Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Take is Easy!

    Above and beyond life's inevitable challenges, we give ourselves a hard time. We CAN reduce our suffering by 95% by NOT getting sucked into unnecessary suffering eg wallowing in & trying to change the PAST, and catastrophizing about & micromanaging the FUTURE. 

    A more advanced practice is "self-inquiry" where we ask ourselves, 'WHO is suffering?' If we really go deep with this open question, we eventually come to realize that we are non other than sparks of the Cosmic Intelligence that dreams this Cosmos into being in the eternal now. So, 

        "All shall be well,
        and all shall be well,
        and all manner of things shall be well."
Julian of Norwich (1342 – 1416) English Christian mystic 

     “Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all.” The Buddha

    "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff … and it's ALL Small Stuff!" Richard Carlson 

 

Pure Love

 

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

The Way It Seems to Be

 

    “A very dear friend, who’s passed away some four, five years now, used to say ... that he believed we are all different shards of God, all experiencing life so that God could experience everything, in every single different way, because God wants to experience life as you, and life as me, and life as him, and life as her, so that God is having all of his experiences through us.” 
    
Abby Wynne https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHzxFkdwZwM

 

        "The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.” St. Teresa of Avila

 
        Nature is God giving birth to itself.Friedrich Schelling
                    "not a direct quote, but captures the essence of Schelling's philosophy, where Nature is not merely a collection of objects but a dynamic, self-creating force connected to the Divine or Absolute. His concept of Nature and the Absolute as a unified, self-unfolding entity, not separate, but rather different expressions of the same underlying reality."                Google's AI

I am that living fiery essence of the divine substance 
that flows in the beauty of the fields. 
I shine on the water; 
I burn in the sun and moon and the stars. 
The mysterious force of the invisible world is mine
I sustain the breath of all living beings. 
I breathe in the grass and in the flowers; 
and when the waters flow like living things, it is I . . 
I am the force that lies hidden in the winds; 
they take their source from me, 
as a man may move because he breathes; 
fire burns by my breast. 
All these live because I am in them 
and am their life. 
I am Wisdom. 
The blaring thunder of the Word 
by which all things were made is mine. 
I permeate all things that they may not die; 
I am life.”


Hildegard of Bingen


        "Nothing human is foreign to me"
attributed to the Roman playwright Terence, essentially means that as a human being, nothing that is part of the human experience is strange or alien to him.
 


"When you practice these holy teachings 
slowly the clouds of sorrow will melt away 
and the sun of wisdom and true joy 
will be shining 
in the clear sky 
of your mind."


Kalu Rinpoche


    “This feeling that Jung had, that if man lived his life ... symbolically, then it was almost as if, what the theologians called God, and my Zulus called M-cooloo-coolo - the first spirit - had passed over some of his power and some of his responsibilities to the human being and that the human being had a God-like task to perform in creation. And the extent to which he performed it, he derived his meaning. That's a very important part of Jung's thinking.”
Sir Laurens van der Post - Author, statesman, London.

"The training ... is to take in God's love
which correctly produces, protects & cultivates all things in Nature  
and assimilates & unites it 
in our own mind & body.”

Morihei Ueshiba O’Sensei – founder of the martial art of Aikido
 

 
        “As our consciousness evolves, we become more attuned to the subtler dimensions of being and our interconnectedness with everything. Ultimately, individual consciousness merges with the Oneness that underpins all of existence, where there is no separation at all – no ‘me,’ no ‘you,’ no other. Oneness is the fundamental fabric of all existence, the essence of what we all Are.” 
        Melinda Edwards. “Psyche & Spirit. How a Psychiatrist Found Divinity through her Lifelong Quest for Truth and her Daughter’s Autism.” 2024.


    "Everyone’s spiritual path will unfold in its own unique way. What we’re doing is allowing ourselves to be opened up to the higher realm, to the divinities, and to the masculine & the feminine divine, but also to its different manifestations. ... So it’s not to try and have an experience that we think we should have in order to have a rich spiritual life. It’s to allow it to come in, and tell us what way it wants to manifest in us, with us, for us, as our guide.” Aedamar Kirrane https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHzxFkdwZwM


    “We might as well stay open-minded & surrender to the endlessness of it.” Francis Carr, in Edward St. Aubyn's 2025 novel, “Parallel Lines.”

