Toward Our Unconfused True Nature

    A palpable joyous energy animates us when we're open to our own depth. YET far too much of our life is a meaningless energy drain - which we've learned to quickly rationalize!

     “… wisdom broadly defined is the understanding & practice of the full profundity of what it means to be human …” Michael C. Kalton

     "… what others accept as wisdom, we need not accept ourselves unless we have independently confirmed it to be so; and what we may believe to be wisdom will not be so for others. It may even be that what will appear as wisdom to us now may not be so a year after our present epiphany. Buddhism teaches that when examining its doctrinal explanations of wisdom, remembering these points is essential to the examination and to the development of wisdom itself.
     … it is worthwhile to engender a spirit of inquiry, discovery & experience." Ari Goldfield

     “... there are three categories of worldview: Preconventional, Conventional, and Postconventional, each with its own sense of wisdom and morality.
     The Preconventional worldview is rooted in the notion that those with superior power determine what is true, wise, and good. You know an action is good because compliance is rewarded, and resistance is punished. Wisdom is the system that identifies what is good and what is not based on reward and punishment, and truth is simply that set of ideas insisted upon by those with the power to enforce them.
     In Preconventional worldviews right and wrong are determined by power and personal satisfaction. In Conventional worldviews a more sophisticated level of thinking is required that subsumes individual happiness to group cohesion. The community rather than the powerful individual determines what is good and true and wise. Adherence to the community’s rules and laws, rather than the often arbitrary whim of the powerful, now constitutes morality. This is the worldview to which most people ascribe … The central teaching of the Conventional worldview is that wisdom and morality lie with group conformity.
     The worldview of the wisdom sages falls into the Postconventional category. The Postconventional thinker seeks to identify universal moral principles, and to use these to guide her actions. The Hebrew Wisdom sages did not find wisdom in the covenant with God, the sacrificial service of priests, or even the revelations of prophets. They were independent observers of life, and their teachings reflected what they saw to be true rather than what the official arbiters of truth insisted is true. … life is more than a matter of trusting in God, adhering to the commandments, or even doing good and receiving good. Life was, and is, a wild chaotic struggle for survival that can be neither tamed nor avoided, only well traveled.
     Creation is irreducibly wild … chaotic and unformed. There is no conquering the chaos of life. There is no avoiding the terror of merely being alive. There is only learning how to make meaning in the madness. … Whatever justice and order there may be in the universe it is beyond the limited anthropomorphic fantasies of the conventional worldview. … A vast and wild universe transcends human categories of justice. It isn’t that life has no meaning, but that only when you see life for what it is are you able to make meaning in the midst of it. Yet seeing the truth can be frightening, and our initial response may be to hide from it.” Rami Shapiro

     “the more one is in tune with one’s inner self, the more natural and more fluid are one’s actions.” Livia Kohn

“Making mistake after mistake, I walk on the authentic path,
Forgetting and forgetting, I rely on unforgetting mindfulness,
Experiencing confusion after confusion, I search for the unconfused true nature.”
                                                                                                                                                            Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso 

      Roger Walsh ed. “The World’s Great Wisdom: Timeless Teachings from Religions and Philosophies.” State Univ of New York Press, 2014.

 

Awaking from Conventional Slumber

     “At some point the hero’s conventional slumber is challenged by a crisis, an existential confrontation that calls previous beliefs and ways of life into question. The call can come from within or without. Outer physical crises may take the form of sickness, as with come shamans; a confrontation with sickness in others, as with the Buddha; or suddenly staring death in the face. 
     An inner call may take the form of a powerful dream or vision, as with some shamans, or of a deep heartfelt response to a new teacher or teaching. It may also emerge more subtly as ‘divine discontent’: a growing dissatisfaction with the pleasures of the world or a gnawing question about the meaning of life. No matter how this challenge arises, it reveals the limits of conventional thinking and living, and urges the hero beyond them. In our culture, this may appear as an existential or midlife crisis. Tragically, the deeper causes and questions of the crisis are rarely recognized, its potentials rarely fulfilled, and one of life’s great opportunities is then missed. 
     As Jesus said, ‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’ Indeed, few choose to even recognize the call. And no wonder! For those who hear the call now face a terrible dilemma. They must choose whether to answer the call and venture into the unknown realms of life to which it beckons, or deny the call and retreat into their familiar cocoon. If the call is denied then there is little choice but to repress the message and its far-reaching implications. Only by such repression can non-heroes fall again into the seductive, anesthetic comforts of conventional unawareness, suppress the sublime and sink into what the philosopher Kierkegaard so aptly called ‘tranquilization by the trivial.’ The result is a life of unconsciousness and conformity, which existentialists call inauthentic living and alienation.”

        Roger Walsh. “The World of Shamanism. New Views of an Ancient Tradition.” Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, Minnesota, 2007.