Brokenness AND Repair

    “The physical world in which we live … is only part of an inconceivably vast system of worlds. Most of these worlds are spiritual in their essence … they exist in different dimensions of being.” Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, “The Thirteen Petalled Rose”

    “The old temple of Western religion is burning … We are seeking a new temple, one that links our inherited traditions with our forgotten ancestors.” Jill Hammer, “The Hebrew Priestess.”

    “The October 7th slaughter of her fellow Jews, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza, deeply shook Jill Hammer and her wife Shoshana, whose father survived Auschwitz and fought in Israel’s war of independence. Hammer looked drawn and exhausted when we spoke a few days after the massacre. I asked if there was anything in her belief system that would allow her to digest what had happened. 
    ‘In the Kabbalah, the world is a broken place,’ she said almost forlornly. ‘And the whole idea of tikkun, repair, which is at the heart of Kabbalah, assumes that our world is broken. And it makes the mystical assumption that the small acts of repair that we do are a way of slowly piecing back together that broken world. I don’t think that’s a bad way to look at the human condition.’ 
    As we spoke, thousands of human beings were being killed each day by other human beings. Divine intervention was not the answer, Hammer explained sadly. The onus, she said, was on us. ‘The Kabbalah assumes that there isn’t some deity looking at this from some perfect realm, but that the transcendent is itself implicated in all of this brokenness and also cannot escape it. And for me, that’s a much more appealing theology than there’s some God in some perfect space who could fix all this if only God would bother.’ 
    I could see a change in her face as she tried to compartmentalize her human pain and reconnect with her spiritual self. ‘As long as we live in bodies, there is the potential that we will fight over things, that we will hurt each other.’ The Kabbalah taught this was the inevitable result of imbalance between gevuruth, strength, and chesed, loving-kindness, in the world. Strength without compassion, she explained, was the root of evil. ‘It’s like a cancerous growth that comes out of gevuruth. Then you get acts of ego and cruelty and separation.’ 
    But it was on the idea of Jews as the ‘chosen people’ that she parted with her beloved Kabbalah. ‘I certainly feel the Jewish people have a unique history and perhaps destiny, but the Kabbalah’s argument that Jews are engaged in this work of tikkun and other people are at best neutral and at worst agents of brokenness, that’s not a thing I would want to adopt.’ That view just fueled narcissism and the quest for strength without compassion. Peace might be out of reach, but restoration of balance – which would be the first step – was at the center of her prayers. ‘I understand that there are things that may not move in response to my prayer, but maybe there are some things that can.’” 
    Lawrence Pintak “Lessons from the Mountaintop. Ten Modern Mystics and Their Extraordinary Lives.” Sentient Publications, 2025.

    Perspective, as in most things, is all-important when the concept of "chosen people" comes up. Non-Jews, might immediately feel excluded, inferior, second class etc. However, ALL the other theistic religions ALSO dogmatically state that their specific religion is the ONLY way to heaven - they may not call themselves "chosen people" but religious exclusivism, no matter how thickly sugar-coated, excludes anyone outside the club just the same.
    Narcissism still rages like a wildfire in politics, but mercifully, it's causing rigid, ossified, religious dogmas - like religious exclusivism - to crumble.

“We live in a moment of disruption, death, and rebirth.  
What’s dying is an old civilization and mindset of ‘me.’  
What is being born is less clear but in no way less significant… It’s a future that requires us to tap into a deeper level  
of our humanity, of who we really are,  
and who we want to be as a society.  
It’s a shift that requires us to expand our thinking  
from the head to the heart.  
It is a shift from an ego-system awareness  
that cares about the well-being of me  
to an eco-system awareness  
that cares about the well-being of all,  
including myself.” 
Otto Scharmer


“God dwells within you, 
as you.”
Muktananda

"The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind ..."

