Saying YES! to EVERYTHING!

    “Contemplation is being open to all of the reality we can stand.” Richard Rohr

    YES. AND we're more deeply conditioned than we realize, to quickly, instinctively say NO! to anything unpleasant, uncomfortable, painful, distressing, and even 'different' than what we're used to! A LOT of today's reality is far from likeable and very difficult to accept! So mostly unconsciously, we tend to shrink back & shrivel up, further & further away from the full spectrum of reality.

    “The smart way to keep people passive & obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” Noam Chomsky, “How the World Works”

    A rigid defensive posture - whether self & or externally imposed - imprisons us in a small, narrow, constricting, supposedly 'safe' box. 'Ordinary unhappiness' or much worse, is the inevitable result. We feel trapped, like a caterpillar stuck in a cocoon. Fearful defensiveness easily turns into offensiveness, and much worse - the violent polarization in politics, race, religion, social media, etc & the endless slaughter of wars that we witness on the news daily.
    Brian McLaren's 45-minute overview from a Developmental Psychology / Mystical Christian perspective is imho excellent : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TrhL8VOUB0 .
    Kelly Noonan's 2017 (1hr 46min) documentary "Heal" on Netflix is also imho very applicable & well worth watching : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5239942/ 

    “Of all the ways you can limit yourself, your own self-definition is the most powerful.” Michael Crichton

    "Letting go of our suffering is the hardest work we will ever do. It is also the most fruitful. To heal means to meet ourselves in a new way - in the newness of each moment where all is possible and nothing is limited to the old." Stephen Levine

    By saying YES! to ALL of life's 10,000 joys AND 10,000 sorrows we free ourselves, spread our wings, and fly!

    Mindfulness practice - and really all deep spiritual practice - is about "cultivating a certain kind of intimacy with the core of our being."
Jon Kabat-Zinn PhD
    Gradually we learn to practice remembering, feeling, recognizing & re-connecting with who / what we can sense we are in the depths of our being – our true self – love.

    "Wisdom comes when we live from the heart. It’s the recognition that love is the only power that is moving any of this." Jac O’Keeffe

    “A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness into the intricate web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole. You can call this web ‘God, the Tao, the Great Spirit, the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father,’ but it can be known only as love.” Joan Z. Borysenko PhD

    THIS is the mystics' level of consciousness, expressed in Rumi's
"The Guest House" :

"This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond."

     “I share poetry when speaking about mystery, because as a great poet said, ‘You can’t get the news from poetry, but men and women die every day from lack of what is found there.’
    Poetry connects us to the mystery. This is in the same spirit as Buddhist texts that begin with the words, ‘O Nobly Born, remember who you really are, you are the sons and daughters of the awakened ones.’ You are in the lineage of those who have awakened before you. Look directly at the mystery of love and existence. It is your birthright to remember freedom and awakening.
    ‘If I had influence with the good fairy who’s supposed to preside over the birth of all children, I should ask her gift to each child in the world a sense of wonder so indestructible it would last throughout their life.’ Rachel Carson
    This is one of the gifts of poetry. We can meditate to quiet the mind, we can calm ourselves, we can de-stress, and we can see in new ways. And with this mindful presence, poetry invites a sense of wonder and mystery, and with that, an opening to love.”
    Jack Kornfield https://jackkornfield.com/poetry-of-awakening-navigating-the-great-mystery/?mc_cid=f635f4b32e&mc_eid=cd718e6a49

 

      "Imagine love wants to see
your true face
    Imagine that nothing matters
except love
    Imagine love as you
    Imagine love as everything
you’ve ever given attention to
    Imagine love abides in difference
    Imagine love as a force
that gives us meaning
    Imagine love abhors a vacuum
    Imagine love wants to know love
    Imagine everything matters
because love is real
    Imagine love is a power
uncontainable & inconceivable
    Imagine love as language, as selfless action,
as water, as purslane, as voles, as dragonflies, as wind
    Try to imagine a love
able to rise whole into thin air,
invisible to our eyes
holding our entire awareness
on the thin new blade
of a brightness soon to come
    Imagine the imperfections of love
that love adores
    Imagine love imagining
your radical truth &
trusting your courage
your vision
your journey
to recognize
your self
in vastness."              Poem by Qayyum Johnson

 
        “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

     More about love : http://www.johnlovas.com/2022/11/calling-all-wise-elders.html

Yuval Noah Harari, "What it Means to be Human" (in 3 minutes!)

