"What are you going to do if you’re God?"

    "What are you going to do if you are God?"    

    Ridiculous idea?

    But why would you feel that way? 
    Seriously. Why?

    "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
    Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
    It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us." Marianne Williamson

    “So long as one is merely on the surface of things, they are always imperfect, unsatisfactory, incomplete. Penetrate into the substance & everything is perfect, complete, whole.” Philip Kapleau. “The Zen of Living and Dying. A Practical and Spiritual Guide.” Shambhala, 1998. 

    Alan Watts 65 years ago argued “Everybody operates on certain basic assumptions but very few people know what they are." Below, Alan Watts: "The Constitution of Nature." Philosophy: East and West. Program 28. 1960. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/constitution-of-nature 

    "The high civilizations of the world have produced three different views of the constitution of nature, of the physical universe. I call them respectively: nature as a construct, nature as a drama, and nature as an organism. 
    The first view, nature as a construct, has until very recently been characteristic of the Western world. The view of nature as a drama has been largely characteristic of India. And finally, of nature as an organism, has been characteristic of the Far East. I’d like to compare these three views and point out certain of their advantages, disadvantages, and the ways in which they complement each other.
    Our thinking about the world is strongly influenced by analogies that are almost hidden. They are so far back in the history of the thought of any given civilization or culture that they are taken as something more than analogies. They are taken almost as logical patterns. And they are basic to our grammar, to our common sense, and to our attitudes in ways that often go unsuspected. 

    Why don’t we start with the Western view of the world as a construct. The physical world has historically, in the West, been looked upon as a created or manufactured article; the world of a creator external to the world. And this view has continued in many ways even after the rise of deism in the eighteenth century and the general tendency of the scientist to dispense with the hypothesis of the creator. The idea still remains that the world is a construct, analogous to a machine, and indeed obeying laws or plans in the same way as a machine obeys a blueprint, even though the law-giver and the planner himself seems to have disappeared.
    The basic metaphor, though, underlying this is not so much the machine as the work of clay: the pot or the modeled figure. For, as you know, it is said in the Book of Genesis that the lord god created Adam out of the dust of the ground, and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. And so our language, our poetry, is full of allusions to the fact that we are really, after all, clay. 
    And because of this figure, it is fundamental to our common sense that the world is formed matter — the form being the shape of the pot, the matter being the clay. And thus we think of life as being basically something done to a medium. The medium is stuff: a kind of formless and of itself inert and unintelligent goo, which requires an external agency to give it form and intelligence and life.
    And naturally, because we have thought this way ((materialistically & dualistically)) for so long, it’s a terribly difficult idea to abandon—to get out of our heads the notion that, in the same way that tables are made of wood and houses of stone, so we tend to think that trees are made of wood and mountains of stone and people of flesh, and all of it eventually reducing itself to the primordial goo, the universal clay, the primal matter, the formless original water over which the spirit of god is said to have moved in the beginning of all time. 
    Now, beyond the idea of the world as a work of pottery lies the more sophisticated idea of the world as a mechanism in this Western view of the world as a construct. As soon as men began to understand mechanical principles, it became extraordinarily convenient to make analogies between various types of machinery and things to be found in the world. And it is really upon this analogy that the great achievements of Western technology have hitherto been based. And it’s really very difficult to think that we could have devised our technology, and that our practical sciences could have made such progress, without the idea of the analogy between the world and a constructed machine. 
    You see, one of the most fundamental things about a machine is that it is an assemblage of parts. And the successful measurement and description of nature depends upon the calculus, upon reducing it to parts. You know, the word “calculus” originally meant “pebbles,” and pebbles were one of the oldest methods of calculating: counting pebbles. In a funny kind of association of words, calculus is also calculating in the sense of having a calculating attitude; scheming. And scheming is associated with turning things to calculae, or stones. It is a sort of killing of the world, reducing it from the living to the dead, from the organism to the machine—but nevertheless it has had the most marvelous consequences so far as we’re concerned. And the cultures which thought of nature by analogy with drama and by analogy with an organism did not produce the technology that we in the West produced.  

