusive at best." 
    Joan Borysenko. “Fire in the Soul. A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism.” Warner Books, 1993. 

    Even intelligent, educated people seem overwhelmed by mysticism for many reasons. First and foremost, our culture is by and large ignorant about mystics & mysticism. Our "consumer society" trains us to buy as much as possible as fast as possible, "greed is good," even after 9/11 George W. told Americans to show the world what they're made of, "Go shopping!" We're starving on a restricted diet of junk food (shallow materialistic concerns), and don't even know the vocabulary of nutrition (metaphysics, spirituality). We fear what we don't know, and procrastinate & otherwise avoid learning about it.

    "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
    Marie Curie, Nobel Prizes in Physics, & Chemistry 

   "... relax, allow life to be as it is, & open your heart to yourself. It’s easier than you might think, and it could change your life.”
    Kristin Neff. “Self-Compassion. The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself.” HarperCollins, 2011. 

 
      "I was born
       when all I once feared
       I could love.”                     Rabia Basri 

      "Once we are willing to be directly intimate with our life as it arises, joy emerges out of the simplest of life experiences." Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara 

      During meditation “you are not escaping the world; you are getting ready to fully embrace it.” Christine Skarda  

     "To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things." Zen Master Dogen   

    SO, what CAN we do? Not should, not must - although our time as individual mortal beings, as well as a species is running out - but absolutely CAN do, because wisdom that is IN ALL of US, the wisdom that is in fact who/what we actually are, is amazingly what we mostly, and in some almost entirely, have forgotten.
    Here's some of what I've understood from the many imho wise elders I've been reading about, listening to on the web, occasionally meeting, and more recently, blogging about: 

 

    Don't Judge. Every day we see outrageous, disgusting behavior on the news. It's disorienting to see how almost half of the US population fervently supports behavior, that in a few years (as Germans did after WWII) they will categorically deny having even known anything about it. So it's hard not to judge terrible behavior. 
    But from a much higher, non-dual perspective, what if we're each born to play a certain role, with a certain set of talents, a certain set of limitations & no matter how wonderful or horrible it appeared, we all did our best. And what if most of our ridiculous behavior was because most (but mercifully not all) of us completely forgot that we took on our role freely, including the fact that we are actually producers & executive directors of the entire play - almost identical to the Jesus being fully human and fully Divine story, except the he had almost complete recall of who he actually was, where he came from, and where he would return to.
    Bewildered? This blog & its video might help: http://www.johnlovas.com/2023/01/the-nearly-unforgivables.html 

 

     Be Discerning. Many of us spend a great deal of time watching / listening to the news & comments about the news. While it's important to perhaps watch / listen to the CBC or BBC news for 30 minutes a day, much more than that is probably masochistic or even an addiction. Doing more & more of what makes you feel sick is not a recipe for optimal healthy.
    Instead of a steady diet of psychopathic politicians, billionaires, "influencers", and other nightmare visions, for the sake of sanity - how about reading about and listening to wise elders? My blogs are all about inspiring, mature, healthy, wise role models, like: 

    James Finley: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=James+Finley .

    Helen Hamilton: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Helen+Hamilton .  

    Rainer Maria Rilke: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Rilke . 

    Robert A. Johnson: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Robert+A.+Johnson

    Rami Shapiro: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Rami+Shapiro . 

    Richard Rohr: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Richard+Rohr .  

    Henry Shukman: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Henry+Shukman .  

    John Welwood: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=John+Welwood .

    Toni Packer: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Toni+Packer . 

    Ram Dass: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Ram+Dass .

    James Hollis: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=James+Hollis . 

    Roger Walsh: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Roger+Walsh .

    David Whyte: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=David+Whyte .

    Norman Fischer: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Norman+Fischer .

    David Steindl-Rast: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=David+Steindl-Rast . 

and MANY MORE wise elders to learn from & be inspired by. 

    It's OUR CHOICE - our free will - whether we immerse ourselves in wisdom - OR - in darkness. "Too busy", yet doomscrolling for hours each day?; is this wisdom stuff "too deep" or "too confusing", and again, "just too busy" to get into it and learn? You can procrastinate and aim at best for feeling superficially OK, "ordinary unhappiness" - OR - discover what life is really about.

