Fear to Love

    Krishnamurti said, "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." It is indeed sad, stressful, disgusting and terrifying that a 'crime boss' is ruling, at his whim, over the most powerful military & financial gang in the world. Many around the world must surely be amazed at the psycho-social-spiritual level of a nation that would not once, but twice elect such a leader.

    “Worryin' is just prayin' backwards."    David Chethlehe Paladin

    Fortunately, a proportion of us also intuitively understand that there is ultimately only one real force or form of energy, and that is love. Like darkness is the lack of light, fear is the lack of love.
    There is an old Jewish legend that every generation has 36 saints (lamedvavnikim) on whose piety the fate of the world depends. By now, our world must surely have millions of awakening evolved human beings!

    So when we witness consistently irrational, heartless, uncivilized behavior, it is best for us & everyone else to consider, 'What if this perpetrator were my only child? How would I want them to be treated?' Not beaten or murdered. We'd certainly want them to be arrested & securely restrained, and ideally, if at all possible, rehabilitated to become as functional as possible, & if possible, safely re-introduced into a decent, law-abiding society.

“If this world is to be healed through human efforts,

I am convinced it will be by ordinary people

whose love for life is even greater than their fear.”

Joanna Macy

 

    Poetry, along with other arts, has the wonderful potential to connect us with our heart, right-hemisphere, body, the now, others, Nature and the Divine.

 

When she was a garden spider
Terry Ofner

and she hovered improbably above the patio
on that autumn morning, she caught me
with a filament across the brow.

Now, here comes the longest night.
People gather around solstice fires
as sparks drift into whatever comes next.

Angels, too, must have a ritual for this,
the moment of perfect imbalance
when the dark is collected in one place.

They must lean into it, their weightlessness
floating us through gravity’s fingers.
For me, I need a face. One I can recognize.

Take this photograph of my aunt Claudia
who died in childbirth years before I was born.
How do you know what’s no longer there?

Or take the field mouse that nibbled on a seed
under the feeder that late November evening.
A blink of owl-white and it was gone.

What we don’t know comes out of nowhere,
takes us up to the other side of doubt.
She’s gone, but traces of her remain.

A dun-shaded egg sac tucked in a corner
out of sight, full of now and hereafter.
Or light. Or wings.

Or that which floats or falls
when let go into our cousin night.


Winner of the Thomas Merton Grand Prize in the annual Poetry of the Sacred Contest www.centerforinterfaithrelations.org published by Parabola, Winter 2024-2025 www.parabola.org

Each individual's Loving Zest for Life is the Real Power

What Can We Do?

    “I’m often asked, ‘So this is all very fascinating about hemispheres and your analysis of how we got to be where we are. But it’s pretty important isn’t it? What are we going to do about it?’
    I think people can easily become overwhelmed by the thought of the scale of, for example, the ecological crisis that threatens, but almost the most helpful thing of all is that you can begin in the inner temple, which is you. You can begin with the one thing you do have control over, which is what you do, how you think, what you value. And that can be done here & now, and doesn’t involve persuading other people necessarily.
    If we start to ensure that we are at least aligning our own lives, with the things that are deep and important, then a lot of things will follow instinctively, and they won’t need to be formulated in the way that people want to formulate. ‘Well, I think what we should do is change the curriculum, and we should …’
    Those things are important, but once you begin to see the world differently, you begin to act differently, to prioritize things differently, and different things follow effortlessly because it is a stream. A stream that is currently blocked in us, and it’s a stream that can become unblocked.”
    Iain McGilchrist — Aligning with the Creative Impulse of the Universe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCtPDS5AVSo

Carefully listening to this 66-minute Iain McGilchrist interview in its entirety is imho time very well spent.