    Let us contrast the other attitudes: the Indian attitude of the world as a drama. In Hindu thought, the world is not thought of as being made or constructed by god, but as being actually god himself playing a game. The idea of one single divine actor who is playing all the parts of all the creatures in the world, imagining himself to be them —assuming, as it were, myriads of masks, behind which there is simply one wearer of the mask. In "The Masks of God" Joseph Campbell contrasts the way in which the myth of the one who became two, the one that became many, has gone in two quite different directions. Beginning in ancient Sumeria (which constitutes, as it were, a sort of cultural watershed), it has flowed eastwards in one way and westwards in another. 

    To the East, the idea that the one (the godhead, in other words) split itself and dismembered itself into many parts quite voluntarily, and thus became the world as a play. 

    To the West, the theme of the one who became many is different, because (as he points out in the Book of Genesis) it is not the divine who becomes male and female, it is the creature. In the Upanishads—say the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad—the divine Self is described as saying in the beginning of time, “Let me become two,” and he splits into male and female, and thus generates the world. But in the Book of Genesis it is not the godhead who splits, it is man, the creature, who is split into Adam and then into Eve. But thus, in the Eastern world, we have the dramatic view—in India in particular. And although it’s interesting to note that in, say, the writings of the great philosopher Shankara and others, you very often encounter the analogy of the potter or of pots as representing the world. The roles are reversed. Clay is used as the symbol for the divine reality. Just as pots are all made of clay, or as jewels are all made of gold, so all things in the world are of one divine substance, which is of the nature of the godhead, or Brahman. It’s interesting, the different use of the simile.
    And so, from the standpoint of the dramatic view of the universe, all the divisions & distinctions of the world are looked upon as being a kind of as-if. They are in play. They are not quite serious. 
    And this contrasts very sharply with what has been the characteristic ((dualistic)) Western view: that the distinctions in the world are the most important things about it, that they are deeply serious. The distinction of good and evil is an eternal distinction, as is the distinction between the creator and the creature. The world in this view is not a drama. It  is played not by actors, but by what we call real individuals, even real persons—although, funnily enough, as I suppose you know, the word “person” is originally persona: the megaphone mask worn by actors in classical Greek drama.

    Then, thirdly, there is the organic view characteristic of China. In this, there is no real thought of there being a divine creator or a divine actor behind the world, but rather the world is thought of as being self-moving & self-creating. The word for nature in Chinese means “what is of itself so.” When, in the West, a child asks its mother, “Who made me?” and she replies, “Darling, god made you,” and the child asks, “But who made god?” she has to say, “Nobody made god.” And that is a great puzzle to the child who thinks of the world as a construct. And it may be explained to the child, if you like, that god makes himself; he exists of himself, because he is existence. 
    There is a certain sense in which the Chinese view is fundamentally almost anarchical—or, if you don’t like that word, you could call it democratic. A world which is self-governing—not even through a president, but self-governing in every way. ... which moves itself in the same way as you and I move our fingers without directing them in the sense that we know exactly what we’re doing and how we move them (we don’t)."

    NOW, 65 years later, we have an EXCEPTIONALLY FINE summary of how we have evolved beyond rule by barbaric force to all individuals (potentially) living in attunement with the cosmos: 
    A few excerpts from Arabella Thaïs “Attunement as Governance: A New Political Possibility. The End of Hierarchy, the Dawn of Sovereignty.” https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/attunement-as-governance-a-new-political-possibility/

    "The world was viewed as inert, mechanical, & mute. In such a cosmos, control becomes necessary—an external force imposed upon the otherwise unruly. 
    But if the universe is alive, conscious, & self-organizing — as mystics, complexity theorists, and post-materialist scientists increasingly affirm — then governance as enforcement becomes obsolete. A deeper model must emerge.

    Order does not require laws. It requires resonance. This is evident in the natural world: ecosystems, galaxies, human consciousness itself. There is structure, but it is not forced. There is hierarchy, but it is dynamic, fractal, and non-coercive. These systems organize through patterns of self-similarity, feedback, & relational intelligence. 
    Therefore, any model of governance that fails to reflect the actual metaphysical conditions of the universe is not only oppressive—it is inefficient. It is maladaptive. A politics of force is the symptom of a civilization that does not yet trust its own source. 
    If we accept that the cosmos is psyche — structured consciousness — then the political must become the art of attunement, not the science of enforcement.