 

    Learn & Do Spiritual Practices.  Theory is important BUT not enough. We need to intentionally PRACTICE shifting from being fearful consumer robots to becoming wise elder human beings.
    Our culture is not big on "practices." Some of us might admire the dedication it takes to become world class athletes, dancers, surgeons etc, but most of us just don't have the dedication to put in the time & effort. 
    The ONE area where ALL of us would massively benefit is putting in dedicated time & effort into spiritual practice: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=spiritual+practice 

 

    Be a Nurturing Presence. Only by waking up to who/what we truly are, can we help instead of hinder others to wake up and help others. 
    “… we have to allow our higher nature to show before we can do anything real, before we can be truly responsible people.” Jiyu-Kennett. “The Wild, White Goose. The Diary of a Female Zen Priest.” ed 2. Shasta Abbey Press. 2002.

 

    Be Humble. The ego is a tricky, sticky, persistent trickster. We must regularly check our own BS-meter. A common problem is assuming a massive group ego - thinking one can do even horrible things because "I'm doing God's work." But such "crazy wisdom" is just crazy. To paraphrase Forest Gump, "Crazy is as crazy does." 
    Humility, gentleness, empathy, wisdom & kindness are rarely promoted or even recognized in our consumer culture & partisan religions. 

 

     Learn Self-compassion. The tough, aggressively self-reliant, workaholic individual is venerated these days, while a decent, nurturing, humble person would be branded "a loser" by today's dictators & billionaire CEOs. So decent human beings need to intentionally practice self-compassion, in order to survive & be effective in today's crass, superficial, heartless environment.

 

    Practice Self-awareness. With self-awareness practice, your talk & your walk are kept aligned. Again, humility is crucial. 
    "Self-inquiry" is a specialized, key, self-awareness practice: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Self-inquiry 

 

    Become More Discerning, More Self-compassionate. The more neuroses & "story of me" burdens we shed, the more clearly we see ourselves & what's going on around us. The more clearly we see, the more magnified our remaining (though diminishing) neuroses & other burdens appear to us, so it can seem like we're regressing instead of "getting ahead." So we need more self-compassion & patience with ourself.
    “Felt reality is invariably wept reality, and wept reality is soon compassion and kindness. Decisive and harsh judgments slip away in the tracks of tears. And when we cry, we are revealing our truest, most loving self.” Richard Rohr. “The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage” Convergent Books, 2025.

  

     Live in Joy. Gradually, you will be progressively more peaceful & joyful, regardless of the many challenges & sorrows in your own & loved ones' life, as well as that of the human race. The major, even crippling burden that you will shed is your identification with & constant rehashing of your own 'story of me' AS WELL AS its twin, the constant anxiety of 'what will happen to me?' and of course, vividly imagining the worst possibilities. As this HEAVY PSYCHOLOGIC BURDEN starts to lift, you start to experience 'the peace that surpasses all understanding' ie it must be experienced to be understood. Even this has, if you will, a 'dark side': while you'll see as your own past, no matter how miserable, as just a story, your empathy towards others (even actors playing a sad role in a movie) becomes progressively more powerful. Your job now is embodying peace & joy modeling equanimity even in the midst of chaos, when it's the most essential.

    "This is actually instruction from the Buddha, where he says, ‘Live in joy, in love, even among those who hate. Live in joy, in health, even among the afflicted. Live in joy and peace, even among the troubled. Look within. Be still, free from fears and attachments. Know the sweet joy of living in the way things are in the Way, the Dharma.' 
    And so this is also a challenge. He doesn’t say, let’s get rid of disease and all these problems, but to find a joyful way to be alive amidst it all.”
    Jack Kornfield - Finding Your Self on the Spiritual Path - Point of Relation with Thomas Hübl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fjz7WaTyX4 WONDERFUL MATURE WISDOM - Jack Kornfield at his best

    And some 500 years later, in another incarnation of the Divine, Jesus said, "the poor will always be with us." Fixating on quickly eliminating age-old problems is in itself problematic, akin to "seeing a splinter in another's eye," again from Jesus, advising that we should first address our own significant flaws (‘the beam’ in our own eye) before attempting to correct / "save" others.