 

Van Morrison - "Into the Mystic" 




 

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Levels of Experience

    One summer night when we were around 14, my best friend Kazimir and I were walking through a park in Montreal near where we lived. We noticed 20 or more people near us all looking upwards. We stopped, looked up, and saw this extraordinary, large, bright white, stationary object overhead. We all stared at it for several minutes. We had no idea what it was, but decided that nobody would believe our description, so we went home and never discussed it.

     Roughly fifty years ago, while a university student working for the summer as an orderly in a large hospital, I was called to help clean up a mess. I arrived to find a tragicomedy unfolding. An elderly, apparently famous gentleman, dressed only in an untied, soiled Johnny shirt, was experiencing explosive diarrhea all over his private hospital room's bathroom. Several hospital staff were helplessly standing around, trying to keep him from slipping & falling into the mess. Only one person was quite beside herself - the gentleman's elderly wife. She was impeccably dressed in black, evening-at-the-opera attire, complete with all the jewellery, black gloves etc. The gentleman himself was impressively peaceful, gently trying to calm his completely distraught wife.

    During that summer in the same hospital, I chatted with a young man who was about to have heart surgery the next day. He was friendly, cheerfully looking forward to enjoying the rest of his life post-op. I wished him well. The next day, I came by to visit, and found his bed made and empty. I asked about him, and was told he had died during surgery.

    "Shit happens," no matter how obsessively we try to control ourselves, others & life in general. If we live long enough, we realize it's just a question of when. And yet we do have freedom, which depends on our perspective, which determines our response

    We can, and I fear many of us do, see each individual unwelcome event in our life as if it were some random or even intentional cruelty of chance, Nature or the Divine. We can keep count of these, and rationalize holding a grudge against the meaningless of life, cruelty of Nature, or malevolence of God. This is our noisy ego's last desperate, failed attempt to hang onto its own relevance. It is the ego / false self / separate self that goes through Kübler-Ross' 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression & acceptance

    While our wiser 'part' / Self is aware of the bigger picture and our intimate connection with everyone & everything, our Oneness.
   
"There’s a crucial 6th stage to the grieving process: meaning. ... we acknowledge that although for most of us grief will lessen in intensity over time, it will never end. But if we allow ourselves to move fully into this crucial & profound sixth stage – meaning – it will allow us to transform grief into something else, something rich & fulfilling." David Kessler. “Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief.” Scribner, 2019. 

    But the ego does not give up pretending to be in complete control easily! One ploy is taking on the persona of "the liminoid ... when you start to take pride in the breakdowns, trouble & commotion of your life, because you think ... ‘it makes you windswept and interesting.’" Martin Shaw  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpi06B0mvSI&list=PLb7eXq8MJBchKf73SDzbcMyD3i-mhjJsn&index=2
    When all else fails, the ego's last act is to PROUDLY cling to anything: Charlton Heston, spokesperson for the National Rifle Association (NRA), "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands" and Dylan Thomas' call to the dying, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Our Self knows better, and we can hear our own wisdom when the ego isn't yelling.

    But we require a lifetime of intentional training to recognize how thoroughly we have been conditioned by our stunningly shallow society to abandon our true nature and instead adopt a robotic level of self-centered left-hemisphere dominance.

    The training, the practice we need is one by which we progressively remember our true nature, who we truly are, and integrate this more & more consistently, into daily life
    "
Growing pains" are inevitable on any learning journey, especially a spiritual one which requires us to release compulsive self-centeredness. It's probably easier for an obese life-long 'couch potato' to become an elite athlete, than for the average person who considers him/herself open-minded and 'good' to become moderately spiritual
    These
 2 very recent interviews shed useful light on this process :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkX-Dc6WRcs

https://batgap.com/jurgen-ziewe-2/

 

The Jeff Healey Band - "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

Sunday, June 8, 2025

Our Best is Needed

    "The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that's happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to really hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization.” Ram Dass

    We can easily remember Ram Dass' words with the help of these two short phrases:
    In the wonderful TV series, "New Amsterdam," Dr. Max Goodwin's response to even the most challenging situations was to ask, "How can I help?"
    And if we can't help, then: "At least do harm."
 
