Balance

     What is reasonable, appropriate, balanced, is context dependent. When a wildfire is closing in on their home, people should rush to gather family, pets, their most precious belongings, and escape as quickly as possible. However, a family going on vacation behaving as if a wildfire were closing in would clearly be unreasonable, inappropriate, unbalanced.

    For a variety of reasons, many have a distortedly pessimistic perception of their current & future context.
    Past traumas & ongoing traumas: racism, bullying, poverty, etc, lead to perceiving mainly danger, to great difficulty trusting anyone / anything, and being trapped in survival mode.
    News media almost exclusively focus on tragedy: murders, mass shootings, wars, fires, landslides, losses & misery of every kind. "Human interest stories" have devolved to this. The tremendous amount of kindness, good will, forgiveness, generosity & collaboration just to keep our busy transportation systems, factories, health-care systems & businesses running smoothly never seem to be newsworthy.
    Advertising firms earn billions convincing us that our only chance for happiness is through buying advertised products & services.
    Many unwittingly turn legitimate science into a fundamentalist religion. Secular materialist dogma preaches that science can & very soon will know EVERYTHING, & be able to control EVERYTHING. They furthermore assume that everything, including human beings, are nothing more than machines, arisen by chance, meaningless, and will inevitably disintegrate, end of story.

     A leading PTSD expert 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.  

    “William Blake said, ‘As a man is, so he sees.’ ... the way a person sees or understands him or herself deeply conditions the ways he or she sees & understands objects, others & the world.” Rupert Spira

     These potent influences (above) in which we are SATURATED have produced our profoundly unhealthy, unsustainable, toxic, left-hemisphere-dominant culture. Historically, whenever cultures became left-hemisphere-dominant, they quickly collapsed.
    Whenever the right hemisphere is dominant, cultures thrive and the left hemisphere serves an important but limited, supportive role. Iain McGilchrist spent 30 years researching, writing & speaking about hemispheric differences. From one of his many SUPERB interviews: Iain McGilchrist: "Wisdom, Nature and the Brain" - The Great Simplification #85 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dogVQDydRGQ 

    "... the most important parts of religious experience & practice, the consensus is, seem to be underwritten by the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is sort of necessary for systematizing it and turning it into a durable phenomenon such as Christianity or whatever it may be, Islam. But in doing so, it often over legalizes, makes over-certain, over-fixed what should be less certain, more fluid, more awe-inspiring, in fact.

    ‘Most human institutions, by the purely technical & 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

    I think we’ve lost the capacity for three very important things: a sense of awe or wonder; a sense of our own humility, or the humility we should have; and compassion. And I think these are the things that most religions that are real religions, or spiritual traditions that are true spiritual traditions, have in common, that they induce and rekindle in us a sense of wonder. They make us feel appropriately humble about what we can do & what we can know, and they increase our sense of oneness with and compassion towards the rest of the created world.
    Now I think that is what’s going wrong. I think we’ve completely failed to understand that religion is not about a matter of propositional belief, but dispositional belief. Belief is a matter of a disposition of your consciousness towards the world in a certain way. It’s not about propositions or six impossible things that you have to believe before breakfast. That’s not what religion’s about.
    And what I want to do in my work is take people from a standpoint where they will almost certainly be part of the culture that believes that only somebody rather simple or uneducated would think that there was a divine realm, to a position where they will see that only somebody who’s rather simple or uneducated would just want to rule that out. I’m not saying would become suddenly religious, but I think it’s extremely clear that people who either are fundamentalist religious or fundamentalist atheists are on the wrong track, and that they have more in common with one another than they have with true believing people. In any case, I just think that business of the ever-evolving, deeper relationship, a loving relationship with the world in all its manifestations, IS the secret of human wellbeing & happiness.
    And you say that there is now a different religion, that of economic growth and so on. … I’m sure you’re broadly right, and it reminds me of something that GK Chesterton said, that ‘When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything.’ ((DJT became a Republican "because Republicans will believe anything.")) And that ‘anything’ for them ((and DJT)) is their own power, to become more & more rich, powerful, wealthy. And that leaves out of the count just about everything that sustains human happiness. And in the seeking for it, they will never find happiness. As a psychiatrist, I can tell you that the most successful people, the richest people, the most powerful people are not the world’s happiest people.”
    Interviewer, Nate Hagens: “As a former high-net-worth stockbroker on Wall Street, I totally concur with that assessment.”
    Iain McGilchrist: "Wisdom, Nature and the Brain" - The Great Simplification #85 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dogVQDydRGQ

    Despite the US's second relapse into cave-man rule, wisdom & decency CAN & WILL prevail!

