In our hectic lives, when we recognize anything familiar, we quickly name it, subconsciously assume that we know enough about it, and focus on what's next.If we're being honest, we actually know very little about most of the "roses we fail to stop to smell." Assumptions about "knowledge" are humbling. It's the brightest, most knowledgeablestudents who tend to suffer from "imposter syndrome" - where they doubt their knowledge and feel like frauds, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, some students who are in obvious danger of failing, are happily confident(Dunning-Kruger effect).
When we come across something radically unusual, instead of investigating it with curiosity & interest, many tend to write it off as an unimportant aberration. This is how scientific materialism deals with anything that can't bemeasured & quantified. That attitude may be reasonable in the midst of an experiment. But real scientistsshould be curious about & ideallyinvestigate anything that is clearly outside the scientific materialist paradigm.
“When the vague, implicit meanings are unpacked by an articulate mind attuned to them, and when the abstractions needed to conceptualize reality (left hemisphere) are informed by a wider, overall sense of context (balanced by the right hemisphere), then something that we might call genius, or at least insight, can occur.” Gary Lachman “Lost Knowledge of the Imagination.” Floris Books, 2017 Peter Brown's concise 108-page 2020 book, “The Yoga of Radiant Presence” ($13) gives an exceptionally clear, useful overview for anyone seriously interested in stepping through the "barrier" or, more accurately, "gateless gate" between our common, default ideas: small separate self & materialist worldview or "consensus reality" and themystics', saints', and ever-increasing numbers ofordinary folks' direct experience of Ultimate Reality:
“Spirituality is paradox. Reality, the actual condition, cannot beconceived of, described, written about, or imagined. Nothing is actually as it appears to be, or is held to be. Even to say that this is pure miracle or magicdoes not begin to capture it. Nevertheless, this book has been written for anyone who finds themselves driven to confront paradox, to challenge impossibility, and to try to penetratethisdeepest Mystery for themselves. Yoga is an ancient word, that means investigation for discovery of truth, of the actual nature of reality. The Sanskrit root means union or joining, and what is joined or unified is held to be one's separate self with the totality of being. In fact these are already one, and Yoga clearly reveals this to be so.
The Yoga presented here is distinguished by its technique, where the normal experience of the yogi, without any modification of behavior or circumstance, is the method of experiential engagement that leads to realization of the absolute.
This is effective because in fact it happens that your normal experience IS already the complete naked Presence of the absolute. This is ultimately discovered to be the case by directly noticing the inherent properties of your experience. Through Yoga these are discovered to be fundamentally beyond what you are normally used to imagining them to be, and are revealed to be essentially entirely miraculous.
The practice of Yoga is: Investigating the nature of reality by engaging with present experience intimately, sensitively, and intelligently."
The above is a pretty radical departure for most of us, because our "normal" is mostly regretting the past, worrying about the future, and sleep-walking right past "the roses" and all the other "ordinary miracles" of the present moment. “You have to go beyond all concepts. And you will find it in the stillness of your mind, in the quiet chambers of your mind when you go fromthe knownto the unknown, from the physicalto the spiritual … When you hear beyond the word, an inner light goes on and it brings out inner knowledge and wisdom, spiritual intelligence, before the contamination of human thought.” Sydney Banks, “Long Beach Lecture Series: The Great Illusion”
For a gentle entry into this, perhaps newish territory I recommend setting aside 30 minutes for uninterrupted attention to Helen Hamilton's video. She leads a gentle, guided "self-inquiry" meditation for 23 minutes. Then for 7 minutes she'll answer the first of several very worthwhile questions. Enjoy:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4bXew7umcc
Most of us assume that our identityis defined exclusively by: our name, age, body, family of origin, education, job, successes, failures, illnesses, ups & downs - ie "the story" about us that we keep telling ourselves & others. We've become habituated to an almost continuous level of self-concern - anxiety & fear about our comfort & survival as if alone in a hostile world.
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.