    What do we value most in a human being? What are the best attributes of people we most admire
    Decency, honesty, trustworthiness, reliability, kindness, acceptance, humility, courage & nurturing stand out for me.
 
    Aren't these the very same characteristics that lie deep within us all? These attributes - sparks of the Divine - we all potentially or actually manifest under optimal conditions, when we feel sufficiently safe & brave enough to lower our hardened defenses, and be authentic - our true Self
    We can easily differentiate between feeling rigid with fear, guarded, aggressive, enraged, versus when we feel safe, relaxed, glowing with an open-heart & open mind
    BUT what's really valuable is learning to recognize how we habitually remain armored, at least somewhat tight & hyper-vigilant even when there's NO "clear and present danger" AND how this constantly corrodes all our perceptions, thinking, speech & behaviors
    ONLY by repeatedly recognizing & releasing this default survivalist, separate-self, adversarial illusion are we able to gradually stop sabotaging our own quality of life, and the quality of life of all those around us.

    What clues do we have, that we're lost in the default survivalist, separate-self, adversarial illusion? We feel physically tight, strained, anxious, impatient, 'time poverty,' 'empty' or 'lacking' something, desperate to 'keep busy,' competitive, aggressive. OR we may feel 'lack luster,' no energy, no interests, no plans, hopeless, downOR we may feel constantly anxious, afraid & upset by a wide variety of things, and assume that it's these that are making us sick. But fear of living AND fear of dying are common. Meditation teacher Ezra Bayda calls it the "anxious quiver of being."

    Becoming clearly aware of what's really going on, here & now occurs only in stillness, not by "keeping busy" chasing after stuff, nor running away from other stuff. Perhaps that's why we fear to, and rarely stop & look carefully. Our compulsive activity - like furiously riding a rocking horse - gives the illusion of "getting somewhere." HOWEVER, intentionally being aware of what's really here & now gradually tames our fears, and intimately engages us with the awesome mystery of Reality.

    When I change the level of my awareness, I start attracting a different reality.” Santon Saint Pierre, French philosopher

    Living in the default survivalist, separate self, adversarial illusion feels bad & harms myself & everyone around me
    I CAN learn to detect this default way of being, repeatedly let it go, relax, open my heart-mind, and ALLOW my true naturedecency, honesty, trustworthiness, reliability, kindness, acceptance, humility, courage & nurturing - to shine, which radically changes EVERYTHING - our perceptions, thinking, speech & behaviors. It's a lifelong adventure.
     

Passenger - "When We Were Young"

Friday, June 6, 2025

Ordinary Mysticism

    Many of us turn away from traditional organized religion, paradoxically, because we are more spiritual than most representatives of organized religion.  
    Organized
 religions are, in general, typical large corporations (group egos) that do 'whatever it takes' to survive & grow, and as a result have long ago lost understanding & interest in their founder's original intention. As self-interest (individual & group) increases, values & ideals proportionately diminish. 

    Those of us who are serious about healthy maturation / aging / spirituality travel, often alone, in the opposite direction:

“... as self decreases,
the Divine increases.”

Bernadette Roberts 

    Mystics have compassion for (all) religious traditions, but are spiritually independent. They hold specific religious affiliations (group egos) very lightly, and focus almost exclusively on their direct experiential connection with the Absolute

    "Thomas Merton once said, ‘The regrettable thing about the Christian missionary movement is that all too often the Christian missionaries failed to realize that people they were converting were as or more holy than they were.’"
    
James Finley on Mysticism, Psychedelic Drugs, Transgenderism, Thomas Merton and Richard Rohr : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymSfaKy4CPI EXCEPTIONAL

    It's confusing & sad when large corporate entities - be it food-supply multinationals, or major religions - that originally stood for something good & meaningful, progressively degenerate, 'sell out.'  
    I
ndividuals who still pursue what's good & meaningful, must learn to do so independently.

