Curiosity, Acceptance & Nurturing

"May I develop complete acceptance and openness
to all situations, and emotions, and to all people.
May I experience everything nakedly, completely
without mental reservations and blockages.
May I never withdraw from life or centralize onto myself.
May my heart be laid bare & open to the fire of all that is."
Reginald A. Ray

 

    Our acceptance & openness needs to INCLUDE the MANY daily random accidents, screw-ups & irritants like stubbing our toe, dropping, spilling & breaking things, losing keys / wallets / phones, burning & ruining meals, crazy random digital errors, loooong 'holds' on the phone, near impossibility contacting health-care providers, trades people & most companies ... We REGULARLY encounter a LOT of situations that very easily annoy, frustrate, irritate & anger us, even if / after we feel we've successfully 'dealt with' (fully processed) the real biggies in our life ie past major traumas.

    But our acceptance & openness ALSO needs to INCLUDE ongoing inescapable major traumas like chronic pain, prolonged disability, incurable illness & death of loved ones, friends and our self! These can & do cause "shipwrecks" - at least one of which is pretty much guaranteed if you live beyond 60. Do see : https://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.com/2013/07/361-beyond-stress-management-resilience.html

    Aversion to all that we fear / dislike / can't control is common & understandable, but is at best only a short-term band-aid. Clinging & chasing after things we like, think we need or must have is also common & understandable, but easily becomes obsessive eg addictions, and there are many "entrepreneurs" to feed our hunger to escape (see the 2023 miniseries "Painkiller" on Netflix). But it's a meaningless delusion to see our identity just a meat-machine that avoids undesirables & chases after desirables. "The one who dies with the most toys wins" is desperately simple-minded.

     Our ONLY WORTHWHILE OPTION is repeatedly remembering our true nature and repeatedly embodying it by BEING a NURTURING PRESENCE to others & the environment no matter how annoying, great or persistent the challenge. This is simply being natural, true to whom / what we are - like birds flying in the air and fish swimming in water. 

    We see great nurturing when parents really know their children and spend quality time with them by providing all that they require to optimally express their natural talents and mature into healthy, balanced, self-sufficient, caring, intelligent, pro-social adults. 

    Nurturing has NOTHING TO DO WITH stuffing them full of candies & fast food; indulging them with as much screen time as they want; throwing money at them to blow shopping online or at the mall; buying them all sorts of toys & clothes - there is no quality time here - just spoiling and creating helpless, hopeless, miserable perpetual infants. The worst fear of wealthy parents is their kids "growing up to be assholes." This fear easily becomes a reality if parents don't have the wisdom & energy to spend quality time with their kids.

    EVERY stage of life has its own challenges. During our youth, we try so hard to learn and become competent & competitive to get by in this fast-moving world. During our middle years, we try so hard to establish a career, a home life, have & raise kids, pay our bills, maybe even live a little, put a bit of money away for retirement ... During our later years, we're dumbfounded that life went by so fast; if we're fortunate enough, we can help raise grandchildren; again, if we're fortunate enough, we have the inclination to devote our time & energies on NURTURING our own & loved ones' spiritual maturation / evolution of consciousness, rather than wasting our time wallowing about our progressively declining physical & mental health.

    “… for each & every one of us, we have circumstances in our lives that are chaotic, out of our control, outside of the box of what we think of as practice. And that is actually your deepest practice.
    The Buddha talked about this precious human birth. It’s precious for all of us, it has the most exquisite balance of dukkha (challenging situations) & easefulness. We’re not so overwhelmed by suffering that we’re lost and drowning, or we’re not so lost in the pleasure, either. It’s got this balance that keeps us needing to find a deeper happiness and having the resources to look.
    This birth the Buddha talked about as the precious human birth is rare and it’s precious. And it’s precious for all of us, even those of us who don’t have the conditions in our lives to go on many or any retreats.
    There’s something about practicing with the chaos of life, & the realities of our difficult, complicated relationships & situations that we’re faced with in day-to-day life that can move us very deeply and force us to feel things we might not otherwise feel. It also helps us see that it’s good to be alive and in the world and feel it and really land in this human experience fully and recognize it as a shared thing.” Cara Lai https://www.dharma.org/cara-lai-dharma-talk/

     Four wise teachers & authors immediately come to mind when I think of inspiring survivors of major trauma. I've quoted them all in my quickly searchable blogs:

    Amoda Maa : “Embodied Enlightenment. Living Your Awakening in Every Moment.” Reveal Press, 2017.