    This is the paradox: Anarchy is not the breakdown of order, but the maturation of it.

    In the 17th and 18th centuries, the so-called pirate utopias—from Madagascar’s Libertalia to the floating cities of the Caribbean—offered living examples of anarchic coherence. These were not lawless zones, but radically self-organised societies governed by codes of mutual agreement, shared spoils, elected leadership, and often racial and gender egalitarianism unthinkable in the empires they subverted.

    Anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey resurrected these spaces as what he called Temporary Autonomous Zones. The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) is a fleeting pocket of liberation—a territory of freedom in time & space, where hierarchical control is momentarily suspended and replaced by spontaneous, decentralised order. The TAZ is not a static utopia—rather, it is ephemeral, ecstatic, emergent, and arises in the cracks of empire—in festivals, secret societies, pirate enclaves, desert rituals, rave cultures, and sacred gatherings***. It resists capture because it is non-cartographic: a zone of resonance, not regulation. 
    (((*** On a week-long silent meditation retreat at Insight Meditation Society in Barre MA, 20 years ago or so, early on somebody had found a solid gold wrist watch and pinned it on the announcement board. It stayed there untouched for the entire week. 
    While entirely silent, with even eye contact generally avoided at such retreats, a remarkable sense of intimacy spontaneously arises between all participants by the end of the retreat, despite the fact that most participants had never met.  
    To really test this phenomenon, at the end of one such retreat, I once intentionally went over to two specific people to chat & get to know them. I picked them because at first glance, at the beginning of the retreat, I had judged them as the least attractive. Now, chatting with them at the end of the retreat, I couldn't believe what fine human beings they were. We are capable of INFINITELY more intelligent, wise, loving & effective way of relating to ourselves, others & the cosmos!)))

    In this sense, the TAZ is a model of anarchic advent—not a total revolution, but a sovereign moment. A glimpse of what becomes possible when we stop waiting for permission and begin to live from coherence now. 
    As Bey writes: “The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere.” 
    In biology, we see similar nodes of coherence in swarms & flocks—patterns of grace and coordination emerging without a single commander. 
    This is not chaos. It is emergent order—a coherence that arises from within, not imposed from above. In complexity science, such systems are called self-organizing. Their intelligence is not centralized but embedded in every node. The mycelial network, the blockchain, the ant colony, the neural net: all are examples of distributed intelligence that outperforms hierarchy. 
    In an anarchic society, the leader is not the one with the most control, but the one with the most alignment—the one who is so attuned to the deeper frequency of the Real that others orient around them effortlessly, not out of obedience but recognition. 
    This is how the cosmos leads. Not with domination—but through radiance.

    ... when beings are unshackled from repressive systems, and attuned to the inner source, they act in service to divine order.
    Christ was not a revolutionary against Rome—he was a vibrational insurgent, subverting the very metaphysics upon which empire rests. His leadership was anarchic in the truest sense: not the assumption of power, but the disruption of its necessity. 
    In this light, Jesus becomes the prototype of the Anarch—the figure who dissolves external rulership not by force, but by rendering it obsolete through the radical coherence of divine being.

    To live anarchically is to live from kairos, not chronos—from the sacred time of right alignment, not the mechanical tick of the clock. It is to act, as Christ did, from impulse, not from protocol—from the soul’s timing, not the calendar’s. To live from kairos is to become temporally sovereign. One ceases to move through time as sequence, and begins to modulate time as frequency—a vibratory reality shaped by alignment, not duration. When time is understood in this way, individuation is no longer a psychological journey within time—it is a re-tuning to time’s deeper structure.

    Individuated, anarchic beings are not merely free—they are temporally generative. Their presence carries the power to dislodge timelines, to open unexpected pathways, to bend probability. In this sense, they function like strange attractors in a chaotic system—subtle but catalytic forces around which reality reorganises itself. Not through force, but through the coherence of their inner architecture.

    They do not push history forward. They change the pattern altogether.

    In anarchy, freedom is not deferred—it is not something granted by the future, but something activated in the now through resonance with higher-order time. The anarchic subject becomes a temporal node—a being whose very presence rewires the causality of the world.