“The teachings on Buddha Nature do not mean that there is some nucleus of Buddhhood enclosed in sentient beings 
behind the temporary obscuring stains. 
Rather, our whole existence as sentient beings is in itself 
the sum of temporary stains that float like clouds in the infinite, bright sky of Buddha Nature, the luminous, open expanse 
of our mind that has no limits or boundaries. 
Once these clouds dissolve from the warm rays of the sun 
of wisdom shining in this space, 
nothing within sentient beings has been freed or developed, 
but there is just this radiant expanse without any reference points of cloud-like sentient beings or cloud-free Buddhas." 
Sthiramati, 6th century Indian Buddhist scholar-monk

 

 

     Watching David Ditchfield's 40-minute BBC interview about his Near-Death Experience (NDE) is imho wise use of your precious time: https://www.shineonthestory.com/ 

 

Spiritual Intelligence

"There is a brokenness 
out of which comes 
the unbroken, 
a shatteredness 
out of which blooms 
the unshatterable. 
There is a sorrow 
beyond all grief 
which leads to joy 
and a fragility 
out of whose depths 
emerges strength. 
There is a hollow space 
too vast for words 
through which we pass with each loss, 
out of whose darkness 
we are sanctioned into being. 
There is a cry deeper than all sound 
whose serrated edges cut the heart 
as we break open to the place inside 
which is unbreakable and whole, 
while learning to sing." 
Rashani Rea

    We may be so familiar with feeling fragile, sad or worse, that a dark mood may almost feel like home, the "story of me," who we (assume we) are, our (assumed) identity, our 'normal.' We may also assume that our quality of life is chained to & rigidly determined by life circumstances, which we see as bleak.

    UNTIL somehow, even if just for a brief moment, we clearly see how this entire mess is ONLY a story. Eckhart Tolle's spontaneous awakening from severe depression is a dramatic example of this. Many dramatic awakenings are being reported with psychedelic-assisted therapy - exceptionally moving stories of Navy Seals suffering from combat PTSD are beautifully documented in the 2025 documentary "In Waves and War" https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/82047468. But most awakenings are gradual progressive life-long processes, during which spiritual practices help to uncover our innate spiritual intelligence.

    THEN we might notice that we are ACTUALLY this awareness, this witness to the "story" - NOT the story itself. Initially, this is a subtle felt sense of a shift, almost like remembering an old memory, impossible to put into words. A silent, peaceful, wise, loving intelligence that is our Self, our True Nature, who we truly, actually are. 

    WE CAN, with the help of spiritual practices - like meditation and self-inquiry - start to embody this, our real identity, for slightly longer stretches of time, very gradually connecting these stretches that are marked by peace & joy and are remarkably, wonderfully independent of life circumstances.

    Repeatedly practicing Loving-Kindness meditation toward ourselves & others can, over the years, melt the armor we no longer need, resulting in periodic ‘heart openings’ – feeling of warmth radiating forward from the heart area, occasionally accompanied by ‘uncaused joy’ – spontaneous, prolonged blissful peace & happiness for days, weeks or longer, without any change in our external circumstances.

    We're fully aware of all the usual challenges of life, however, we're experiencing life from a peaceful, wise, remarkably objective perspective, that is radically different from feeling helplessly trapped in a bad drama. 

    This is the process awakening, a mystical experience, the flowering of spiritual intelligence, etc. Wise people throughout history have considered awakening to be the very purpose of life. Our own culture desperately needs to be reminded of the importance of spiritual intelligence.

    Mark Vernon, former Church of England priest, now psychotherapist & author, introduces his book "Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps": 

    “Spiritual intelligence is a type of perception, although unlike types of empirical perception that see, hear, touch, taste or smell, it works by spotting what is alive & implicit. It delivers the felt sense, often first glimpsed out of the corner of the mind’s eye, that our experience of things is connected to a wider vitality, that what we grasp is only a fraction of what might be understood, that there is more underpinning existence to become alert to this presence is like becoming aware of light, which is not itself directly visible though simultaneously shines from all the objects it illuminates. 
    Spiritual intelligence is a kind of intelligence to with humble awareness, rather than slick analysis. And when someone has spiritual intelligence, you will think they are inspiring more than clever. It is a wonderful capacity and a source of delight, comprehension & purpose. It is also basic to being human. 
    But my fear is that it has become so overlooked and so sidelined in the modern world that people are inclined to be sniffy about it and deny that it exists altogether. 
    The word 'spiritual' is of course contentious. People can spend years trying to define it. For others it’s straightforwardly a turn off as it evokes superstition or woo. I’ve resorted to it partly because it is useful in signaling my conviction that there are more things in the world than can be accounted for by a materialist philosophy. 
    Also, if spiritual seems slippery, that is only in the way that defining what is good or beautiful or true seems slippery, though we know these things the instant we are in their presence. The realization lies in the recognition, not any definition which will inevitably be too tight. 