    Isira : "Buddha on the Dance Floor." ‎ Living Awareness, 2014.

    Gabor Matte : “The Myth of Normal. Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture.” Alfred A. Knopf, 2022.

    James Finley : “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation.” Orbis, 2023.

 

    James Finley on the alchemy of transforming the lead of trauma into spiritual gold:
    “(After graduating from high school, I escaped from a lifetime of psychological & physical abuse by my alcoholic father by entering a monastery. But there) I was sexually abused by one of the monks – a priest, my confessor, who Merton thought very highly of - everyone thought very highly of this person. And I had a breakdown. I became extremely dissociative, paranoid.
    I worked (looking after the pigs at the monastery). … The boar walked out on the ice, and it fell through the ice of this little lake in the woods, and drowned. I felt as I was walking around, I felt I was unraveling, and that sanity was like thin ice over icy-cold black water, and it was cracking, and if I fell through, because of my trauma history, I might never find my way back again. So I left (the monastery). I didn’t tell the abbot what happened. I didn’t tell Thomas Merton what happened. I didn’t tell John Hughes, who was a psychiatrist. I just left.
    So here’s a lesson. How can we learn to be healed from all that hinders us from experiencing the steady strong currents of divinity that flow on & on in the bitter-sweet alchemy of our lives? The alchemy is just not how phases of happiness can unexpectedly become precipitously sad – it was frightening. Nor is it something so sad that can suddenly break wide open with liberation, like an unexpected gift, or love, or presence, or a child. It isn’t just the rhythm of darkness and light, or birth and death, or the rhythms of your life, the rhythms of my life. Rather, the alchemist of old were trying to turn lead into gold. And lead into gold is how do we turn the unrelenting, unforeseeableness of life, how can we learn to experience the steady strong currents of divinity that flow on and on and on so unexplainably, that brought me and brought all of you up to this very moment that I’m talking right now? How has this come to pass? And how can I learn to find my way to this groundedness that’s always there? And finding my way to it, how can I abide in it? And how can I learn to share it with others?

 
    So I’d like to end with a story. … This hermit heard a knock at his door, and when he opened it, it was a mother and a father with their little girl. And the parents apologized for intruding on his solitude, but said to the hermit, ‘As you can plainly see, an evil wizard has turned our daughter into a donkey. And we would like you to pray over her, so we can have our daughter back.’
    The hermit said, ‘I see. Come in, come in, come in.’ And he had them sit off to the side, and he asked the little girl if she was hungry and would like something to eat. She said she would like that. And so he was talking to her while he prepared a meal for both of them, and they sat down. And he asked her about herself – about things about her life and so on. 

    And as the parents were watching how lovingly he spoke to the little girl, and how attentive he was to her, they suddenly realized the evil wizard did not cast a spell on their daughter, turning their daughter into a donkey, the evil wizard cast a spell on them to believe that their daughter was a donkey. 

    And so when they left, they were so relieved and grateful, having their daughter back, and the little girl was so relieved because it’s very hard to be a little girl when your parents think you’re a donkey, especially if because you’re a child, and to avoid the confusion, you start believing it yourself. There’s like a shame-based, traumatized place within yourself, that you don’t know what to do about it. 

    The deep healing that that little girl and her parents experienced in this story bears witness to the deep healing that I hope we are exploring together here today.”
    James Finley "Becoming a Healing Presence in a Traumatized World" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu97TxU7mW4&t=6s

 

 

Another glorious morning shines down on us ...

Seriously?

    When I intentionally (or unintentionally) say or do something silly in front of my 7-year-old granddaughter, she gives me that look and exclaims, "Seriously?!?!"
    But without the benefit of such instant, honest reminders, our most common error is taking ourselves too seriously. We do this individually (self-centered, egocentric, self-serving, self-absorbed, self-obsessed, narcissistic) and also as members of a group (partisanship, sectarianism, religious exclusivism).
    This narrow focus on our 'self' & 'tribe' shows up as: jealousy, gossip, theft, pessimism, cynicism, nihilism, impatience, anger, arguments, shouting, bullying, sabotaging, fighting, racism, sexism, misogyny, ageism, religious intolerance, war, genocide, etc ... in brief, as 'greed, hatred & delusion.'
    'Delusion' because these are misguided, dysfunctional expressions of our innocent, universal need for love.
    See Chris Germer's 8-minute video: https://www.theawakenetwork.com/chris-germer-shame/