 

Nurturing Our Troubled World

     “A beautiful prophecy they tell in the Andes and in the Amazon is called the prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor. They say that this is the time when the Eagle People – people like you & I, who perceive life primarily through the mind – at this time in history will reach a kind of zenith. They’ll use the mind, and tools to even extend the capacity of the mind. That’s probably a prophecy about computers & artificial intelligence. And we will be materially rich beyond any previous generation’s imagination. But we will be spiritually impoverished to our peril and our very survival will be at risk. While the Condor People – which refers to indigenous people, who live primarily through the wisdom of the heart, the five senses, and inhabit the spirit world as their primary home – they will have reached a kind of zenith & sophistication in their skills & their way of life, but they will be materially impoverished to their peril and encounter with the Eagle world, and their survivability will also be at risk. And they say that at this time in history – the beginning of the third millennium (this is the 1st century of the 3rd millennium) the Eagle People and the Condor People will begin to fly together in the same sky, and the world will come back into balance.
     But the change after hundreds of years of domination of the Eagle People over the Condor People, from the 4th pachakuti, the pachakuti of dominance & darkness, (between ~1492 to 2000), changing to the 5th pachakuti, the pachakuti of balance & light (a pachakuti is a 500-year period of time). This change from the 4th to the 5th pachakuti will take, they say, 25-50 years, and during that time, Pachamama (their name for Mother Earth) will humble all her creatures with huge climactic events – earthquakes, temperatures rising, fires, floods, tsunamis – to humble all her creatures so they remember their rightful role in relationship with her, going into the pachakuti of balance & light. So this time of climactic turmoil and huge crisis with our climate has been predicted for thousands of years by the indigenous people as a way that the Mother is humbling us, in some cases destroying us, but humbling us so that we will find a rightful role of integrity with her as we go into the 500 years of balance & light, where the Eagle and the Condor fly together – the prophecy about the Pachamama Alliance. They say that this is a huge transitional period, this roughly 25 to 50 years, where we are receiving massive feedback from the Mother. They say the pandemic is part of this feedback, an announcement from the Mother. So everything comes from the earth, everything – the computer, the pen I’m writing with, everything we know, including the pandemic. That virus impacts only one species, of the millions of species on the planet, only one species gets sick from it, and that’s us. Why is that?
     They say that the pandemic is an announcement, it’s not a punishment. It’s an ally, it’s halting us, interrupting our way of life so we have to stop and think, re-source, re-check, re-generate who we are for the next 500 years.
     I call it morning sickness for our pregnant species, that’s pregnant for its own rebirth. When a woman is pregnant but doesn’t know she’s pregnant, and she’s vomiting in the morning, and feeling tired by 2 o’clock, and wanting weird things, and feeling very out of sorts, she actually considers herself sick.
     But if she finds out she’s pregnant, then she’s no longer sick – she’s having a baby. She’s still throwing up, but delighted that she’s going to have a baby. And I say that the pandemic is our morning sickness for a pregnancy that we’re entering into as a species, to re-birth ourselves, co-labour, both men and women collaborate into our next evolutionary leap, into what it means to be a human being. All pregnancies do not produce a baby. There are miscarriages, there are stillbirths, all kinds of things. This is a metaphor. The indigenous people say how we hold this interruption – the pandemic, the climate crisis – is not happening to us, it’s happening for us as feedback, so that we will make the changes necessary to survive. And if we don’t we’ll go extinct. These changes are harsh, but gentler than they could be, but are forcing a transformation."
     Lynne Twist (1hr 35min) interview: https://batgap.com/lynne-twist/

The Butterfly Story - A Metaphor for Humanity in Crisis
by Elisabet Sahtouris, Evolution Biologist & Futurist
http://www.sahtouris.com/#5_3

     “A caterpillar can eat up to three hundred times its own weight in a day, devastating many plants in the process, continuing to eat until it’s so bloated that it hangs itself up and goes to sleep, its skin hardening into a chrysalis. Then, within the chrysalis, within the body of the dormant caterpillar, a new and very different kind of creature, the butterfly, starts to form. This confused biologists for a long time. How could a different genome plan exist within the caterpillar to form a different creature? They knew that metamorphosis occurs in a number of insect species, but it was not known until quite recently that nature did a lot of mixing and matching of very different genome/protein configurations in early evolutionary times. Cells with the butterfly genome were held as disc-like aggregates of stem cells that biologists call 'imaginal cells', hidden away inside the caterpillar’ all its life, remaining undeveloped until the crisis of overeating, fatigue and breakdown allows them to develop, gradually replacing the caterpillar with a butterfly! 
     Such metamorphosis makes a good metaphor for the great changes globalisation, in the sense of world transformation, is bringing about, as Norie Huddle first used it in her beautiful book Butterfly. Our bloated old system is rapidly becoming defunct while the vision of a new and very different society, long held by many 'imaginal cell' humans who dreamt of a better world, is now emerging like a butterfly, representing our solutions to the crises of predation, overconsumption and breakdown in a new way of living lightly on Earth, and of seeing our human society not in the metaphors and models of mechanism as well-oiled social machinery, but in those of evolving, self-organizing and intelligent living organism.
     If you want a butterfly world, don't step on the caterpillar, but join forces with other imaginal cells to build a better future for all!”