     Below, two excerpts from Mirabai Starr - former professor of world religions, author of many books on spirituality, mostly about the great Christian mystics:

    Your life is holy ground. And you are a mystic
     I know you are because all it means to be a mystic is to have a direct experience of the Sacred. You have had zillions of those. You may be having one right now. Some resonance in your bones that whispers, Yes, I belong. I am intertwined with all that is. A mystic is someone who skips over the intermediaries (ordained clergy, prescribed prayers, rigid belief systems) and goes straight to God. Meaning, someone who experiences the Divine as an intimate encounter, rather than an article of faith. A mystical experience may or may not be connected to established spiritual traditions, theological structures, or faith communities. Mysticism is not about concepts: it is about communion with Ultimate Reality. And 
Ultimate Reality is not some faraway prize we claim when we have proved ourselves worthy to perceive it. Ultimate Reality blooms at the heart of regular life. It shines through the cracks of our daily struggles and sings from the core of our deepest desires
     A mystic knows beyond ideas, feels deeper than emotions, is fundamentally changed by That which is Unchanging. Mysticism is a way of seeing – beyond the turmoil, the rights and wrongs, the good guys and villains – to the radiant Heart of things. The mystical gaze reveals the miracle in the summer thunderstorm and the bowl of ramen. It glimpses the face of the holy in the withered dahlias and blesses the sound of the siren in the middle of the night. It quickens the heart with yearning and soothes the soul with the felt presence of the sublime. A mystic gazes through the eyes of love, and love reveals itself as the only true thing
    For most of us, mystical seeing does not happen all the time, but for all of us, it happens some of the time. And for more and more of us, it is happening more and more of the time. In proportion to current challenges of systemic inequity and climate catastrophe, the flowering of grassroots activism and the uncovering of ancestral trauma in our own family systems, old filters are burning away and we are granted renewed access to the numinous nature of reality
.  
    When
 you decide to walk the path of the mystic, the mundane shows up as miraculous, the boring becomes fascinating, and your own shortcomings turn out to be your greatest gifts

    My friend James Finley – a living mystic if ever there was one – puts it like this: ‘If we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God that protects us from nothing even as it sustains us in all things, then we can face all things with courage
& tenderness and touch the hurting places in others and in ourselves with love.’ ” 
    
Mirabai Starr. “Ordinary Mysticism. Your Life as Sacred Ground.” HarperOne, 2024.

 

     “The classical scholarly definition of a mystical experience is a direct experience of the Sacred, or of the Divine, or of God, depending on your tradition, and what language works for you. It’s unmediated through prescribed prayers, ordained clergy, or belief systems. It’s an experience of the sacred that is direct and transformational, even if subtly
    So
 what I’m talking about here is not past life regression, or sound healing, or anything like that. Those are beautiful, wonderful things, but that’s not what I mean by mystical
    I
 mean an experience of Union. It’s a unitive experience with the loving truth of reality. I say loving because to me Ultimate Reality – what you might call God or the Divine or the Sacred – is characterized by love. And so it’s a direct experience of that vast, loving reality
    (Quoting her 90yo agnostic mother), 'A mystical experience is when you have an encounter with something that is deeply moving, and you don’t skip over it, you stay with it, you make yourself available for the fullness of that experience.'

    So whether it’s watching an osprey landing on the mangrove outside our window, and look into your eyes, or if it’s about receiving a phone call that the lump in your friend’s breast is malignant. 
    A whole range of moments can be portals to deep presence - IF we don’t run away, IF we stay with it and cultivate a kind of curiosity and willingness to be transformed by the encounter, whatever it may be, willingness to be changed by it." 