    My book – “Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps” – is in part a product of my involvement in a research group organized by the International Society for Science and Religion that is looking into these things. I feel it has become crucial to get a felt handle on the notion of spiritual intelligence, in contrast to other kinds, and in particular, artificial intelligence. The immediate concern is that AIs are already so pervasive that we are at risk of forgetting what it is to operate without their slick planning cunning manipulation and tremendous capacity for problem solving. The challenge is to ensure AIs benefit us more than threaten us, which requires us to understand more fully what it means to be human. If we can be brightly aware of the capacities we have, which no machine does, even as the technology continues to improve, we might have a chance of staying human in the age of the machine. 
    Emotional intelligence isn’t enough I’ve concluded, partly because it looks as if AIs will be increasingly able to mimic the qualities that Daniel Goleman originally highlighted as proficiencies of emotional intelligence. 
    The first two competencies he lists: social skills and empathy, machines can already be programmed to fake. 
    The next two, motivation and self-regulation, machines simply don’t need as it is in their nature to keep going without hesitancy or deviation. 
    Goleman’s fifth characteristic, self-awareness has so far eluded computers, and my guess it always will, though the danger is that it can be imitated so as to confuse humans, and it’s already doing so. 
    I put it like this, if artificial intelligence is mostly about solving problems by spotting patterns, and emotional intelligence is mostly about relating to feelings by understanding them as opposed to being swept along by them, spiritual intelligence turns to the steady presence that runs through, above & under it all. 
    This awareness is transformative, not because it is successful at what it does like an AI, nor because it fosters flourishing like emotional intelligence, though it might, spiritual intelligence enables the individual & groups of individuals to become increasingly aligned with the deeper pulses of reality. It takes us to the shoreline of knowledge where learning becomes a type of listening, consideration a type of resonance, and personal change a type of expansion. 
    With spiritual intelligence education becomes an activity that seeks to draw out and recollect, rather than pour in and test. The truly deadly thing is to fail to notice you are experiencing, because you have become lost in the experience. It is this self-forgetfulness and alienation that the pervasiveness of machines can bring about, not because they have woken up, but because their impressive presence has made us fall asleep. The risk is that we become like them, not that they’ve become like us.

    What I am proposing as spiritual intelligence is related but different to the ways it has been defined so far by the writers who have attended to it. It has been thought of as a skill that can handle values or as an ability to discern purpose or as a concern for ultimate issues like life and death. Experts have turned to it as a complement to emotional intelligence, rather than as the capacity that is onto the realm in which the imminent meets the transcendent, as I am suggesting. 
    There are two problems with these older approaches. One is that they commit the flaw of much modern psychology by trying to remain metaphysically agnostic, instead of concluding on the basis of experience & evidence, coupled to intuition & desire, that there is a ground wellspring & sustaining presence within our existence. 

    Psychologists typically attempt to hover above reality and comment on behaviors or observations, but this is not metaphysically agnostic. It is adopting the materialist assumptions of the physicist, which might work well when studying the objective world, but fragment when studying the subjective, because unlike the Cosmos, the psyche cannot be inspected in a detached manner. The so-called replication crisis is a result. 
    Second, spiritual intelligence is not a kind of know how, but more basic. It is know that – know that our plane of existence has qualities of being and consciousness and constancy and peace. That awareness will undoubtably help with our emotional intelligence, as I explore in the book, but spiritual intelligence as I see it is not a proficiency, because it is not something to be achieved. It is a perception, which you could say is born of a knack or a grace or a crisis, though it only appears to elude us in retrospect, because it is closer to us than we are to ourselves. It invites us to turn back to our ground of our being, and re-build from there. 
    My sense is that now is a good moment to become aware of its awareness for another reason. Many thinkers, including my colleagues at the research Network Perspectiva, believe that we live in a time of crisis, that is actually a meta-crisis. They mean that the challenges of the 21st century, from environmental collapse to social alienation, are not problems prevailing systems can fix, for all the specific policies and decisions may be able to impede pandemics and put out some of the fires, rather the problems have in large part been caused by the prevailing systems themselves. So while systems will have to be redesigned, and more basic tasks must be attended to, remembering what it is to be human.