    This shift in time is not abstract—it is the scaffolding of a new civilization, one rooted not in deadlines and duties, but in destiny and divine attunement."
    Arabella Thaïs “Attunement as Governance: A New Political Possibility. The End of Hierarchy, the Dawn of Sovereignty.” https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/attunement-as-governance-a-new-political-possibility/ I HIGHLY RECOMMEND READING this ENTIRE SUPERB ESSAY.

 

    "I am, by the sheer complexity of my structure, far more evolved than any system which I can imagine. ... you (too) are the most complex thing that has yet been encountered in the cosmos and you can’t figure you out." Alan Watts "The Process of Life" (https://www.thealpinereview.com/articles/alan-watts-the-process-of-life )

     We have a GREAT DEAL to learn. 

    “In this choiceless, never ending flow of life
    There is an infinite array of choices.
    One alone brings happiness -
    To love what is.” Dorothy Hunt

    "When you know you’re the ocean, you’re not afraid of the waves.” Tara Brach

    "Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present." Alan Watts

 

Molly Hahn buddhadoodles.com

Spiritual Evolution

Reality is more complex than we would like.
If we insist upon it making sense,
we will find ourselves despairing.
Reality cannot be neatly packaged ...
Reality is all that is, and this is often at odds
with what we imagine it should be.
Rabbi Yannai, an early Jewish sage 

 

 

    “Always keep an open mind about whatever you experience. Try not to jump to conclusions. Simply keep observing & investigating your experience thoroughly & continuously. Jumping to conclusions will prevent your understanding from deepening.”
    Ashin Tejaniya “Don’t Look Down on the Defilements – They Will Laugh at You." http://sayadawutejaniya.org/teachings/

      In medicine, a well-recognized source of diagnostic error is "premature closure" - when physicians fail to listen to patients long enough to hear the full history, wrongly assuming they already "know" because they've "heard it all before." 

    It takes effort & humility to patiently, intentionally retain an open, beginner's mind, especially for 'experts' burdened by dogma.

     One definition of an expert is one who's incapable of further learning. This patronizing, colonializing hubris keeps governments, religions, professions & other large institutions fossilized decades, if not centuries behind progressive ideas.

      “While religion at its best calls us to a community of the curious and a unity beyond dogma & tribalism; religion at its worst calls us to worship the very things that divide us and to pit people against one another in the name of one fantasy or other.”
       Rami Shapiro. “Holy Rascals. Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries.” Sounds True, 2017.  

    Dogmatic secular scientism & dogmatic religions are equally captivating, both promising certainty. For both, it's an open & shut case, all other worldviews are fiercely denounced, now adherents can get back to being busy doing stuff, end of discussion, thank you & good night!

      Reality is far too complex, paradoxical, and takes way too much effort for the vast majority to spend a lifetime exploring with an open mind / heart!  

    “The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching…” Joseph Campbell 

    Increasingly, people are becoming "spiritual revolutionaries, spiritually independent" or "mystics" - no longer followers, and find marching lock-step with any crowd spiritually confining, even suffocating. Their individual ego (small self) is sufficiently secure, so they do not depend on a group ego, a charismatic guru, or an all-powerful separate "other." Nor do they "other" the Divine, but instead experience Oneness with Source. This felt sense is often referred to as "Self" by mystics, Jung, Internal Family Systems, etc. Some of them resonate with the mystical level of some spiritual traditions, which may or may not be one in which we were raised.

    We ALL have firm opinions about people & things, based on minimal or wrong information.
    AND, we ALL consider others with such baseless opinions, to be bigots, red necks, etc.
    So, in the spirit of open-mindedness, I invite you to watch this 68 minute documentary about a couple who spent a very productive lifetime actually being open-minded enough to learn a great deal of valuable, worthwhile information about shamanism - about which our materialist culture only has disparaging innuendo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNloOTQoRzA

    “There is widespread agreement that seven kinds of practices are central & essential for anyone who would live a life to the fullest. These seven practices are:
        1) Living ethically,
        2) Transforming emotions,
        3) Redirecting motivation,
        4) Training attention,
        5) Refining awareness,
        6) Cultivating wisdom,
        7) Serving others.
    These are the seven practices that sages the world over emphasize as central & essential for a full spiritual life. Together they constitute a ‘technology of transcendence’ for awakening our potentials and living life to the fullest. Shamans were the first to develop this art …

    Shamanism can be defined as a family of traditions whose practitioners focus on voluntarily entering altered states of consciousness in which they experience themselves or their spirit(s) interacting with other entities, often by traveling to other realms, in order to serve their community.”
    Roger Walsh MD, PhD. “The World of Shamanism. New Views of an Ancient Tradition.” Llewellyn Publications, 2007.