    Insights at the Edge: “Your Life Is Holy Ground” with Mirabai Starr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4lBH4A0zxU


Our Present Society is in the "Kindergarten of Consciousness"

Thursday, May 29, 2025

Remaining Open and Curious

    "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination & understanding are filled with doubt & indecision." Bertrand Russell

    A simplistic, superficial, literal 'understanding' of even the most complex of mysteries is common. We dread uncertainty, rush to conclusions & hide in group-think for (false) security. Respected monk Thomas Merton said that even in monasteries, people of spiritual depth are very rare:
    
Once in a while you will find someone with whom you can talk about (spiritual experiences). But they are hard to find. And when you are fortunate enough to find such a person it will be a temporary arrangement. For you will spend most of your life without such a person, which will be your solitude in which you will learn from God how to depend on God to guide you into ever deeper communion with God.
    James Finley. “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation.” Orbis, 2023.

    Most human institutions, by the purely technical and professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by being obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in view.’ William James 

    Don’t carry away a conclusion unless it has been arrived at through your own experience. Rather, if there hasn’t been direct experience, carry away the question.”
    Toni Packer. “The Silent Question. Meditating in the Stillness of Not-Knowing.” Shambhala, 2007.

    Throughout much of Western history, until the fourth century AD when early, ‘primitive’ Christianity began to be systematically stamped out beneath the jackboots of the Roman Catholic Church, ‘beatific visions’ were the primary recruitment tool of the enormously ancient and influential ‘religion with no name’ that is the subject of The Immortality Key. This religion could shift and morph into multiple forms – The Eleusinian and Dionysian Mysteries are among the examples … and to these I would add the much older religion of the painted caves explored in Supernatural – but the common factor in every case was a psychedelic sacrament (sometimes food, sometimes drink, sometimes both) consumed by all participants.
    ‘Primitive’ Christianity started out around two thousand years ago as merely the latest form or incarnation of this archaic religion, and – at least in some cases – seems to have made use of bread & wine infused with psychedelic plants & fungi as its sacrament. At that time, because Christianity was persecuted under the Roman Empire until the reign of Constantine (AD 306-337) it was normal practice for its adherents to meet secretly in small groups to eat the bread and drink the wine of Holy Communion, and afterward experience powerful & deeply meaningful beatific visions. And more often than not, these secret ceremonies of direct experiential communion with the divine were led by women with men playing a secondary role.

    Then, from the second half of the fourth century AD onward, came the rise of Roman Catholicism, dominated by men who took decisive steps to marginalize the role of women in the Church and to remove the psychedelic elements from the sacrament, reducing Holy Communion to the empty symbolic act, devoid of powerful experiential content, that hundreds of millions of Christians continue to perform.
    My friend, the visionary artist Alex Grey, whose work has been much influenced by Ayahuasca, describes the Old Testament story of the serpent, the forbidden fruit, and God’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as ‘the first psychedelic slapdown.’
    Pursuing that thought, Roman Catholicism’s persecution of ‘primitive’ Christians and the extirpation of their visionary Communion wine might be described as the second psychedelic slapdown.
    And then, in the twentieth century, just as we seemed to be freeing ourselves from the loveless iron grip of the Church and opening up to new spiritual possibilities, governments around the world waded in with the so-called ‘war on drugs’ – the third psychedelic slapdown.
    Over the centuries, therefore, enormous often deadly forces (with the power, for example, to burn people at the stake or imprison them for decades) have repeatedly been unleashed to prevent people from experiencing direct contact with realms & realities other than the mundane. At the same time, however, even when it must have seemed that the ‘religion with no name’ had been deleted completely from the human record, there were always – if I may extend the metaphor – multiple ‘backup disks’ in the form of psychedelic plants & fungi growing all over the planet. There might be long gaps, lacunae of centuries even, but the moment would always come when certain curious individuals, either by accident or by design, would sample the plants and mushrooms that serve as the permanent Hall of Records of the religion with no name, thus setting in motion the experiences & subsequent processes of social organization that would ultimately allow it to be rescued in full force.
    It is not an accident that the Mazatec shamans of southern Mexico refer to the psilocybe mushrooms used in their ceremonies as ‘little teachers,’ and, in a sense, that is what all psychedelic plants & fungi are – literally the ancient teachers of mankind. Whether we engage with Ayahuasca, or with Psilocybe Mexicana, or with peyote, or with LSD (which is itself derived from the fungus ergot) we are dealing with the biological agents of the religion with no name and with their numinous capacity to reawaken our spiritual appetites and potential.