    My seven steps are a set of reflective reorientations that turn the attention towards spiritual intelligence, deepen the understanding of it, and thereby locate it more consciously in life. 

    The first step is to retell the origin story of human beings. This is important because stories are like filters and the current crop of big history accounts of homo sapiens treat the spiritual element as if it were a delusion, which whilst once useful, can be filtered out now. I present the case, emerging from research in human evolution, that what I’m calling spiritual intelligence, developed in significant ways with the emergence of homo sapiens, and played the fundamental role in the development of culture and technology. We are homo spiritualis, and need to recall that now. 
    Second step, or perceptual shift continues this story into the annals of history, and explores how individuality and individual freedom emerged. The basic freedom is again often forgotten now. It is not freedom of choice, which is freedom from hindrance; or freedom of expression, the freedom to speak or do; but the more basic type of freedom, to recognize what freedom is for, which in a nutshell is to know ourselves in all our depth. Freedom grows as spiritual intelligence becomes established. 
    Step three is a type of discursive meditation on what it’s like to tune into spiritual intelligence. The upshot is a growing perception that reality is simple, not in a naïve sense of not complex, which is clearly not the case, but in the deeper sense that the myriad things arise from a spiritual commons, which spiritual intelligence can know. 
    Step four considers how spiritual intelligence relates to the inner life of the individual or the soul. It explores the ways in which developmental psychology and psychotherapy have charted this interiority that argues that without the metaphysical ground that spiritual intelligence brings, these methods of easing suffering and promoting development have no goal, and so can leave people journeying and journaling almost indefinitely. 
    A fifth step follows because when the soul settles into the being that sustains it, the tricky but transformative reality of death can be approached anew. Mortality reveals itself with spiritual intelligence to be a kind of natality, an insight that can be found in any wisdom tradition of merit with the advice to learn to die before you die. 
    Step six argues that spiritual intelligence precipitates a radical shift in our perception of ethics. It must move on from being understood as about morality – which tends to foster guilt & shame, and is readily weaponized, and so unwittingly weds us to alienation. Instead, the older tradition of virtue commends itself – which focuses on the qualities & characteristics that not only incline us to what’s good, but enable us to embrace more & more of life, especially when hard. 
    Spiritual intelligence offers a radically different way of being in the world, which is the focus of the final step seven. We might come to love realization instead of being wedded to growth & progress. We might value notions like awakening and conversion, alongside management and development, not least when thinking about education & ecology. In particular, the experience of time can be transformed. These capacities are essential now and will be increasingly essential in the future, so I commend the book to you.”

    Mark Vernon https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps

 

Tending and Befriending

    Twenty-five years ago, Taylor et al published a paper, "Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-befriend, not Fight-or-flight" (Psychol Rev 2000; 107(3): 411-29) which suggested female behavior is more marked by a pattern of "tend-and-befriend" than by "fight-or-flight."  
    They defined "tending" as nurturing activities to protect self & offspring, to promote safety & reduce distress; "befriending" the creation & maintenance of social networks that help this tending process.
    Despite this surprisingly promising start, the story - to be published in a "scientific" psychology journal - had to devolve into reductionism: "oxytocin, in conjunction with female reproductive hormones & endogenous opioid peptide mechanisms, may be at its core." 
    So wise motherly love & nurturing care for children, family, friends, neighbors & beyond was reduced to meaningless, accidental matter activated by hormones, while other hormones activate male machines fight & run. 
    Now it's all figured out! BUT ONLY IF you value a meaningless, accidental, mechanical model to the exclusion of an infinitely greater, wiser reality!   

    "Spiritual intelligence is the foundation of who we are and our particular type of consciousness. It is the perception identified across wisdom & religious traditions, and known by many names, which can be summarized as the awareness of awareness, and so of being itself. It is the foundation of peace, even in the face of death, as well as purpose and solidarity. The challenge today is to recover and live according to that knowledge." 
    Mark Vernon, "Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps" 2023.