 

 

An Evolutionary Spiritual Path

    "Evolutionary spirituality" seems - for me & many others - to be the most advanced way of experiencing & promoting a meaningful, peaceful, joyous life.
    Steve McIntosh “The Presence of the Infinite – The Spiritual Experience of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.” Theosophical Publishing House, 2015. https://www.stevemcintosh.com/

     There's an obvious difference between feeling ENERGIZED by bright, warm, loving zest to explore, connect with & serve life versus feeling TRAPPED, STIFF, RATTLED by dark, cold, anxiety / anger driven to resist / fight / grab.
    Moment-by-moment we DO CHOOSE between Heaven and Hell to live in. But amazingly, some of us take a lifetime to finally start consciously choosing Heaven, and thus start voting decent evolved human beings into leadership positions. http://www.johnlovas.com/2024/01/seriously.html

    "Spiritual experience … can be understood as an encounter with the presence of the infinite within our finite universe of time & space. 

    … spirit is the ‘presence of the infinite’.

    Everyone who has felt the power of truth, the kindness of goodness, or the loveliness of beauty has had an experience of spirit. The only reason such common yet profound experiences are not universally identified as spiritual is that our collective understanding of spiritual experience remains underdeveloped.
    (The recent democratic election of several dysfunctional primitives around the world, imho, is evidence of the spiritual immaturity of a majority of the voting population.)

    … deepening our understanding of what spiritual experience is and how it can be fostered in ourselves & others is one of the most direct ways we can make the world a better place.

    … the experience & creation of that which is spiritually real – that which is beautiful, true, and good – is ultimately how we make things genuinely better. In other words, we become direct participants in evolution’s unfolding – the process by which something more keeps coming from something less – as we work to increasingly perfect ourselves & our world. Thus those who are on an evolutionary spiritual path recognize that their purpose in life is to participate in the gradual perfection of the evolving universe of nature, culture & self."
    Steve McIntosh “The Presence of the Infinite – The Spiritual Experience of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.” Theosophical Publishing House, 2015. https://www.stevemcintosh.com/

    "The seeker is one who devotes her/himself, ultimately through love, to the labors of discovery." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 

     “The true function of religion is to sustain & spur on the progress of life – to nurture the ‘human zest for life.’" Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
    (NOTE Pierre Teilhard de Chardin used the word 'religion' in much the same way we now use the word 'spirituality.')

     "Religion is part of the energy of cosmic personalization & unification.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

     “Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete & fulfill them, for it alone takes them & joins them by what is deepest in themselves.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
            Above quotes from: Ilia Delio “Does Evolution Have Direction?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koYGt9BWe1Y

    “The Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin claimed that love exists on the fundamental levels of life. Some might think this idea absurd and ask, do quarks fall in love? Teilhard was pointing to the fact that the characteristics of human love such as attraction, irresistibility and union, can be found on the most fundamental levels of physical life.
    Love is a passionate force at the heart of the universe, according to Teilhard, a core energy of cosmic life, a unitive principle and a cosmological force. He wrote, ‘love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.’ By declaring love a cosmological force, Teilhard indicated that love is an energy ‘present from the Big Bang onwards, though indistinguishable from molecular forces.’ In his poem ‘The Eternal Feminine,’ he speaks of cosmic love in the voice of wisdom:
    'I am embedded in the force field that is driving the cosmos towards greater novelty, towards greater integrity, and eventually towards greater consciousness. From within the fragments of matter, I encourage all possible combinations since I know that not every combination will be productive. I am the principle of union, the soul of the world. I am the magnetic and unitive force that brings the disparate matter together and urges each newly created form to multiply, to beautify, and to bear fruit. I nurture & release spirit from among the crude & complex elements. Each step towards union moves my creation towards greater spontaneity & freedom.’
    This irresistible energy of love, present in the universe, led Teilhard to claim that ‘the physical structure of the universe is love.’ The universe is created not only by the interaction of space-time-matter; it is created from the ubiquitous energy of love embedded in the fabric of the universe. All levels of life are governed by principles of attraction and union. Love is a cosmic force before it is a human one.”
    Ilia Delio. “The Primacy of Love.” Fortress Press, 2022.