    “... most of us seem to experience three stages in the way we relate to others.
    Stage 1: … emotional slavery, we believe ourselves responsible for the feelings of others. We think we must constantly strive to keep everyone happy. If they don’t appear happy, we feel responsible & compelled to do something about it. This can easily lead us to see the very people who are closest to us as burdens.
    Stage 2: … obnoxious stage, we become aware of the high costs of assuming responsibility for others’ feelings and trying to accommodate them at our own expense. When we notice how much of our lives we’ve missed and how little we have responded to the call of our own soul, we may get angry … we tend toward obnoxious comments like, ‘That’s your problem! I’m not responsible for your feelings!’ when presented with another person’s pain. We are clear what we are not responsible for, but have yet to learn how to be responsible to others in a way that is not emotionally enslaving.
    Stage 3: … emotional liberation, we respond to the needs of others out of compassion, never our of fear, guilt, or shame. Our actions are therefore fulfilling to us, as well as to those who receive our efforts. We accept full responsibility for our own intentions & actions, but not for the feelings of others. At this stage, we are aware that we can never meet our own needs at the expense of others. Emotional liberation involves stating clearly what we need in a way that communicates we are equally concerned that the needs of others be fulfilled. Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is designed to support us in relating at this level.

    … an important form of self-compassion is to make choices motivated purely by our desire to contribute to life rather than our of fear, guilt, shame, duty, or obligation. When we are conscious of the life-enriching purpose behind an action we take, when the sole energy that motivates us is simply to make life wonderful for others and ourselves, then even hard work has an element of play in it. Correspondingly, an otherwise joyful activity performed out of obligation, duty, fear, guilt or shame will lose its joy and eventually engender resistance.”
    Marshall B. Rosenberg. “Nonviolent communication. A language of life.” ed 2. Puddle Dancer Press. 2003.

    AND what if all that we experience were just a dream, like ones we experience during sleep? Wouldn't this markedly reduce how seriously we took ourselves & our life? This is exactly what some very wise folks say about reality! Yet to us, this sounds ridiculous because we've been conditioned from early childhood to be anxious, frightened, hyper-vigilant perfectionists. Here we have two diametrically opposed ways of seeing ourselves & life. How we can resolve this quandary is expertly presented in these 2 books:
    Robert Wolfe. “Living Nonduality. Enlightenment Teachings of Self-Realization.” Karina Library, 2014.
    Robert Wolfe. “Emptiness.” Karina Library, 2020.

    “The trouble with the rat race, is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” Lily Tomlin

    “Dear ones, you who are trying to learn the miracle of love through the use of reason, I am terribly afraid you will never see the point.” Hafiz

    “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” Joe Klaas

    “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” Winston S. Churchill

HOW we Relate

     Suffering arises primarily from having a distorted view of ourselves & the world, and thereby relating sub-optimally to ourselves & the world - as if lost in a dream, drifting on autopilot. 

     "... in my direct experience, I suffer when I perceive myself as separate from life." Caverly Morgan

     We can end suffering by waking up, perceiving reality as it really is, and relating more appropriately towards ourselves & the world.

     "We are liberated from suffering by correctly perceiving reality."
                                                                                                                              Yongey Mingyur

     From personal experience, we know that when we feel threatened, we become "contracted": physically our muscles tighten; mentally "the world shrinks" we're only concerned about our self or at most, our immediate family; emotionally we feel isolated, alone against a suddenly hostile world. We feel rigid, hardened, "up-tight," "a stranger in a strange land" physically, mentally & emotionally. In this contracted, grimly self-centered, "siege mentality", our actions naturally reflect our immediate outlook on life: "nasty, brutish, & short."
     There are many valid reasons why we become contracted - at times. Life presents all of us with some heavy, unavoidable challenges. However, the vast majority of our suffering is completely "discretionary" - completely unnecessary, IF we were interested enough to learn to live more wisely! But we become so thoroughly accustomed to being at least somewhat contracted, that all we may notice is that "life is stressful, but I'm coping as well as most" - "it's just normal stress" - (Freud's) "ordinary unhappiness" - just the normal momentum of my life.

     Again from personal experience, we also know that when we feel happy, satisfied, at peace, we become "expansive": physically our muscles relax; mentally "our world expands" our circle of interest & concern spreads far & wide across our one "global village," we entertain big creative nurturing thoughts & intentions to help solve common global problems; emotionally we feel part of & responsible for the entire human family, all living creatures, all of nature. We feel open-hearted, open-minded, at peace, relaxed, thoroughly at home, physically, mentally & emotionally. In this expansive, generous, nurturing mind-set, our actions naturally reflect our true nature: a wise nurturing grandparent who holds themself & all others in safety & unconditional love.