     "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

      “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. “The Zen of Living and Dying. A Practical and Spiritual Guide.” Shambhala, 1998. 

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

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

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

     "... everything yearns to be met. Everything yearns to resolve itself in love – that love being the open space of acceptance, of allowing, of staying resolutely present, and unconditionally open to every nuance of your inner experience." Amoda Maa. "Surfing the Heart of Darkness: Suffering as a Doorway to Liberation." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXlUsBYbv0w

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

 

 All that's obviously alive & seemingly inanimate, awaits our recognition & love, for we are ONE

Wisdom, Nature and the Brain

    In "Breakfast of Champions" Kurt Vonnegut writes: 
    “As for the story itself, it was entitled 'The Dancing Fool.' Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate. Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golf club.” 

    Imagine that you are an experienced swimming coach, and you come across a drowning person screaming & flailing ineffectually in deep water. You can't jump in & pull him out, all you can do is try to persuade him to shift from screaming & flailing to effectively, relatively-effortlessly swim to shore. But the drowning person is furious because you're 'wasting his time' with 'irrelevant nonsense.'

    "Most human institutions, by the purely technical & professional manner in which they come to be administered (left hemisphere dominance), end by being obstacles to the very purposes which their (usually right hemisphere dominant) founders had in view." William James

    The above illustrate the certainty of our left hemisphere, which typically fails to understand & obey the broader perspective, greater wisdom & thus better judgment of the right hemisphere. 

    A relatively brief excerpt from a superb recent Iain McGilchrist interview: "Wisdom, Nature and the Brain" - The Great Simplification #85 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dogVQDydRGQ

Iain McGilchrist (IM)    “Of course, I'm not suggesting that physically the brain has changed enormously since 2000 years ago. It will have changed a bit, because it's always evolving, but it's not that I'm referring to. It's that we use the brain in different ways. We can choose to listen to one part of the brain more than another. And I think that what happens as a society becomes a powerful civilization, a number of things happen. One is that it overreaches itself either in terms of its territory or its military and economic power. And in doing that, it needs to be able to control or thinks it needs to be able to control an ever vaster panoply of elements in human life. And to do that, it needs to simplify, to roll out, as we say, a bureaucratic system and so forth.
    So as a civilization becomes too large & overreaches itself, it moves more & more towards a kind of left hemisphere thinking that helps it with the map, the theory, the diagram of life rather than the actual business of life.
    And I think the other thing that happens, well, there are many things that happen... about half a dozen that I refer to in the preface to ‘The Master and His Emissary,’ and take much further in ‘The Matter with Things.’ But one is something that the great philosopher A.N. Whitehead said that ‘A civilization thrives until it overanalyzed itself.’ And I think what's happening in our world is we don't really live connected so much to nature. We don't live connected to a spiritual tradition. We don't live connected to our history & culture. Our art has become too intellectualized. It's become too conceptual, not powerful, visceral and metaphoric in its nature as most great art is. And so we've been cut loose and we're all kind of at a loss and when we try to talk to one another across these spaces, we tend to talk in very theoretical terms, so people talk about a theory of politics, a theory of economics, and a theory of how people behave and so on.
    Usually this is inaccurate, over simple. And so it's that that gets us into this frame of mind because the left hemisphere's message is money for old root. It's incredibly simple: that 'we are just apes competing for territory, money & power.' That's the left hemisphere's knowledge because, let me put it this way, the left hemisphere's raison d'être is to make us powerful, to help us grab things. It controls the right hand, which for most of us is the one which we do the grabbing and the manipulating, and it helps us maintain power. But all the rest of the understanding of everything else that humans are capable of, the life, the spirit, the life of morality, of beauty, of goodness, of truth, all these things are somehow left out of this picture and become somehow marginalized or trivialized as they have done, I believe in our culture at the moment.
    And so why I wrote ‘The Matter with Things’ was because I could see that we all agree there is something that is the matter with things. Very few people think everything's going fine right now, but it's also a notice of the facts that we overvalue matter in the most simple sense. I actually say that materialists are not people who overvalue matter. They're people who undervalue matter because matter is a very extraordinary thing. Matter is wonderful, but this kind of simple idea of matter is what we tend to overestimate the power of, the consciousness & the spirit, the mind is somehow a secondary secretion of matter which it cannot be, and that we've made a world up out of things, which is how the left hemisphere puts things together. Whereas I believe the importance in everything lies in relationship, not in what we call the things themselves that are related.”