    “Einstein did not believe in a personal God, but he did maintain that mystery permeated the universe. Reportedly he said to one of his skeptical acquaintances, ‘Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws & connections, there remains something subtle, intangible & inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.’ … Scientists may treat mystery is mere data, but if we believe in matter as God’s beloved dwelling place then we should trust nature completely because God is in the (gravitational) waves.”
    Ilia Delio. “The Hours of the Universe. Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey.” Orbis Books, 2021.

from: Ilia Delio “Does Evolution Have Direction?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koYGt9BWe1Y

 

Resisting What is Most Precious

    “It is a common fate of all knowledge to begin as heresy and end as orthodoxy.” Thomas Huxley

    “We suffer to the exact degree that we resist having our eyes & hearts opened.” Adyashanti

 

    OK, here's a classic example of "people in positions of power & influence" resisting with all their might something that revolutionized all our lives for the better:
    “In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis, a doctor at Vienna’s General Hospital, noticed something important about the women and children he treated in the maternity ward. They died. Distressingly often. Semmelweis wondered if all of the autopsies he and his fellow colleagues performed on cadavers were somehow contaminating the next group of children and mothers they attended. So he developed a handwashing solution of chlorine and lime for physicians to rinse with between seeing patients. It worked. Infections dropped to below 1 percent on his ward.
    But, among the other doctors, the reception was less kind. His colleagues mocked him, refusing to believe on principle that a gentleman’s hands could spread disease. Semmelweis himself could only offer up the vague concept of ‘cadaverous contamination’ to justify his protocol (this was several decades before the formal articulation of germ theory). The stress drove Semmelweis to a nervous breakdown. A bitter colleague had him committed to a lunatic asylum, where he was beaten by guards, and died of an infection that his very own handwashing technique would have prevented.
    But Semmelweis’s legacy lives on, and not just in the grudging adoption of surgical hygiene. He’s also shaped the cognitive sciences, where the Semmelweis reflex – the idea that we habitually & often violently reject new evidence or new knowledge because it runs to counter to our preexisting articles of faith – has become a standby on the list of common cognitive biases.
    Our cognitive biases hamper our ability to predict with any degree of certainty what’s going to happen next. That’s because the Semmelweis reflex kicks us out of accepting what is staring us in the face. We can’t wrap our head around it because it runs to counter to everything we hold to be self-evidently true.”
    Jamie Wheal. “Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind.” Harper Wave, 2021.

 

    Our current infatuation with dogmatic scientism (not legitimate science, but scientism as the latest 'opium of the people') blinds us to our own depth and ability to live a truly meaningful, peaceful life. As soon as we hear words like 'spirituality' or 'religion' or even 'depth' and "the Semmelweis reflex kicks us out of accepting what is staring us in the face."

    “Were one asked to characterize (spirituality) in the broadest & most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the (direct experience) that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” ​William James, (paraphrased)​ ​“The Varieties of Religious Experience”

    “The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working.
    To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.” William James

    “Too often, our understandings have been limited by culture, religious debate, & the human tendency to put ourselves at the center.” Richard Rohr

    “So much of our precious life force, our prana, our chi, our sacred energy, is spent on the Sisyphean task of pushing feelings away, trying to make them go 'somewhere else'... but where would they go? For even the Underworld is within us! So much creativity is released, so much relief is felt, when we break this age-old pattern of self-abandonment, go beyond our fearful conditioning, and try something totally new: staying close to feelings, not pushing them away, as they emerge in the freshness of the moment, looking for their true home – which is our own hearts. This is meditation: Breaking the cycle of fear.”
 Jeff Foster

    “Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.” Ram Dass 

    “That which is threatening to the ego is liberating for the heart.” Amaro Bhikkhu

"Once we have died to the false self,
we have a hope of getting out of our own way and
meeting the Holy One face to face.”
    Mirabai Starr. “Caravan of No Despair. A Memoir of Loss and Transformation.” Sounds True, 2015.

“When the mortal mind appears, buddhahood disappears.
When the mortal mind disappears, buddhahood appears.
When the mind appears, reality disappears.
When the mind disappears, reality appears.” Bodhidharma

    “May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.”
    John O’Donohue, “Imagination as the Path of the Spirit John O'Donohue” 

 

Estas Tonne - Live in Ulm (2017) stream - 100 min

We CAN Do This!