     Research also shows that we feel truly happy only when we're fully present; that it’s the quality of our presence, not the external environment, that brings happiness.
      Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.” Science 2010; 330(6006): 932. 

     Enlightenment has been defined as "intimacy with all things."

     Though we all have experienced episodes of expansiveness, for most of us it's a relatively rare, short-lived accident. We have little or no encouragement, guidance or support to learn to inhabit our true expansive nature.
      Even for those who learn mindfulness meditation, which is specifically designed to recognize & release contraction, and thereby allow us to naturally embody expansiveness, the momentum of contracted conditioning is so strong that they quickly forget about mindfulness, and resume sleepwalking through life in a contracted state.

     “… the main goal in meditation is not to get to certain good
      states, but rather to eliminate what gets in the way of those
      good states.” Shinzen Young

     “Your task is not to seek for love, 
      but merely to seek and find all of the barriers 
      within yourself that you have built against it.” Helen Schueman

      Mindfulness is not for everyone. It takes clarity of mind, courage & perseverance to very gradually, intentionally, progressively let go of habitual patterns, that have us stuck in unhappiness. A very small proportion of us do choose to intentionally mature wisely by way of an ongoing regular mindfulness practice.

Expansive Nature

Relationship, Relationship, Relationship

     "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. 

     How do we feel on reading such statements by saints, mystics & other serious meditators / contemplatives? Where do we land on this spectrum?: 

vehemently disagree
confused & lost
intrigued
intellectually agree
emotionally agree
completely agree (intellectually, emotionally & physically)

     The closer we are to vehement disagreement, the more aversion we have towards some aspects of our life & our selves AND the more craving we experience towards other aspects of our life & our selves. Powerful aversion to all (people, things & situations) that threatens our survival, health, happiness, wealth, status, etc, and craving & clinging to all that guarantees our survival, health, happiness, wealth, status, etc seems absolutely obvious, healthy & reasonable to most of us.
     YET, at the same time, we all know at least subconsciously, that our ability to control constant change, aging, sickness & death is an illusion. So most of us, for most if not all our lives, live "merely on the surface of things." We half-pretend (delusion) we can keep our "self" from changing, aging, getting sick & dying, AND at some level, we experience life as hard, cruel & meaningless.

     But an interesting change occurs when we stop pouring so much energy into aversion, craving & delusion. We start to experience intimacy with who we really are, everything around us, with all of life. This often happens after we suddenly realize that we only have a very short time to live (trauma-associated growth); following other major traumas ('shipwrecks'); during aboriginal sweat lodge ceremonies, vision quests, & other spiritual practices; insights, 'heart openings' & other mystical experiences during serious meditation practice. 
     Many of us have experienced more trauma than we may consciously realize. Psychotherapy would greatly help to free us from a prison of PTSD-like reactivity. Relying on spirituality alone when psychotherapy is necessary ('spiritual bypassing') prolongs needless suffering and obstructs spiritual growth.
     "On the surface of things," life does suck. But when we "penetrate into the substance," when we become intimate with reality, everything changes.

      "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  

     "When we give our hearts to whatever we do, to whatever we experience, or to what is happening around us, without personal agendas or preferences taking over ... the space of awareness, is exactly the same."
       Amaro Bikkhu "Small Boat, Great Mountain." 2003   www.amaravati.org/downloads/pdf/SmallBoat.pdf 

     "All IS well,
      and all IS well,
      and all manner of things ARE well." Julian of Norwich (modified)

Core Beliefs and Mental Health

     Our personal core beliefs, no matter how unaware we may be of them, nevertheless powerfully guide & influence our life. And many educated, Westernized people have core beliefs based on scientific materialism. Scientific materialism is entirely appropriate for physical sciences, BUT makes no sense at all as a worldview, particularly when dealing with our identity, the meaning of life, and other existential matters. These most critical aspects of life have been studied by the world's wisdom traditions for thousands of years. Ignoring this depth of knowledge, and assuming by default that science has all the answers is "profoundly alienating, depressing and delusional."

     Wisdom traditions can be compared to politics. Many politicians put self-interest & their own party's success, ahead of the welfare of their country. Such "partisanship" is tearing the US apart. However, politicians who take their job seriously, primarily serve their country's, & ideally the world's, best interests. Wisdom traditions, taken seriously, guide practitioners toward ethical behavior, unconditional love of self & others, and the capacity to gracefully navigate life's most difficult existential challenges. Like politics, religions have a shameful history of incompetence, bad actors & criminals. Nevertheless, both politics and wisdom traditions - when taken seriously - are absolutely vital & irreplaceable for a deeply meaningful life.