But what Van Der Kolk observed after severe trauma - preoccupation with managing fear, anxiety & unworthiness - is now almost ubiquitous in our society. This widespread unbalanced mindset, self-concept & worldview is what Iain McGilchrist has been studying, researching, writing & lecturing about for the past 30 years. He's found that ouranxious self-concernactivates & keeps us in left-hemisphere-dominant thinking WHICHoverridesour muchwiser, more balanced right-hemisphere-dominant perspective. Our current, as well as 3 previous global crises, arose due to left-hemisphere-dominant thinking.
Below is part of a recent interview with Iain McGilchrist MD, PhD about his perspective on the huge problems we face, based on his extensive studies & research findings, described in 2 monumental, critically-acclaimed books: "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" in 2019, and "The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World" in 2021. Here's a greatly abbreviated snapshot of, imho, his extremely important work:
“I see my work as essentially philosophy rather than something about the brain, but I think the divorce between philosophy and science has been a disaster for both parties, and I want to try and bring them together a bit in a way that I think could be helpful. Just a little bit about my progress or lack of it. I started off wanting to study philosophy and theology at university. I thought I would probably be ordained and go into a monastic order. But I discovered during the three years I was at Oxford that I wasn’t a very good candidate for monastic life. It wouldn’t have been good for me, and it wouldn’t have been good for the monastery. So that was ditched, and I got a fellowship which allowed me to explore all sorts of things. And I had a problem about the academic study of literature, because people took something that somebody had written in the past, that had great meaning, and that they had left to communicate something to us, and instead, we sat in the seminar room and took it apart. The piece of literature had its value because it was unique. The message was embodied and also implicit, not explicit. When you made it explicit, you lost the point completely, like explaining a joke. And in the seminar room we turned thisimplicit, embodied, unique thinginto something that was explicit, disembodied & with a message you could find anywhere. And that led me to write my first book, ‘Against Criticism,’ and I decided that what I needed to do is to find out more about the mind-body problem, because it seemed to me we were just too disembodied. I spent a lot of time in philosophy seminars on the mind-body problem, but it just seemed to me that the philosophers were far too disembodied in their approach. And around that time, Oliver Sacks had written a book called ‘Awakenings’ which I thought was very important. And he did two very wonderful things there, he went into individual cases in great detail, in order to show general points. This is a Goethean phenomenon. One of Goethe’s most important philosophical contributions is the idea that you don’t find the general by turning your back on the particular or the individual, but bygoing deeper into the particular in the individual. And he also seemed to me to be talking about what happened when the mind and body interacted in an odd way and something happened to the body and it changed the mind, or something happened in the mind and it had effects on the body. And the only way to know more about this was to study medicine, and so I did. And when I had qualified in medicine and was working at the Maudsley Hospital in London, which is probably the foremost psychiatric hospital in Britain, I heard a lecture one day by a colleague (John Cutting, whom I considered the most interesting living psychiatrist) who’d been studying the right hemisphere of the brain. It had never been my intention to study it, but he had done what lots of neurologists hadn’t done, which is to sit at the bedside of people who had had strokes, tumors or other injuries to the right hemisphere of the brain, and discovered that actually their consequences of this were more devastating for their ability to understand themselves, the world, or what was going on around them than a left hemisphere stroke, even though the left hemisphere most commonly made it difficult for them to use their right hand, to write, and to use language. So this was fascinating. And he told me in this lecture certain things that were based on a book, which was published by Oxford University press called, ‘The Right Cerebral Hemisphere and Psychiatric Disorders.’ He told me certain things that explained to me that the righthemisphere alone, really understands a unique case; that the left hemisphere has already taken whatever it is into a category, put it into a box, made it a representative of something rather than something unique in its own right. Also that the right hemisphereunderstood implicit meaning, irony, humor, metaphor, poetry, ritual, body language, facial expressions, the tone of voice, but the left hemisphere didn’t. It was more like a computer taking a book of syntax rules and semantics, and dictionary, and working out what people meant. And the third thing was that the right hemisphere was much more in touch with the body; the left hemisphere was effectively less so. I have to cut corners here enormously, but just to give you an idea which I think helps to explain why I ended up in this area. I went up to him afterwards and said this is very interesting, and I told him about the book I’d written about the philosophy of literature, and he wanted to read that. And that started a working relationship in which we researched hemisphere differences together. And I knew very, very well that this was a very risky thing to do. But I’ve got a perverse streak in me that if I think that there’s something here that’s really important, I’m not put off by people who say, ‘Oh that’s all rubbish. The thing about their brain hemispheres, it’s all been exploded. It’s all nonsense. It’s all pop psychology.’ Everyone warned me, ‘Don’t go into this.’ But of course it was true that what we then believed was wrong, but it didn’t mean that there were no differences, and the differences were fascinating. And it was the next 20 years of research, including neuroimaging at John Hopkins, & acquainting myself with the literature, & examining patients that led me to understand these hemisphere differences. And so these experiences were as an adjunct to a philosophical question about how we see the world, and what are the effective differences. I can put this as quickly as I can. For reasons of survival, all living creatures have to do 2 incompatible things at once. They have to be able to focus their attention on a detail so as to get it, and grab it, and eat it, or pick it up and use it, faster than anyone else, accurately. So a very clearly targeted, narrow beam of attention needs to be paid. But, if that’s the only attention you pay, then you don’t see the predators, you don’t see your kin, your conspecifics (organisms belonging to the same species), you just don’t understand where you are and you will not survive. So all the neural networks that we know, all the creatures, not just humans, but all the way down through mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish, birds, insects, everything that we know seem to have at least two centers of attention, dedicated to these two differences. And we think this goes back very anciently from examining fossils of trilobites and the most ancient living creature still extent ... And it’s already asymmetrical. So there’s something very, very important about different attention. Effectively, if you pay attention to the world in one way, you will see one thing, and if you pay a different kind of attention, you will see another. One of the things I would say is that attention changes the world. It actually makes the world that we experience – the only world that we can possibly know – different. And it also makes us different, because if we pay a certain kind of attention, we can become alienated from the worldORwe can become connected with the world, for a start.
What do these two kinds of attention result in in phenomenological terms? Well, the left hemisphere’s attention builds up a picture of a world that is made of isolated fragments that have no context and don’t mean anythinguntil they’re put together by us. We arrange them, and we probably put them in a little category. The left hemisphere is very keen on putting things in a little box where they all belong together. And so you have a world which is simply made of fragments. The fragments are static. They’re frozen by this gorgon-like stare of the left hemisphere to capture it. (in Greek mythology, the Gorgons were 3 monstrous sisters with snakes for hair who could turn someone to stone just by looking at them). And they have no particular meaning for us. We are not connected with them. We are very distant from these things because we’re observing them and ready to attack them. And they have nosort of implicit meaning or connection with other things. Whereas the right hemisphere sees a world in which everything is flowing, changing all the time, in which everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Nothing is ever completely isolated. And that when you take something out of its context, you radically change what it is, completely change it. You can in fact reverse the take, or the meaning, or the impact of what it is you’re looking at by decontextualizing it. So these 2 ways of looking at the world are in a way both necessary. They both have a use. BUT they have contradictory effects. And what I began to see was that in the world we live in, we ONLY use the left hemisphere’s kind of attention.