     Although many of us are careful to make sure our homes and cars are as energy-efficient as possible, we're surprisingly unaware of how much energy we waste through useless & even harmful thinking, emotions & resultant behavior.
    You may quickly say, "Well, that's not me!"
    Okay, what proportion of your time are you peacefully open-minded, curious to explore your surroundings, happily cooperating & playing with others?
    And what proportion of your time do you feel anxious, afraid, angry or sad & alone? 

    Very few enjoy a fairly consistent pleasant, peaceful, kind glow about us. Cynics would quickly judge such people as being high on drugs or having some other problem. However the fact that so many of us waste so much of our precious life energy, not really living but merely surviving lost in a dark mood may be common, but far from desirable & healthy.

     One of the foremost experts in PTSD wrote: “If you feel safe & loved, your brain (is) specialized in exploration, play, & cooperation; if you are frightened & unwanted, it (is) specialized in managing feelings of fear & abandonment." Bessel Van Der Kolk. “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” Penguin Books, 2015. http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=kolk

    More of us have PTSD than we realize. Many more of us are depressed than we realize. Many, many more of us have an inaccurately dismal, dysfunctional self-concept / worldview than we realize. 

    This blog is dedicated to inspire readers to wake up from our current pandemic of dysfunctional cynical helplessness. Despite the world's political pendulum swinging to a cartoon-like extreme position, more & more people are waking up today. We can, and I believe that we will, with wisdom turn our massive ship around before it's too late. 

    “It’s vital that we regain control of the stories we’re telling because they are shaping the future we’re creating. To do that, we have to remember our deepest inspiration, heal our pain & apathy, and connect to each other like never before. If we can do that, we’ve got a shot at solving the big problems we face. And if we can’t? Well, the dustbin of history has swallowed civilizations older and fancier than ours.”
    Jamie Wheal. “Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind.” Harper Wave, 2021.

Laura Marling "When Were You Happy? (And How Long Has That Been)"

 

Oneness, Peace, Contentment, Happiness

    Everyone at some level is aware that right now, no matter how well we're doing, by whatever measure - loved & respected by family & friends, smart, well-educated, successful, healthy, attractive, financially-secure - our life as we know it & that of our loved ones, can radically change in an instant. Our fragility is partially because for many, happiness depends entirely on how well we can control our environment. But, again at some level we know that we have put our environment & ourselves into crisis. So our anxiety & stress appears to be because we cannot reliably control the basic, universal facts of life: constant change, aging, sickness & death.
    Much of this is based on the simplistic materialist model of reality - a left-hemisphere-dominant perspective - which imagines life AS IF life was nothing more than accidentally-assembled machinery, meaninglessly churning away, then inevitably breaking down, end of story. As a result, a frightening proportion of humanity are electing brutal primitive leaders who are obviously deaf, dumb & blind to essential human values of love, compassion, honesty, truth, empathy, compassion, nurturing each other. http://www.johnlovas.com/2024/09/balance.html

    BUT WHAT IF our anxiety and pervasive sense of 'lack' or 'something missing' were caused not as much by our inability to adequately control life / fear of death, but MOSTLY by the gnawing disconnect between how most of us perceive the world ("relative reality" "consensual reality") and our innate intuitive memory of "Ultimate Reality" which cannot be seen, nor adequately described. And because Ultimate Reality is far more complex than the reductionist model, many are not able to or not ready to deal with it.
    Nevertheless, throughout history, from all traditions, from every corner of the globe, shamans, mystics, saints, philosophers, poets & other deeply spiritual seekers of Truth have continued to point us toward Ultimate Reality in the only possible way - by directly experiencing it.