“The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell,
don’t go back to sleep!
You have to ask for what you really want,
don’t go back to sleep!
You know, there are those who go back and forth
over the threshold where the two worlds meet,
and the door, it’s always open, and it’s round,
don’t go back to sleep!”

Jalal al-Din Rumi

 

      “Spiritual practices are methods that can begin to soften our stance toward our self, toward life in general, and to open us to what transcends the habitual. They are invitations to become intimate with the wisdom of silence & stillness.”
      Dorothy Hunt. “Ending the Search. From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness.” Sounds True, 2018. 

      “Silence is the basis and the background of everything. We are an expression of this primordial silence & stillness. But the habits of our mind overlay this simple truth & keep us from experiencing ourselves as a full-spectrum human being."          Sharon Landrith

 

 

Sparks of Wisdom Glowing Brighter

    From a very young age, from before I could speak, I've had a calm, intuitive sense of what's right, true & meaningful, and felt a deep empathic connection towards suffering humans & animals. This same sense seems to have given rise to a few sporadic instances of my inexplicably knowing, with a quiet confidence, that an important, specific, future event would turn out well.
    Many get a glimpse of this unusual sense of intimate familiarity or oneness with the cosmos after a few drinks - the feeling of being "in love with the whole world." There's immediate pressure then to quickly dismiss it as "just the booze talking." After all, the only taboo remaining in our Western society is the one against anything that might be deeply meaningful!
    Indeed, by around age 2, we start being conditioned by the prevailing dogmatic belief that human beings & other living "things" are accidental, isolated lumps of matter, in a mechanical, meaningless universe. So, we spend much of our adult lives trying to be as happy as possible given this narrow, stunted worldview.

    “Our talent for division, for seeing the parts (reductionist left hemisphere), is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole (right hemisphere).” Iain McGilchrist

    “Not only is the universe stranger than we think,
it is stranger than we can think.” Werner Heisenberg

    “There is but one cause of failure
And that is man’s lack of faith
in his true Self.” William James

    "All shall be well,
and all shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well." Julian of Norwich, English Christian mystic

    “So long as one is merely on the surface of things,
they are always imperfect, unsatisfactory, incomplete.
    Penetrate into the substance
and everything is perfect, complete, whole.” Philip Kapleau

    "You learn about a thing ... by opening yourself wholeheartedly to it. You learn about a thing by loving it." Barbara McClintock - Nobel prize-winning geneticist

    "Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough." George Washington Carver

    Fortunately, at least a small "spark" of early-childhood's innocent form of unity consciousness survives into adulthood, and many feel that at this pivotal time in human history, this spark is increasingly becoming fanned towards awakening.

    “Spiritual practices are methods that can begin to soften our stance toward our self, toward life in general, and to open us to what transcends the habitual. They are invitations to become intimate with the wisdom of silence & stillness.”
    Dorothy Hunt. “Ending the Search. From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness.” Sounds True, 2018.

 Two (imho) EXCELLENT 15-minute Eckhart Tolle videos:

Playing Small Does Not Serve the World

    One of the world's 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.

    We immediately (incorrectly) assume that we're in the first "normal" group, and only a few war veterans & perhaps some severely traumatized first responders fit in the second "damaged" group. What proportion of your day do you feel anxious, needy, alone, uncomfortable COMPARED TO feeling light-hearted, carefree, adventurous, excitedly participating in group adventures? We can EITHER be afraid (hurt child) OR loving (wise elder) - our two basic 'ways of being' or 'operating systems,' - only ONE of which can be running at a time.