    Graham Hancock's Foreword to: Brian C. Muraresku “The Immortality Key. The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.” St. Martin’s Press, 2020.

    “… in 2006, the (Johns) Hopkins team completed the first psilocybin (research) project since the 1970s, when research into the forbidden substance became largely impossible during the War on Drugs. Under tightly controlled conditions the psilocybin unleashed a profound, mystical experience that seemed to anchor the lasting emotional & psychological benefits recorded by the thirty-six volunteers. They had no life-threatening illness, and were otherwise free of the debilitating angst (morbid fear of death) that consumed (some previous research subjects with advanced cancer). But these early results were shockingly similar to the 2016 collaboration with NYU: one-third of the participants rated their experience ‘as the most spiritually significant of their lives,’ comparing it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. Two-thirds placed it among the top five. When friends, family, & coworkers were interviewed, they confirmed the remarkable transformations in the volunteers’ mood & behavior for months, even years, following their single dose.
    From that moment on, Dr. Roland Griffiths upended his career to focus almost exclusively on psilocybin, creating what is now called the Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Research Unit. More than 360 volunteers and fifty peer-reviewed publications later, he’s ready to call a spade a spade. In his 2016 TED Talk, Griffiths said the drug-induced ecstasy he routinely witnesses in the laboratory is ‘virtually identical’ to that reported by natural-born prophets & visionaries throughout human history. The underlying experience itself, whether activated by psilocybin or some spontaneous internal flood of neurotransmitters
**, must be ‘biologically normal.’ If we are essentially wired for mystical experience, it raises the intriguing prospect that, under the right mind-set & environment, any curious soul can be instantly converted into a religious savant.
    Griffith’s colleague, Dr. William Richards, has been testing that hypothesis since the 1960s, when he codeveloped the very scale to measure these peak states of consciousness, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. … In his 2015 book, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, Richards maps out the essential features of the perfect psilocybin journey: transcending time & space, accessing knowledge that is normally not available. Oftentimes there is a merging of the everyday personality with a larger, more fundamental whole. Words fail to capture the unsinkable conviction that the experiencer has somehow glimpsed the ultimate nature of reality, an insight that seems ‘blatantly obvious’ at the time, and is usually accompanied by intense feelings of joy, tranquility, exaltation, & awe.

    
Brian C. Muraresku “The Immortality Key. The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.” St. Martin’s Press, 2020.

    ** NOTE: Neurotransmitters mediate but are NOT the "ultimate cause" of mystical experiences any more than a TV set actually causes the Olympic Games, or anything else we watch on it.
    ALSO
, shamans who for thousands of years have, & continue to facilitate such numinous experiences, actually do so far more often & widely with drumming & other non-pharmaceutical rituals than with plant medicines.
    AND
, with the appropriate "set & setting" people for millennia have also achieved profound mystical experiences & insights by themselves through meditation & other spiritual practices and less often, even spontaneously. This strongly suggests that we are not only "wired for mystical experiences," but that "we are spiritual beings, having a physical experience."

    When we are in contact with the ineffable, divine reality that is our source, we also know what state we shall return to. Without this knowledge we are indeed dead, even though we may show signs of physical life.”
    Stephan A. Hoeller. “Gnosticism. New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing.” Quest, 2002.

    In summary, direct mystical experiences may be essential prerequisites for us to open to deeper realities, which our 'usual' way of perceiving & thinking these days, can rarely access or comprehend.
    A
wide variety of spiritual practices - from yogic breathing techniques, various meditation techniques, chanting, drumming, dancing, tai chi / qi gong, yoga, sweat lodge ceremonies, and plant medicines in appropriate set & settings, with appropriately-trained traditional shamans or health-care professionals - pave the way to profoundly life-altering, life-affirming direct mystical experiences and insights.