     The quote below is from a Buddhist perspective, but those who take any wisdom tradition seriously (are working towards or are at Culliford's or Fowler's 5th or 6th stage: http://www.johnlovas.com/2018/10/nurturing-nonpartisan-human-maturation.html or http://www.johnlovas.com/2013/11/fowlers-six-stages-of-faith.html) tend to have surprisingly similar perspectives. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and other mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are secular practices, based on Buddhist principles.

     “Cross-cultural psychiatric research shows that the Western understanding of all mental illnesses, such as depression, is profoundly influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations. Mental health care providers, drug companies, and patient-advocacy groups typically regard mental illnesses as ‘brain diseases’ in which the patient has little choice or responsibility. As journalist Ethan Watters comments, ‘The mental-health ideas we export to the world are rarely unadulterated scientific facts and never culturally neutral.’ Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry in London writes, ‘Western mental-health discourse introduces core components of Western culture, including a theory of human nature, a definition of personhood, a sense of time and memory, and a secular source of moral authority. None of this is universal.’
     From a Buddhist (& other wisdom traditions') perspective, the materialist view of the human mind – reduced to a composite of electrochemical processes occurring unconsciously in the brain – is profoundly alienating and depressing precisely because it is essentially delusional. Watters writes:
     ‘If our rising need for mental-health services does indeed spring from a breakdown in meaning, our insistence that the rest of the world think like us may be all the more problematic. Offering the latest Western mental-health theories, treatments, and categories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress sparked by modernization and globalization is not a solution; it may be part of the problem. When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress.’
     The only cure for this culturally induced mental illness is to awaken from our culturally acquired delusion so that we can grapple more effectively with our habitual mental afflictions. The process of adopting a Buddhist (or other wisdom traditions') view of human nature and the world around us is actually designed to induce a profound disillusionment with all mundane concerns. This has served as a motivating force for many Buddhists (& others) to take monastic ordination or devote themselves to a life of solitary contemplative practice. From the perspective of modern clinical psychology, such disillusionment and malaise could easily be diagnosed as clinical depression, calling for therapy, including drugs, to restore the renunciate to the Western ‘norm.’ In the United States, one fourth of the population has a diagnosable mental illness, and from a Buddhist (& others') perspective, even what passes for normal mental health looks more like mental illness – for which the only cure is a radical shift in one’s worldview, values, and way of life.
     William James is not alone in regarding Indian spiritual traditions as promoting a kind of pessimism and nihilism. But Buddhism, unlike modern psychology, proposes that mental afflictions are not innate to the human mind. They are rooted in ignorance and delusion, so they can be irreversibly dispelled through direct insight into the nature of reality. ... the essential purpose of sentient existence is to free ourselves from the fundamental causes of suffering ... by coming to know reality as it is.
     In stark contrast, the modern view of human nature is that we have evolved through natural selection in such a way that all our mental processes have survival value, including egotism, attachment, and hatred, despite the grief they bring us. They are intrinsic, inescapable features of the human mind; any attempt to defeat them could only be a futile and frustrating endeavor. Freud sums up the modern materialistic view by declaring that there is no possibility of achieving the goal of the absence of pain and displeasure and of experiencing lasting pleasure: ‘all the regulations of the universe run counter to it.’ From a Buddhist (or other wisdom traditions') perspective, the view that an individual’s consciousness terminates at death is utterly nihilistic, and the belief that there is no possibility of gaining freedom from suffering, except through personal annihilation, is deeply pessimistic and self-defeating.
     Within the Buddhist context, spiritual practice ... refers to a worldview, meditative practice, and way of life that lead to a lasting state of genuine happiness.”
       B. Alan Wallace. “Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic. A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice.” Columbia University Press, 2012.

Ground of Being

     From a strictly intellectual perspective ("head" only), it's probably not possible to understand any of the below quotes. Nevertheless, many much wiser people than myself, from very different traditions & times, continue to come up with a strikingly similar message: 
     The ground of being (True Nature, Essence, Being, the Universe, Nature, Brahma, Godhead, Holy Spirit, etc) delights in manifesting & thus knowing itself, in innumerable distinct ways. In manifesting physical form, apparent opposites & other apparent paradoxes (eg countless separate individual people, countries, races, religions, political parties, etc all with apparently different "self-centered" agendas) appear. At this time, a frightening number of people rigidly identify with partisan politics and live (& will probably die) exclusively in echo chambers. When, by somehow sensing our one common origin, we're able to see past ("transcend") apparent opposites & paradoxes, we will find ourselves right back in, & living from, our ground of being.