When I was in Baltimore at the Johns Hopkins Hospital I was imaging brains and looking at the abnormal asymmetry in the brains of people with schizophrenia. There is a normal symmetry in the brain that is absolutely normal – the brain is bigger at the front on the right, and bigger at the back on the left. But in schizophrenia, it’s often reversed or absent. And we think that is connected with the phenomena of the illness. While I was there, I got a message from my colleague John Cutting to say that there was a fascinating book ... called, ‘Madness and Modernism’ by Louis Sass, a psychologist at Rutgers in New York. What he showed was that in the modern period, people thought that their poetry, their stories, their paintings above all, & even their music, showed an aspect of something that was like what happens in schizophrenia. And in schizophrenia the world makes no sense. Things are no longer coherent. And he points to about 25 different phenomena that are seen in schizophrenia, but are also replicated in the last hundred years of philosophy, literature & art. I thought that this was absolutely fascinating. It’s a brilliant book and very well written. It may sound rather glib, but it isn’t. It’s extremely thorough and well thought through. And I began to think, if that’s happening now, we can’t all be getting schizophrenia, but I had already discovered that people with schizophrenia are very like people witha left hemisphere in overdrive and a right hemispherethat is not functioning properly. And again, I haven’t got time to go into that. But that led me to think, what’s happening nowis thatwe are not listening to what our right hemisphere tells us, only towhat our left hemisphere tells us. And then I thought, maybe there were other times in history when the balance was better. And I found in short that three times over Western history, starting with the Greeks and working forwards to post-modernism, there have been three times when a flourishing societybegan to drift more & more to the take of the left hemisphere before collapsing. So that is quite relevant for us, because I believe we’re in that terminal phase now, unless we wake up and see what it is we’re doing. It’s not enough to have a list of things to do, because if we don’tchange in our heart & our mind, if we don’tchange the whole way we look at the world, we can’t survive. That in an incredibly brief & simple way, is to try and explain why I think this subject is important.” Interviewer: “The way you describe it now, and in your books, really shows how our technological relationship to reality, what defines modernism, and also the kind of effectiveness of modernism, and the particularity of modernism, is very much related to the phenomena described withthe left hemisphere of the brain. And ... that our crises may be related to the one-sidedness of our culture. …” “The central thing is to do with values, because the value of the left hemisphere is in getting things, grabbing things, possessing things, having power over them, having control, and all the rest. It sees this tiny thing. It’s dedicated to something it already knows at once. But all the rest, the uncommitted attention to the whole, is yielded by theright hemisphere. And I sometimes put it like this, that the left hemisphere helps us apprehend the world, … whereas the right hemisphere helps us to comprehend the world, which is really to hold it together, perhaps to Big Life, but it’s a bit more than that. … This is the difference between them in their values, and so there’s something addictive about the left hemisphere, because it gives you power, it gives you control. Technology is the tool of the left hemisphere. But the important thing about technology is it’s neither good nor bad, it depends on the wisdom of the person who’s wielding it. And wisdom is what we’re leaving out of this picture. The right hemisphere is wise, and sees a lot. The left hemisphere isrelatively ignorant, so it sees literally less than the right hemisphere, understands much less and doesn’t see the need forwhat the right hemisphere knows. Whereas the right hemisphereseeing more, knows that its knowledge is limited, & knows that it needs the left hemisphere. So they have an unfortunate inequality, in which the one that should be in control – the right hemisphere, the master as I call it, the one that can see where we need to go, that can exert wisdom, isn’t in control. Instead, we’re driven bythe desire for stuff, for acquisition, for power, for control which is the left hemisphere’s raison d'être.” The Brain, the Sacred and the Soul - Iain McGilchrist & Thomas Steininger of Evolve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5g4tOu6Hgk
So when we're finally fed up with "the story of me," and are ready & courageous enough to experience who we really are, who has been witnessing all the changes over this lifetime of ours, who has been consistently aware of all the changes taking place in that mirror of ours, start meditating in earnest, including "open questioning" or "self-inquiry," and instead of being ruled by fear & aggression, loving wisdomwill guideus.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” Simone Weil
Can I allow myself to be deeplycurious? Can I reserve time to sit down, be still, silent, and simply observe what spontaneously arises; only to observe - no judging, pushing away, hanging onto, or otherwise getting entangled with the words, images & sensations that arise? My interest is not in what arises - not the content, but the source of all this stuff. This is a radical shift from automatically identifying with the content of 'self talk.'
So I gently, patiently keep accepting that the focus of attention keeps getting drawn to content, and refocus by silently wondering who is hearing this? Who is seeing this? Who is feeling this?