     In this tradition, Rupert Spira offers very clear, concise pointers to help us directly experience Ultimate Reality in his excellent 40-minute video (at the bottom of this page). His excellent talk (from the video) about how our Essential Nature is Happiness, is partially transcribed here : 

    “Could it be that the entire, what we call the universe, is an appearance within Awareness or Consciousness? After all, that is what our experience tells us.
    Could it be that each of our minds are like localizations of an infinite field of Consciousness, through the agency of which Consciousness knows itself as the world? Just as when we fall asleep at night we dream, we imagine an entire world within our own minds, and yet, we view that world from the perspective of a separate subject of experience within that world.
    Could it be that each of our minds are like dreams, in the mind of Infinite Consciousness? Or to use religious language, each of our minds are like dreams in the mind of God, through which infinite consciousness or God’s infinite being seems to divide itself into two parts: a subject that knows and an object that is known, just as we do at night when we dream.
    Our own mind divides itself into two parts: a dreamed world and a separate dreamed character, from whose point of view that world is known. In other words, the dreamed character – the character in the dream – is the agency through which our mind knows itself as the dreamed world.
    Could it be that each of our minds are like localizations through which Infinite Consciousness knows itself as the world? After all, that is in line with our experience. Is there anyone here who is currently experiencing anything other than the knowing or consciousness of your experience?

    … if we investigate like honest scientists, relying only on the evidence of experience, this knowing or consciousness is all that is ever experienced. And it is possible to explain the whole of reality on the basis of consciousness alone, without recourse to an abstract world made of matter, which nobody has ever, or could ever come in contact with.
    What are the implications of this possibility? It implies that whatever or whoever seems to be outside of ourselves, in other words all others, all objects and the world, although they may be outside of our limited, finite minds, they are not outside of the infinite field of consciousness, out of which our finite minds are made. In other words, the implications of this possibility is that everyone & everything is a modulation of a single infinite indivisible whole, seemingly separate from ourselves, seemingly made out of something other than ourselves, but in reality, an integral part of the same infinite, indivisible whole.
    In other words, although experience seems to comprise a multiplicity & diversity of objects & selves, if we look through that appearance, trusting only the evidence of experience, we find no separate objects, people, entities, selves or things. We find only our Self, not our personal (small) self – a collection of thoughts and feelings, but our Self, that true and only Self of infinite, indivisible, self-aware Being – referred to as God in the religious traditions; referred to as Consciousness in gatherings such as this; and referred to as “I” in common parlance. 

    I’m not speaking of some extraordinary experience to which only a few enlightened sages have access. Everybody knows the experience to which I am referring. The common name for it is love. When you feel you love someone, or are in love, do you not feel, to a greater or lesser extent, that you are one with that apparent other? (Oneness, Unitive Experience, Unitive Consciousness) Is that not precisely what the experience of love is – the dissolution of the sense of separation between yourself & the other. In other words, love is not a relationship. It is the collapse of relationship. It is the absence of self & other. In other words, it is the recognition of our shared being. It is the recognition of Reality.
    Why is it that everybody loves the experience of love above all else? It is because each of us, all apparently finite minds long, above all else, to be divested of their seeming separation. All the separate self truly longs for is to be divested of its sense of separation, it’s limitations.
    The experience of beauty is exactly the same experience but in relation to an object rather than to a person or an animal. When you feel the experience of beauty whilst walking in a landscape or listening to a piece of music, do you not feel to a greater or lesser extent that you merge with the music or the landscape? Is there anyone here who has not had that experience? Is there anyone here who on listening to a piece of music or walking in the landscape has not felt themselves dissolve into the music or the landscape, who has not felt the sense of separation between themselves and the object dissolve? Isn’t that why we love to walk in Nature or to listen to music?
    All the separate self truly longs for is to be divested of its sense of separation, to be relieved of the apparent limitations that seem to confine us to a cluster of thoughts, images, feelings, sensations & perceptions, and returns us, as it were, to our Origin, our Source, or our Essence. 

    In the non-dual traditions there are these two essential pathways.
First of all the inward-facing pathway through which we investigate what we call “I,” which culminates in the recognition that the “I” that we essentially are, the Awareness that we essentially are, is without limits & is inherently peaceful.
    And then there is the outward-facing pathway in which our entire experience is realigned with this new understanding in which we not only understand but feel that everyone & everything is a modulation of our own essential infinite self-aware Being.”
    Rupert Spira, “Your Nature is Happiness” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfQSbc42Uc4 - below