 

Levels of Experience

    One summer night when we were around 14, my best friend Kazimir and I were walking through a park in Montreal near where we lived. We noticed 20 or more people near us all looking upwards. We stopped, looked up, and saw this extraordinary, large, bright white, stationary object overhead. We all stared at it for several minutes. We had no idea what it was, but decided that nobody would believe our description, so we went home and never discussed it.

     Roughly fifty years ago, while a university student working for the summer as an orderly in a large hospital, I was called to help clean up a mess. I arrived to find a tragicomedy unfolding. An elderly, apparently famous gentleman, dressed only in an untied, soiled Johnny shirt, was experiencing explosive diarrhea all over his private hospital room's bathroom. Several hospital staff were helplessly standing around, trying to keep him from slipping & falling into the mess. Only one person was quite beside herself - the gentleman's elderly wife. She was impeccably dressed in black, evening-at-the-opera attire, complete with all the jewellery, black gloves etc. The gentleman himself was impressively peaceful, gently trying to calm his completely distraught wife.

    During that summer in the same hospital, I chatted with a young man who was about to have heart surgery the next day. He was friendly, cheerfully looking forward to enjoying the rest of his life post-op. I wished him well. The next day, I came by to visit, and found his bed made and empty. I asked about him, and was told he had died during surgery.

    "Shit happens," no matter how obsessively we try to control ourselves, others & life in general. If we live long enough, we realize it's just a question of when. And yet we do have freedom, which depends on our perspective, which determines our response. 

    We can, and I fear many of us do, see each individual unwelcome event in our life as if it were some random or even intentional cruelty of chance, Nature or the Divine. We can keep count of these, and rationalize holding a grudge against the meaningless of life, cruelty of Nature, or malevolence of God. This is our noisy ego's last desperate, failed attempt to hang onto its own relevance. It is the ego / false self / separate self that goes through Kübler-Ross' 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression & acceptance. 

    While our wiser 'part' / Self is aware of the bigger picture and our intimate connection with everyone & everything, our Oneness.
    "There’s a crucial 6th stage to the grieving process: meaning. ... we acknowledge that although for most of us grief will lessen in intensity over time, it will never end. But if we allow ourselves to move fully into this crucial & profound sixth stage – meaning – it will allow us to transform grief into something else, something rich & fulfilling." David Kessler. “Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief.” Scribner, 2019. 

    But the ego does not give up pretending to be in complete control easily! One ploy is taking on the persona of "the liminoid ... when you start to take pride in the breakdowns, trouble & commotion of your life, because you think ... ‘it makes you windswept and interesting.’" Martin Shaw  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpi06B0mvSI&list=PLb7eXq8MJBchKf73SDzbcMyD3i-mhjJsn&index=2
    When all else fails, the ego's last act is to PROUDLY cling to anything: Charlton Heston, spokesperson for the National Rifle Association (NRA), "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands" and Dylan Thomas' call to the dying, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." 

    Our Self knows better, and we can hear our own wisdom when the ego isn't yelling.

    But we require a lifetime of intentional training to recognize how thoroughly we have been conditioned by our stunningly shallow society to abandon our true nature and instead adopt a robotic level of self-centered left-hemisphere dominance.

    The training, the practice we need is one by which we progressively remember our true nature, who we truly are, and integrate this more & more consistently, into daily life. 
    "Growing pains" are inevitable on any learning journey, especially a spiritual one which requires us to release compulsive self-centeredness. It's probably easier for an obese life-long 'couch potato' to become an elite athlete, than for the average person who considers him/herself open-minded and 'good' to become moderately spiritual. 
    These 2 very recent interviews shed useful light on this process :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkX-Dc6WRcs

https://batgap.com/jurgen-ziewe-2/

 

The Jeff Healey Band - "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

Resisting What is Most Precious

    “It is a common fate of all knowledge to begin as heresy and end as orthodoxy.” Thomas Huxley

    “We suffer to the exact degree that we resist having our eyes & hearts opened.” Adyashanti