This 'self-inquiry' process is how meditators have, for a very long time, become acquainted, and gradually intimate with authentic self. This is the basis for shifting from our common mistaken identity of a fearful powerless child, abandoned in a hostile meaningless universe, toauthentic self: wise, still, silent, peaceful, joyous, kind, nurturing powerful elder. Ramana Maharshi. "How to Practice Self Inquiry." 2014.
After a lifetime of studying & practicing Buddhism, Sandy Huntington wrote as he was dying of pancreatic cancer: “I am learning the hardest of lessons: to no longer want more than what I am given, and to allow what I have been given to guide me through the purifying flames of love and grief into the brilliant darkness of unknowing.” C.W. Huntington Jr. “What I Don’t Know About Death. Reflections on Buddhism and Mortality.” Wisdom Publications, 2021. Deep & Excellent
Investigate how everything changes when you shift from fear to love, embodying your authentic self, intimately engaging with & nurturingall you deal with, in each present moment.
“To not be stingy with my life, with myself, is to fully express myself at every moment — fully express everything that I am.” Nancy Mujo Baker
"There is but one cause of failure and that is man's lack of faith in his true Self." William James
“I sat on the bank,
holding the stone, and tried to list to myself the motions that were at that
moment acting upon it: the Earth’s 700-miles-per-hour spin around its axis, its
67,000-miles-per-hour orbit about the sun, its slow precessional straightening
tilt within inertial space, and, containing all of that, the galaxy’s own
inestimable movement outward in the deep night of space.” Thomas Lowe Fleischner “The Way of Natural History”
"The first half of
life is preoccupied with adaptation, fitting in, learning roles and
expectations. These often necessary compromises with the world around us
seem to offer protection, acceptance by others, and anxiety management.
But over the years, they also become imprisoning structures, reflexive
responses, conditioned compliances. Accordingly, in the second half of life,
we are challenged to recover our personal authority.
Regaining personal, rather than acquired, authority is difficult and becomes
a continuing life’s work, so powerful and repetitive are the received
instructions and scripts. Personal authority requires sifting through the immense traffic that courses
through our minds every moment. Which
voices are those from my culture? Which from my family of origin? Which from my
soul? And then we must mobilize courage to act upon what is true.
While that sounds simple in the abstract, in practice, it is difficult because
it requires us to move into less familiar regions of choice and consequence. Even
when the old ‘authorities’ are constrictive, they remain attractive because
they are so often enhanced through repetition. Stepping into a larger frame, through dreamwork helps us move into a more authentic life, from the ineluctable consequences of fate to the
possibilities of destiny. Tilting that balance is the responsibility of consciousness
and the gift of depth psychology.
Journaling, active
imagination, and dreamwork are all forms of paying attention:
listening to the psyche as it manifests and realizing that someintelligence is therethat transcends ordinary ego intelligence. Something seeks to connect with us, something that
represents, if you will, the wisdom of nature. This idea does not necessarily
fit into the informed intelligence of our culture with which we must deal every
day, but it is something that is larger than this time and place. It is willing, in some way, to risk its investment
in us. How dare we, then, not undertake a journey to that which is seeking its
expression through us? When we do this, it may be a humbling process, but I
think it gives a
profound sense of personal purpose, depth, and dignity to our journey that no amount of outer accomplishments or
recognition by the world can ever equal; it gives that inner conviction that we are living our
journey as honestly and as faithfully as we can. All of us, I believe, are invited to
that journey and are always equipped by nature for it. And we can thank
depth psychology, and specifically the work of Jung, for giving us some of
these tools with which to address it. When we do, we will find that the wisdom
of the ancients is once again present to each of us.
The human psyche, differentiated as mind, body,
spirit, and soul, is a self-regulating system. You are not governing
your parasympathetic nervous system right now, but some agency within you
clearly is. We all forget the wonder of this self-regulating system, take it
for granted, and abuse it. Something
in us always knows what is right for us
and is undertaking measures to bring that confluence of will and nature about,
even as it may be oppressed by the burdens and incursions of the outer world or
opposed by our behaviors or treatment plans. The psyche is also compensatory:
in daily life, complex-driven choices move us to one side or the other, while
other energies seek to bring us back in line, back to our centering systems.