     “I’m not sure that religion only comes from the right hemisphere, but I do think you’re right that the most important parts of religious experience & practice, the consensus is, seem to be underwritten by the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is sort of necessary for systematizing it and turning it into a durable phenomenon such as Christianity, Islam or whatever it may be. But in doing so, it often over-legalizes, makes over-certain, over-fixed what should be less certain, more fluid, more awe-inspiring, in fact.

I think we’ve lost the capacity for three very important things: a sense of awe or wonder; a sense of our own humility, or the humility we should have; and compassion. And I think these are the things that most religions that are real religions, or true spiritual traditions have in common - that they induce & rekindle in us a sense of wonder. They make us feel appropriately humble about what we can do and what we can know, and they increase our sense of oneness with and compassion towards the rest of the created world.
    Now I think that is what’s going wrong. I think we’ve completely failed to understand that religion is not about a matter of propositional belief, but dispositional belief. Belief is a matter of a disposition of your consciousness towards the world in a certain way. It’s not about propositions or six impossible things that you have to believe before breakfast. That’s not what religion’s about.

And what I want to do in my work is take people from a standpoint where they will almost certainly be part of the culture that believes that only somebody rather simple or uneducated would think that there was a divine realm, to a position where they will see that only somebody who’s rather simple or uneducated would just want to rule that out. I’m not saying would become suddenly religious, but I think it’s extremely clear that people who either are fundamentalist religious or fundamentalist atheists are on the wrong track, and that they have more in common with one another, than they have with true believing people. In any case, I just think that business of the ever-evolving, deeper relationship, a loving relationship with the world in all its manifestations, is the secret of human wellbeing & happiness.

And you say that there is now a different religion, that of economic growth and so on. … I’m sure you’re broadly right, and it reminds me of something that GK Chesterton said, that ‘When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything.’ And that ‘anything’ for them is their own power, to become more & more rich, powerful, wealthy. And that leaves out of the count just about everything that sustains human happiness. And in the seeking for it, they will never find happiness. As a psychiatrist, I can tell you that the most successful people, the richest people, the most powerful people are not the world’s happiest people."

Interviewer, Nate Hagens:     “As a former high-net-worth stockbroker on Wall Street, I totally concur with that assessment.”
    Iain McGilchrist interview: "Wisdom, Nature and the Brain" - The Great Simplification #85 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dogVQDydRGQ

    Reality may well be - OK, is almost certainly - infinitely more wonderful & complex than the bleak, simplistic black & white model to which our left hemispheres have reduced it to.
    “This is the kind of trick our minds sometimes play with history – the sort of extravagant romantic fantasy it can be such a temptation to fall for, of projecting our own imaginings and needs onto the realities of the world.”
    Peter Kingsley. “A Story Waiting to Pierce You. Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World.” The Golden Sufi Center, 2010.

 

“The rush & pressure of modern life are a form of violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” Thomas Merton

 

“My salvation is to hear & respond. For this, my life must be silent. Hence, my silence is my salvation.” Thomas Merton

 

"Try to be mindful, & let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange & wonderful things come & go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha." Ajahn Chah 

 

We are Called

    “In Europe there is a long tradition of telling, during long train journeys, one’s whole life story to complete strangers. It allows the heart to ruminate on matters we are fearful of broaching in the company of those it may concern.” David Whyte, “The Heart Aroused. Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America.” Crown Business, 2002.

    Now that to me sounds like a beautiful, meaningful adventure, for both storyteller and rapt listener. But in our present culture, honest meaningful self-disclosure and deep listening seems like a rare & precious gift - mostly found in highly-skilled psychotherapists' offices.

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

    “The human mind (ego) was not designed by evolutionary forces for finding truth. It was designed for finding advantage.” Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel laureate 

    Indeed, our usual way of being - perceiving, thinking, speaking & behaving - is more or less adversarial & at best transactional. Most of us are unconsciously trapped in primitive survival mode - not life but ego survival: opinions, status, popularity, influence, etc, resulting in at best shallow 'ordinary unhappiness.' While struggling to keep (our ego) from drowning, we cannot hear the gentle call of our heart towards truth.

    And yet, some of us can sense a great, wise, unconditionally loving force always subtly inviting us back to our authentic Self. Saints, mystics, artists, writers & poets are this force's messengers.

     Like we from time to time, Frodo finds himself desperately overwhelmed and understandably, just wants to back out of a dire situation, in the movie, "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” 2001 (Prime Video).
    Frodo: “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” 

    But Gandalf, the wise old wizard reminds Frodo - and all of us - of our vital role in the greater scheme of things.
    Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides the will of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring. In which case, you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.” 