     “the task is to stabilize attention on the fluid, unpredictable, and contingent nature of experience as the ground that enables one to take ethical choices that are not conditioned by habitual reactive patterns of greed, hatred, and self-centeredness.
     … this (is a) shift in perspective from a life governed by attachments, to one founded on a vision of contingency & nonreactivity.”

        Stephen Batchelor. “Secular Buddhism. Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World.” Yale University Press, 2017.

     “The enlightenment instinct is the instinct for the ground of being to become fully conscious of itself.” Adyashanti

     “Nothing is finite which doesn't include the infinite. The finite is the byproduct of the infinite as such becomes the outer form, the mirror of the infinite, its external revealing image. Essence and form are inseparable. Essence is the eternal Being. But living form is its constantly ever new manifestation - everlasting revelation... I try to learn from the finite sciences the lessons of the infinite.” Arthur M. Young 

     “True Nature needs no object to know itself. When the mind disidentifies from all movement, we stand at the threshold of True Nature, as radiant Being that transcends, yet exists in all movements.” 
        Richard Miller. “Yoga Nidra. A Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Healing.” Sounds True, 2005.

Frederic Benaglia

Fear and Non-suffering

     “ ‘After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests,’ Dillard writes ...

     When it comes to illness, dying, death – those darknesses – it seems we are still so very much Plymouth Pilgrims – all fear and fretting and fortifications, and a strong sense of our own alienness in a hostile land. We don’t begin to know what to do with ourselves. We cross our arms over our chests and try to look on the bright side as we starve.”
       Nina Riggs. “The Bright Hour. A Memoir of Living and Dying.” Simon & Schuster, 2017. 

     It’s so important to remember, especially for well-educated folks, that while we may consider ourselves highly rational, our thoughts, words & actions are mostly emotion-driven conditioned reactions ie we're sleep-walking through life. Our education allows us to rationalize more elegantly. Can we step back & notice every time we lazily start dumping an old stock opinion on someone? Aren't we all too often as brain-dead & dreary as a person spewing a sales pitch? Do we really want to be like a large ship, with no crew on board, blind momentum taking it to inevitable disaster?
     It's sad & frightening to see folks who seem to exist in a perpetual fog bank. They "try to" clarify things, but find existential & wisdom topics too complicated, too depressing, or they keep falling asleep as soon as they start listening, watching or reading about these. The possibility of avoidance doesn't seem to cross their minds.
     “… the physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.”
       Paul Kalanithi. “When Breath Becomes Air.” Random House, 2016.

       “The best way out is always through.”                   Robert Frost 

     “… when my mind was focused on what was in my heart instead of all the fears from my past, I was able to experience myself as an unencumbered non-suffering being.

     In meditation we learn to cultivate and stretch the moments of being unencumbered, those places of non-suffering.
 
     Only through acknowledging and releasing blind emotions can I experience the inner unencumbered and harmonious being that is always present despite the suffering.

     We cannot fully practice any call for liberation without our lives being fully exposed. There is no hiding.”

      Zenju Earthlyn Manuel https://www.inquiringmind.com/article/2901_08_manual-the-terror-within/

"The Eternal Eye" by Alice Mason https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/AliceMasonArtist?ref=l2-shopheader-name

Everyday Mind's Blindness

     Most of us (sort of) realize that we don't "stop to smell the roses" enough. But who has time for such luxuries? After all, doesn't "everyday mind" insist that we're either a hunter or rabbit, and that it's always rabbit-hunting season?
     No wonder we miss out on so much - a huge chunk of life that doesn't involve survival / mating. Many people, events & things don't even enter our consciousness.

     “… organisms don’t pay much attention to … (things that are) not important in Darwinian terms (spreading genes). … 
     My older brother, after reaching the phase of middle age when women no longer paid much attention to him, said, ‘It isn’t that they think I’m bad looking. They just don’t realize I exist.’ Exactly! As a heterosexual woman walks down a city block, there are tons of things she could focus on, so the first job of her perceptual apparatus is to filter out things that, with the most cursory, even unconscious appraisal, are seen to not merit extended, conscious appraisal. Sadly, that category of things includes my brother …”
     Robert Wright. "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment." Simon & Schuster, 2017.

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