We are equipped for the journey. We possess the resilience of our ancestors who clung
to this spinning orb, tumbling through measureless space, and we survive … rich
for all that has accumulated on our journey." James Hollis. “Living Between Worlds. Finding
Personal Resilience in Changing Times.” Sounds True, 2020.
Handling even a cup as gently as if it were an eggshell “is a practice which reflects back on you. The world is a mirror. Whatever quality you put out will be reflected back to you. This is what mindfulness is all about: to be well aware of the condition in here (hara / dan tien - in the center or core of the body, 2 inches above the navel), and make sure that what you give out is of the same nature. If you want to live peacefully, give peace. If you want chaos, put chaos out there and you’ll soon get it back. If you are wise, you learn to be very, very gentle in almost everything you do. Then you get that subtlety of feeling, and it is the subtlety that matters most. It means slowing down somewhat. Not allowing immediate response. Wait. Be gentle. Does it really need a response? If it does, take it gently. There’s no need to be tough. And also, whatever you do, give it your full, undivided attention. Often you come to know rather than understand. Thought has its place; nobody is denying this. There are times when we need to think about things, but if those times are not present, we don’t have to think. If you stop thinking about them, they will still be there when you need them. But in between thoughts, you can learn to experience what is there. That is where living takes place. In thought there is no living, only delusion. If you give your whole attention, your wholehearted attention to any person, if only momentarily, you’ll see how they respond and blossom. They will feel, ‘I am recognized, I am a somebody.’ But if you give half-hearted attention, whilst you’re thinking of something else, they’ll feel, ‘I’m not here; I am not being recognized.’ People need that recognition. The same applies to household tasks: dusting, polishing, washing the floor, washing the dishes, and so on. Give them your full attention, don’t think of other things. The now is all there is, so learn to live in it. And surprise, surprise, when you do, all fear disappears. The alternative is to live in fear all the time, through being concerned about what might happen next. But if you are only in the now there is no next moment. Strangely, you can move through time with this attitude – with full attention here, there, there, there, there – but it’s all one continuous moment. There is no tomorrow. Am I really saying that you should give your whole attention – with a loving aspect – (even) to a piece of crockery? Yes. As if it were a living creature. In the moment of doing, the object reflects your love back to you by virtue of its mirror action. Try it and see ... Whenever you come to do these tasks, be it washing the dishes or washing your socks or stockings, whatever, do them with your whole attention just for those moments; gently, carefully, as if you’re dealing with a living creature. Observe how you feel and you’ll find it’s really worthwhile. A lot of extraneous thoughts disappear, things that would otherwise worry you, so that you have a contented mind which you carry with you to the next activity. You begin the new task contented, free from agitation, and see things more clearly, so you’re able to deal with every situation better. You don’t have to do anything special, just the things you normally do, but with your full attention. You might forget to do it of course – if so, try again and watch how the process works. Once you realise how it works, and once you experience its benefits, you’ll continue to do it. It’ll enter into different parts of your life more and more and you will be much more content. ... You’ll become much more friendly to other people and they will begin to respond, after a period of time, if not immediately. Some people take longer than others. ... Generally, this is the way we can begin to change ourselves, in little everyday things that don’t require a great deal of effort at all. Where possible, we should give ourselves a bit of time and sit down for 10 minutes, be still, quiet, and allow things to subside and to feel deep within ourselves the still peacefulness from which the nurturing arises. Just like that. There’s a bit of a joke here: it’s been said that Buddhist monks spend their time contemplating their navels. Actually, there is a lot to be said for that, because that’s where that still small space is, deep within the body (hara / dan tien). If you allow your consciousness to drop down into that area and be more peaceful and expansive in consciousness, you find it is very warm and comforting and that it takes you away from the ‘thinking box’ for a while. So in that way you can learn to be still. You don’t have to try to stop your thoughts; they will cease on their own when you become complete within that wholeheartedness. They just stop by themselves. If you try to stop them, that would be suppression and not a good thing. But even if they don’t stop, it’s okay because you see them as peripheral, on the sidelines. When you are down there (hara / dan tien), thoughts don’t really matter. So we learn to live with our basic nurturing instincts, in a more homely way. We begin to base ourselves there rather than in our thoughts, and then we find that even our thoughts begin to change in their nature into a much better form. We can bring about a great deal of change within ourselves without a great deal of concentrated effort. It doesn’t require effort – just a quiet casual way of doing things, but with full attention.” Russel Williams, edited by Steve Taylor. “Not I, Not other than I. The Life and Teachings of Russel Williams.” O-Books, 2015.