“Your task is not to foresee the future,
but to enable it.”             Antoine de Saint-Exupery 

    These are dark times and each one of us is being called to remember & embody the very best in us! This involves: being aware of who & what is right here in front of us right now, sensing what is needed, and wisely, lovingly nurturing so that we may all collectively flourish.

    “It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing. It is not how much we give, but how much love we put in the giving.” Mother Teresa

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

“There is a light in this world,
a healing spirit more powerful
than any darkness we may encounter.
We sometimes lose sight of this force
when there is suffering, too much pain.
Then suddenly, the spirit will emerge
through the lives of ordinary people
who hear a call
and answer in extraordinary ways.”
Mother Teresa

    “There is more hunger for love & appreciation in this world than for bread.” Mother Teresa

    “The important thing is not to think much, but to love much, and so to do what best awakens us to love.” Saint Teresa of Ávila

    Many have ruined the term 'God,' hence the increasing use of less tainted, non-partisan, non-proprietary, more descriptive terms like love, force, truth, universal intelligence. Saints - like Mother Teresa, mystics, and serious meditators, contemplatives, artists, writers & poets still use the term 'God' in its original potent, meaningful manner:
    "Former CBS anchor Dan Rather found himself unprepared for a television interview with Mother Teresa. Ron Mehl described the newsman’s encounter:
    “When you pray,” asked Rather, “what do you say to God?”
    “I don’t say anything,” she replied. “I listen.”
    Rather tried another tack, “Well, okay … when God speaks to you, then, what does He say?”
    “He doesn’t say anything. He listens.”
    Rather looked bewildered. For an instant, he didn’t know what to say.
    “And, if you don’t understand that,” Mother Teresa added, “I can’t explain it to you.”

 

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:

Love - Far, Far More than just an Emotion

     To an old friend, who firmly considers himself a physicalist / materialist, I sent the following email:

                                                         

These quotes reveal some aspects of meaningful spirituality.

     “Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.” W.H. Auden

     “At the bottom of my grievance against a world gone mad, I discovered the vulnerable child who still didn’t know that love was fully available or truly reliable.” John Welwood. "Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships. Healing the Wound of the Heart." Trumpeter, 2006.

     “… what we resist makes us frightened, hard, inflexible, and what we embrace becomes transformed.” Jack Kornfield

     "I was born
      when all I once feared
      I could love.”                 Rābiʿah al-Baṣrī

     “I would define love very simply: as a potent blend of openness & warmth, which allows us to make real contact, to take delight in & appreciate, and to be at one with – ourselves, others, & life itself.
     ... love is the central force that holds our whole life together & allows it to function." John Welwood. "Perfect love, imperfect relationships. Healing the wound of the heart." Trumpeter, 2006.

     “No matter how sharp your intellect is,
      don’t forget to filter it through the heart of compassion
      before you manifest it in the suffering world.”                 Dzogchen Ponlop

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

     "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

     "The truth is, what one really needs is not Nobel prizes but love. How do you think one gets to be a Nobel laureate? Wanting love, that's how. Wanting it so bad one works all the time and ends up a Nobel laureate. It's a consolation prize.
     What matters is love."           George Wald - Nobel prize-winning biologist from Harvard

                                                         

     My friend responded to my email saying the quotes were "interesting," however "Love is an emotion to me, and not the secret of the universe." I suggested that he consider holding his present stance lightly - as an open question or koan.

    William James, a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential American philosophers, and the 'Father of American psychology' wrote:
    "I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness... much like a man who out of his whole bodily organism should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger...
    We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream."

    I've learned that love actually IS the secret of the universe, and much wiser folks than I, like Rabindranath Tagore, seem to agree:

“Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment.
It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.”

“Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.”

“Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom.”

     And Mahatma Gandhi wrote:
     “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth & love have always won. There have been tyrants & murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it – always.”

    “Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world; it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others & the world. It means remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated & exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation & exploitation. Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"The beautiful thing about compassion is that
when it spontaneously arises in you, an inner door opens
into an experience of love,
which is our part of our fundamental reality....
When the inner door opens, it becomes effortless to reach out and connect with others. This is why the greatest antidote to insecurity and sense of fear is compassion. It brings one back
to the basis of one's inner strength.
A truly compassionate person embodies a carefree spirit
of fearlessness,
born of the freedom
from egoistic self concern."
The Dalai Lama

 

Helen Hamilton: "The Ocean Of Loving Acceptance"