 

    Iain McGilchrist is a highly & broadly educated (a very rare combination) and experienced literary scholar, neuroscience researcher, psychiatrist and author of 3 respected books. He sees our present society as being very far from wise, and hence, recklessly self-destructive. 
    The key feature of this blindness is a strident left-hemisphere-dominant perspective, hellbent on grabbing as much as we can, as fast as we can, with no concern for the destructive impacts on other people, animals, plants, the Planet as a whole. This struggle to rob-or-be robbed, is openly adversarial, and feels like "fight-or-flight." India, China, Japan etc which once had profound wisdom traditions, are also drowning in rabid capitalism. The inevitable result is degradation of quality of life, the environment, international relationships, ... everything.
    This is in stark contrast to a right-hemisphere-dominant perspective on life, which uses & values the left hemisphere's qualities of looking after practical matters, AND BALANCES this with careful attention to larger contexts, 'the big picture' in order to nurture & collaborate or 'tend-and-befriend.' This is living in wise relationship with Self, other humans, other beings, Nature, Cosmos, Source. 

     Too many of us have forgotten our own wisdom nature, traditions & practices. We must reclaim these ASAP to help revive our culture's wisdom vacuum.

    "... consider Thomas Banyacya's four words: 'Stop, consider, change, and correct.' Stop what you are doing. Consider the effects of what you are doing. Is it upholding life on this land? Or is it destructive to the life on this land? If it is destructive, then change your value system and your actions. We are not supposed to be subduing the earth, treading it underfoot, vanquishing the earth and all its life. We are supposed to be taking care of this land and the life upon it. So it's up to you to consider which side you are going to be on." 
    Craig Carpenter, traditional Mohawk messenger, in "The Book of Elders - The Life Stories & Wisdom of Great American Indians" as told to Sandy Johnson & Dan Budnik

    In one of his recent informative online interviews, McGilchrist comments on materialist science when it strays far beyond its appropriate limited domain:
    "Reductionism has always tended to produce an answer that is unsatisfactory for what it’s going to make. A simple down to earth example, if I may give one, is a piece of music. So if you ask somebody who is analytically bent, to work our what a piece of music is doing, well they’ll say, first of all what is a piece of music made of? It’s made of notes. Well, the first question then to answer, what is a note? And a note is a sound like that. Then what does it mean? Nothing. Okay, well the music has another of these notes. What does it mean? Nothing. And after 30,000 notes, I’ve got Mozart’s G minor quintet. It’s just made out of notes, none of which mean anything. So it must be a heap of nothing! And in this process, you have driven out everything that was invisible to your analytic eye, which was the web of connections in which, and only in which, the thing had any meaning.

    The point I think I’m trying to get at is that if you take things apart, you destroy their meaning. And if you think of the Universe as just made up of little bits of stuff that you’ve got down to with your microscope, you can’t see what it makes in aggregate. 
    A simple analogy would be like, what is a motorbike? Oh, I’m going to find out. There’s one in the garage. I’ll take it apart. And several hours later, the other person comes back and says, ‘Okay, what is it?’ ‘Well, it’s got two of these and three of those, and something else, but search me, I have no idea what it is.’ And it doesn’t mean anything, because it’s completely destroyed by the acts of analysis. And the only way in which you could work out what it was, was to get on it and ride it. 
    And life is like that. You can’t stand aside from it, from outside, and understand it. A religious belief is like that. You can’t stand aside from it, and inspect it, and go, ‘Well, it doesn’t add up, according to where I am standing now.’ But it only doesn’t stand up from where you’re standing now because of where you’re standing now. 
    Another example would be like learning to swim by sitting on the bank of a river with a book saying ‘this is how to swim,’ and swearing you’re not going to get into the river until you’ve learned to swim from the book."
    Iain McGilchrist "Your Brain Has 2 Masters — And One Is Leading Us Astray" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ5C11mlTH4 

 

    “When good is done, it contains all good. Although good is formless, when it is done, it attracts more good faster than a magnet attracts iron. Its power is stronger than the strongest wind. All the accumulated karma throughout the earth, mountains, rivers, world and lands cannot obstruct the power of good.”
    Master Eihei Dogen

"Choices in a meditator's life are very simple: 
Do those things that contribute to awareness. 
Refrain from those things that do not." Sujata

“Now is the time, and we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Hopi elders

 

Food and Drink for the Soul

    "Beauty is that, in the presence of which, we feel more alive."      John O'Donohue

 

    "Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace & elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life. 