“Love is the quality of attention we pay to things.” J.D. McClatchy “In essence, mindfulness – being about attention, awareness, relationality, and caring – is a universal human capacity akin to our capacity for language acquisition. It is a way of being in wise and purposeful relationship with one’s experience, both inwardly and outwardly, with oneself and with others. Thus there is an intrinsic social dimension to its cultivation as well. It usually involves cultivating familiarity and intimacy with aspects of everyday experience that we often take for granted." Jon Kabat Zinn During meditation “you are not escaping the world; you are getting ready to fully embrace it.” Christine Skarda
“Mindfulness is a kind of balanced awareness — we're open to things as they are, with acceptance and nonjudgment. But when it's incomplete we can open to things as they are and not see the bigger picture of the pain in the world. When we understand and open to that pain, our own and others’, the only thing that makes sense is compassion. Compassion means we use our clear seeing in the service of the alleviation of suffering.” Michelle Beckerhttps://www.eomega.org/article/being-kind-wont-make-you-weak
"Mindfulness does not reject experience. It lets experience be the teacher. With mindfulness, we can enter the difficulties in our life and find healing and freedom." Jack Kornfield "Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough." George Washington Carver
"Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” Claude Monet
“One learns through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.” Mark Twain
"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 Intimacy is what practice is all about: the realization of the essential lack of distinction between self and other that inevitably leads to wisdom and compassionate action. Intimacy with the depth of our being – authenticity – is the essential first step. Then, with the help of loving-kindness meditation, we bring intimacy into our relationships with others, starting with those dearest to us and moving on to those who don’t seem dear at all. We can grow in intimacy to include everyone around us, all of society, the whole world and all the beings it contains. Modified from the description of Pat Enkyo O’Hara’s book: “Most Intimate: A Zen Approach to Life's Challenges.” Shambhala, 2014.
“… scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility & manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter & energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.” Paul Kalanithi MD. “When Breath Becomes Air.” Random House, 2016. "The essential dynamic of the shadow patriarch (dark side of male energy), whether operating within a man or woman, is the unrelenting drive to power, dominance, and control. In many ways this attempts to compensate for the loss of connection, love, & belonging, and ultimatelyfor the loss of an ability to feel intimacy with life.”Thanissara “It’s great if we become a super cool meditator ... but if the heartisn’tfree from suffering – or at least moving in that direction – we may have missed the point. In other words, we need to reflect on the results. What are the effects of meditation practices in my life? Are wholesome qualities of heart increasing – like generosity, kindness, & wisdom? Are unwholesome ones – greed, hatred, & delusion – decreasing?" Kittisaro
“Love is the bridge between you and everything.” Rumi
“If you judge people (* including yourself *), you have no time to love them.”Mother Teresa “The love & attention you always thought you wanted from someone else, is the love and attention you first need to give to yourself.” Bryant McGill
“It’s not a luxury
to feel loved and cared for — it’s what makes us emotionally secure. If
it didn’t happen when we were children, meditation can help us develop a
secure emotional base now. …
connecting with our true nature in order to gradually make our minds
freer is a real possibility. And that same capacity for attunement
translates into more genuine connections.” Tara Bennett-Goleman PhD “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek & find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”Helen Schueman
• Self Inquiry (Part 1: Ramana Maharshi, Adv... 