    Van Der Kolk writes that all of us have been exposed to a wide variety of traumas. The degree to which traumas have impacted our lives will clearly show by our dominant attitudes & moods. In Westernized societies like ours, I suspect very few of us grow up retaining a young child's innocent trust, feeling safe & loved, playing care-free and exploring the world with an open-hearted attitude towards all. 

    So most of us have endured sufficient direct & secondary trauma to have developed defenses against further injury: physical defenses - contracted, tight, stiff, tender muscles; emotional defenses - walled-off hardened heart, cynicism, suspiciousness, pessimism, fatalism, nihilism, anger, disgust; & mental defenses - left-hemisphere dominant, self-centered, narcissism, materialism. 

    Many of us are locked into this very constricted bleak worldview, so much so that it forms a sense of a very small 'self.' We're so emotionally bonded to this small sense of 'self' that when we're shown that we're so much more, it just makes us angrily defensive. This dark worldview draws our attention to, & magnifies everything that confirms, and away from, & trivializes anything that contradicts our dark, small worldview & self-concept.  

    As Anais Nin & others have said, we see things as we are. Our ego / left-hemisphere craves 'being right,' consistency & certainty, even if that means being stuck in misery. So it's incredibly easy to get stuck in despair & disgust - one just needs to become a CNN news junky. 

 

    It’s essential to remember that our disgust about past & ongoing human atrocities, no matter how justified our anger may feel, is nothing more than transient thoughts & emotions that are best “held lightly” with huge helpings of self-compassion & compassion for ALL. 

    One way to make some sense of this: A wise elder may disapprove of & be deeply saddened by her grandchild's criminal behavior, BUT nevertheless holds the child in safety & unconditional love (instead of hatred & vengeance) trusting that nurturing will bring about even his evolution (instead of giving up on a 'hopeless case' & 'throwing away the keys'). Our justice & prison system clearly need to evolve.

 

    “So long as one is merely on the surface of things, they are always imperfect, unsatisfactory, incomplete. Penetrate into the substance & everything is perfect, complete, whole.” Philip Kapleau. “The Zen of Living and Dying. A Practical and Spiritual Guide.” Shambhala, 1998.

 

    With practice, we can all gradually grow out of the fearful hurt child "fight, flight, freeze reaction" phase of life, and remember to mature back into, & re-assume our true nature the wise loving elder "tend & befriend" & "nurturing" phase. We progressively widen our circle of intimacy & nurturing, which happens naturally as we remember to reconnect with our true nature.

    And the practice boils down to simply noticing when we're once again in a dark place (mentally, emotionally, physically - usually in some combination), and 'sense' our way back to the light by 'deeply listening' (metaphorically speaking) for that within us that is always there, but is very, very subtle, with the characteristics of silence, stillness & peace. So effective meditation is very different than most of us imagined when we started.

    “As we sit quietly without any intention to change things or to have any particular experience we will begin to feel a sense of relaxation that deepens into a peaceful state as we progress. By letting go of wanting peace we begin to see that it is already here. It will be seen in time that all our attempts to get something simply clouds our awareness of what is already here.” Helen Hamilton. “Dissolving the Ego.” Balboa Press, 2021.

    There are excellent current guides to help us shift from chronic existential angst, frozen in anxiety, dread, sadness, hopelessness & meaninglessness into the process of awakening to our true nature. They all have many free youtube videos, as well as books & trainings programs:

    Helen Hamilton : www.helenhamilton.org

    Louise Kay : www.louisekay.net

    Eckhart Tolle : eckharttolle.com

    Adyashanti : adyashanti.opengatesangha.org

    Judith Blackstone : realizationprocess.org

    Stephan Bodian : www.stephanbodian.org

    Dorothy Hunt : www.dorothyhunt.org

    Mooji : mooji.org

 
    Be prepared to meet resistance to attempting this all-important shift, because our dominant ego/left-hemisphere interprets it as an attack on our life! Much like when we were kids & someone called us a "bad name" & we felt as if we'd been seriously physically wounded. Especially at a "mature" stage in life, psychological rigidity tends to dominate - “Can’t teach old dogs new tricks.” BUT if we're interested in maturing / evolving, we know that we have to learn to become psychological flexible. 