    ... the beauty of being human is that we are incredibly, intimately near each other, we know about each other, but yet we do not know or never can know what it’s like inside another person. And it’s amazing, you know? Here am I, sitting in front of you now, looking at your face, you’re looking at mine, and yet neither of us have ever seen our own faces, and that in some way, thought is the face that we put on the meaning that we feel and that we struggle with, and that the world is always larger and more intense and stranger than our best thought will ever reach. And that’s the mystery of poetry, is poetry tries to draw alongside the mystery as it’s emerging and somehow bring it into presence and into birth. 

 

    ... there are individuals holding out on frontlines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity, where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they’re able to sustain it because there is in them some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really called to in some way. 

    I love Pascal’s phrase that you should always keep something beautiful in your mind. And I have often — like in times when it’s been really difficult for me, if you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness. 

    … my old friend Meister Eckhart, the 14th-century German mystic … said, ‘There is a place in the soul that neither time nor space nor any created thing can touch.’ And I really thought that was amazing. And what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography, and that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that inner kind of sanctuary."

    above from John O'Donohue's WONDERFUL interview by Krista Tippet: 

    Audio: https://onbeing.org/starting-points/new-to-on-being-start-here/ (also bottom of this page)

    Transcript: https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty/#transcript

    From a wonderful young, living mystic's interview:
    “I don’t think I believe in evil spirits. I think that the words we’re using are making this binary in a way, or categorical. I believe in energy forces. We all speak of this rise of collective consciousness, but with it, we (((inevitably))) can see (((its shadow))) an incredible influx of hatred, anger & violence manifested at the same time. When you look at the state of things nowadays, it’s fairly clear that the collapse is here. We’re not on the brink of it. It's happening. (((BUT RIGHT NOW, revitalization - the OTHER SIDE of the 'collapse' COIN IS ALSO HAPPENING!!! MORE & MORE of us are AWAKENING to our True Nature, which is loving instead of lost in fear.)))
    The collapse is happening for one very simple reason. This is just the expression of ignorance. And when I mean ignorance, I don’t mean intellectual or philosophical ignorance. I mean to not know who we truly are. I mean to believe in an illusion; to believe in the idea of the self, that leads to the idea of separation – that I am this, and therefore I’m not that. I am me and I’m against you because you and me, we have different beliefs, and so we’re enemies; to the condensation of the self, the belief of the illusion of the separate self is what is causing all of this. 
    When you believe in a self, you believe in a country, you believe in an idea, you believe in a social status, you believe in a certain amount of power, in money, in a job that makes you better or not better than anybody. So it’s the story of the self that people believe in and they believe that to be the truth of who they are. And they believe that this is the reality they live and experience, and this belief of separation has caused an incredible amount of fear and suffering. 
    We’re just using words, and language is going to fail us inevitably, because language (((being inherently dualistic)))) separates. Tall only exists because short exists. Narrow only exists because wide exists, or black and white. We create oppositions through words, because we categorize, we label, because we have to. That’s what we found to understand and experience reality. 
    And so we say fear, but fear is just the same way that darkness doesn’t exist. Darkness is a word that means nothing. Darkness is just the absence of light. There’s light and there’s no light. Show me darkness. No. You can just show me the sun disappearing, ebbing and flowing and setting below the surface of the horizon. There’s light and there’s no light. And for the no light part, we created a word, and we called it darkness. 
    And so it’s the same with fear. Fear is just no love. There’s love and there’s no love. And the no love we turned it into fear. But love is what we’re made of. That’s the fabric of who we are. It’s pure love, because pure love is consciousness. And so there’s love and there’s the absence of it. In the absence of it, we made into a word. And that word – fear – has governed much of our understanding, behavioural patterns, and experiences of reality.”
     above from the INSPIRING (1hr 47min) Interview with House of Dragons Actor Emeline Lambert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOTefUSwj4w .
    MORE & MORE WONDERFUL PEOPLE like Emeline above, and untold numbers of less well-known people, like many of the readers of these blogs, are bringing MORE & MORE REVITALIZING LIGHT & HOPE into the dark corners of our world. 

 

Beannacht / Blessing
John O’Donohue

For Josie, my mother

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

 

John O'Donohue — The Inner Landscape of Beauty