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

Basics

    “What is the greatest wonder in the world?
      Every day men see others called to their death, yet those who remain live as if they were immortal.” The Mahabharata

    “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Krishnamurti

    “Whenever I tried looking outside, instead of in, I’d be crushed by an overwhelming heaviness and sadness until I remembered again. It took quite a while for me to see that most of what goes, among so-called adults, by the name of depression isn’t a disease or defect at all.
    On the contrary, it’s a perfectly natural response to the pull of the divine which is always disturbing and disrupting and disorienting – straining to reorient us towards a totally different dimension. And it’s those who seem best adjusted ((most 'normal')), armed like tragic soldiers with their psychological theories and fanciful facts, who are most helplessly trapped in their strange delusions.”  Peter Kingsley “A Book of Life.” Catafalque Press, 2021.

    “Spirituality is the indefinable urge to reach beyond the limits of ordinary human existence that is bounded by unconscious forces and self-interest, and to discover higher values in ourselves and to live them consistently in our relationships and roles. It involves developing practices that aid us in rising and expanding, perhaps beyond the merely good to the transcendent, in the process of looking inwards rather than outwards for our own morality and guidance. Above all, it means becoming a more loving and compassionate human being, in thought, word and deed.” Maya Spencer MD “What is spirituality? A personal exploration.” 2012. https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/members/sigs/spirituality-spsig/what-is-spirituality-maya-spencer-x.pdf?sfvrsn=f28df052_2

     “Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” Jean-Paul Sartre

    “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” Rumi

     “I can nourish myself on nothing but truth.” St. Therese of Lisieux

    “There is a voice that doesn’t have words. Listen.” Rumi

    There have always been among us people who perceive much more & process what they sense far more deeply than the average person. "Sensitive - The Untold Story" a 2015 documentary on Prime suggests that about 20% of people (and over 100 species of animals) fit this category. Artists, serious meditators, mystics, saints & other spiritually-inclined folks may also overlap with this 'highly sensitive people' (HSP) category.
    An important brain function is as a reducing valve to prevent us from being overwhelmed by the shear volume of data surrounding us. This appears to be diminished in HSP, and the resulting frequent overwhelm may inspire them to be more curious & deeply introspective.

    “To imagine that some little thing - food, sex, power, fame - will make you happy is to deceive oneself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.” Nisargadatta Maharaj

    “Our yearning for Truth actually comes from Truth.” Adyashanti

    “As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher. The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge. That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there.” Nisargadatta Maharaj 

    “The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.” Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Even if death were to fall on you today like lightning,

You must be ready to die without sadness and regret,

Without any residue of clinging for what is left behind,

Remaining in the cognition of the absolute view,

You should leave this life like an eagle,

Soaring up into the blue sky.”

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

 

Leonard Cohen - In My Secret Life (Live in London)

Bringing Enthusiasm, Energized Engagement - & WISDOM - back into Academia

“I’m struck by how suppressed the life energy of many students in my current undergraduate class seems to be. … I keep sensing something is somewhat missing: perhaps the ‘primordial confidence’ …

Students are not given much opportunity to attend to their inner lives, to explore their unfathomable riches, to plummet the depth, and to be nourished deeply by such engagements. Yet, it is only through such engagements that energetically charged awareness deepens and expands, connecting self with cosmos, and fully reconciling us with life and universe.

The self is unable to nourish itself with awareness and energy when its attention is continuously siphoned out: attention is needed to access awareness and embedded and embodied energy. The result of the continual drain of attention while knowledge is being accumulated is that we may be knowledgeable but are not intelligent, in the sense of being wise. Jiddu Krishnamurti also talks about our capacity to be aware as intelligence and points to the relationship between that and knowledge. He writes, ‘Intelligence uses knowledge. Intelligence is a state in which there are no personal [conditioned] emotions involved, no personal opinion, prejudice or inclination. Intelligence is the capacity for direct understanding’. For Krishnamurti, intelligence is not an intellectual realization or a constructed assimilation of thoughts and ideas, conventionally known as knowledge, but is a capacity to be aware, sensitive, and clear; is a capacity to love, to act, and to be present to transformation of life from moment to moment.

Similarly, David Geoffrey Smith distinguishes wisdom from knowledge, showing that the former requires, as its precondition, the ‘essential unity between thought and emotion,’ and points out that such unity requires the discipline of mindfulness or contemplation. (The Chinese character usually translated as ‘mind,’ ideographically shows this unity, and should be translated as ‘heart-mind.’) Smith further illuminates the aims of education in various Eastern wisdom traditions:
'In Taoism it involves finding ‘the stillpoint’; in Buddhism, returning to your ‘original face.’ The practice of Way – and here the key word is practice, as one never quite reaches the goal completely, finally – leads to an awareness of how the smallest details of life play into the largest consequences and effects, and that it is therefore highly important to maintain vigilance over the details of one’s conduct, because how we get to her, today, depends on what happened yesterday, or indeed the moment just passed.'


The greatest educational challenge today is not downloading more, better, sophisticated knowledge and skills into students but helping them to cultivate the unity of heart and mind (and let’s not forget the embodied nature of this cultivation) through the work of awareness, and bring this unity fully into all contexts of their personal, communal, academic, and professional lives. The challenge is to infuse knowledge with awareness or mindfulness of which love and sensitivity are a part, and the result is, in short, wisdom. Can our schools, from kindergarten to university, be institutions of wisdom?”       Bai H, Cohen A, Culham T, et al. “A Call for Wisdom in Higher Education. Contemplative Voices from the Dao-Field.” in:
       Gunnlaugson O, Sarath EW, Scott C. eds. “Contemplative Learning and Inquiry Across Disciplines.” State Univ of New York Press 2014.

 

rwstanley   www.dpreview.com