    Be very kind & patient with yourself, as when teaching a 2-year old child or a 2-month old puppy. When training yourself, as with little children & puppies, our primary responsibility is to hold the 'student' in safety & unconditional love. 'Success' is the student feeling safe & loved, regardless of whether learning seems to be occurring at all, slowly or quickly. As per the top of the page, the absolute essential conditions for exploration, play, & cooperation are feeling safe & loved.

 

“In this choiceless, never ending flow of life
There is an infinite array of choices.
One alone brings happiness -
To love what is.” Dorothy Hunt 

 

COLIBRI, art by Martina Hoffman

Artist website: www.martinahoffmann.com

 
 

Dealing Wisely & Effectively with Anxiety, Upset, Tension

     After being racially-profiled, Sebene Selassie “went to the airport restroom alone. Hot tears streamed down my face while I sat in the stall waiting for the sensations to dissipate. They did not. The tension and upset only perpetuated the feeling of not belonging. Anxiety and tension persisted in me for another five minutes. But I meditated with it, meaning I simply observed and allowed all my feelings and sensations. Eventually, I was able to reconnect to the felt sense that I do belong. Everywhere. Even to the agent (who 'randomly' chose her for a pat down). I returned to belonging. … We, each of us, need our own ways back to our belonging.”
     Sebene Selassie. “You Belong: A Call for Connection.” HarperOne, 2020. - a wonderfully wise book

     Meditation during emotional crises is infinitely more effective when it is based on a deep meditation practice established under relatively peaceful conditions! As our meditation practice deepens, we tend to delve deeper into its roots.
     While meditation or contemplation can be found in all wisdom traditions, it is the core & central practice of Buddhism. The Buddha never claimed to be a god, never told people to abandon their current religion, and repeatedly advised people to be skeptical, & only follow teachings & practices, including his own, when these actually helped them ie decreased suffering & increased joy. Buddhism, at least for people in the West, is 'a science of the mind,' deeply practiced by a wide variety of people, from skeptical atheists to devout Roman Catholic nuns, monks, & Jewish rabbis.
     Many of us have powerful love-hate relationships with specific religions, religion in general, specific races, all those we judge to be "different," etc. Xenophobia, beside causing senseless suffering to those around us, powerfully blocks our own healing, maturation & wholeness, and cries out to be addressed & healed.

      “While religion at its best calls us to a community of the curious and a unity beyond dogma & tribalism; religion at its worst calls us to worship the very things that divide us and to pit people against one another in the name of one fantasy or other.”
       Rami Shapiro. “Holy Rascals. Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries.” Sounds True, 2017.

      “Spiritual practices are methods that can begin to soften our stance toward our self, toward life in general, and to open us to what transcends the habitual. They are invitations to become intimate with the wisdom of silence and stillness.”
      Dorothy Hunt. “Ending the Search. From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness.” Sounds True, 2018. 

     “The most profound practice in Buddhism (and MBSR) is ‘resting in awareness’ — simply being here without thinking or doing anything. All of the Buddha’s teachings emerge from this. ‘That you are here right now is the ultimate fact,’ said Suzuki Roshi. This truth can sustain us even in the midst of great suffering. Even in great pain, even at the moment of death, simply resting here is liberation.”
     Lewis Richmond https://learn.tricycle.org/courses/aging-as-a-spiritual-practice

     “The term 'perennial philosophy' was coined by Agostino Steuco (1497-1548) and refers to a fourfold realization: 
          (1) there is only one Reality (call it, among other names, God, Mother, Tao, Allah, Dharmakaya, Brahman, or Great Spirit) that is the source and substance of all creation; 
          (2) that while each of us is a manifestation of this Reality, most of us identify with something much smaller, that is, our culturally conditioned individual ego; 
          (3) that this identification with the smaller self gives rise to needless anxiety, unnecessary suffering, and cross-cultural competition and violence; and 
          (4) that peace, compassion, and justice naturally replace anxiety, needless suffering, competition, and violence when we realize our true nature as a manifestation of this singular Reality. 
     The great sages and mystics of every civilization throughout human history have taught these truths in the language of their time and culture. It is the universality and timelessness of this wisdom that makes it the perfect focus for the spiritually independent seeker."
       Rami Shapiro. “Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent.” SkyLight Paths, 2013.