 

    OK, here's a classic example of "people in positions of power & influence" resisting with all their might something that revolutionized all our lives for the better:
    “In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis, a doctor at Vienna’s General Hospital, noticed something important about the women and children he treated in the maternity ward. They died. Distressingly often. Semmelweis wondered if all of the autopsies he and his fellow colleagues performed on cadavers were somehow contaminating the next group of children and mothers they attended. So he developed a handwashing solution of chlorine and lime for physicians to rinse with between seeing patients. It worked. Infections dropped to below 1 percent on his ward.
    But, among the other doctors, the reception was less kind. His colleagues mocked him, refusing to believe on principle that a gentleman’s hands could spread disease. Semmelweis himself could only offer up the vague concept of ‘cadaverous contamination’ to justify his protocol (this was several decades before the formal articulation of germ theory). The stress drove Semmelweis to a nervous breakdown. A bitter colleague had him committed to a lunatic asylum, where he was beaten by guards, and died of an infection that his very own handwashing technique would have prevented.
    But Semmelweis’s legacy lives on, and not just in the grudging adoption of surgical hygiene. He’s also shaped the cognitive sciences, where the Semmelweis reflex – the idea that we habitually & often violently reject new evidence or new knowledge because it runs to counter to our preexisting articles of faith – has become a standby on the list of common cognitive biases.
    Our cognitive biases hamper our ability to predict with any degree of certainty what’s going to happen next. That’s because the Semmelweis reflex kicks us out of accepting what is staring us in the face. We can’t wrap our head around it because it runs to counter to everything we hold to be self-evidently true.”
    Jamie Wheal. “Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind.” Harper Wave, 2021.

 

    Our current infatuation with dogmatic scientism (not legitimate science, but scientism as the latest 'opium of the people') blinds us to our own depth and ability to live a truly meaningful, peaceful life. As soon as we hear words like 'spirituality' or 'religion' or even 'depth' and "the Semmelweis reflex kicks us out of accepting what is staring us in the face."

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

    “The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working.
    To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.” William James

    “Too often, our understandings have been limited by culture, religious debate, & the human tendency to put ourselves at the center.” Richard Rohr

    “So much of our precious life force, our prana, our chi, our sacred energy, is spent on the Sisyphean task of pushing feelings away, trying to make them go 'somewhere else'... but where would they go? For even the Underworld is within us! So much creativity is released, so much relief is felt, when we break this age-old pattern of self-abandonment, go beyond our fearful conditioning, and try something totally new: staying close to feelings, not pushing them away, as they emerge in the freshness of the moment, looking for their true home – which is our own hearts. This is meditation: Breaking the cycle of fear.”
 Jeff Foster

    “Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.” Ram Dass 

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

"Once we have died to the false self,
we have a hope of getting out of our own way and
meeting the Holy One face to face.”
    Mirabai Starr. “Caravan of No Despair. A Memoir of Loss and Transformation.” Sounds True, 2015.

“When the mortal mind appears, buddhahood disappears.
When the mortal mind disappears, buddhahood appears.
When the mind appears, reality disappears.
When the mind disappears, reality appears.” Bodhidharma

    “May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.”
    John O’Donohue, “Imagination as the Path of the Spirit John O'Donohue” 

 

Estas Tonne - Live in Ulm (2017) stream - 100 min

Awakening and the Ego

    I value what serious spiritual practitioners have learned from many decades of continuous practice & teaching. Here is part of Roshi Gerry Shishin Wick's talk: “What I learned from almost 60 years of Zazen” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlsgX5oH_HQ

    “To paraphrase the Buddha, ‘In my many years of practice, I haven’t gained anything, but I’ve let go of a lot.’ The Buddha said that everyone, without exception, has the wisdom and virtue of the Buddha. We’re all intrinsically as complete and spacious and as virtuous as the Buddha. Yet we obscure that truth with all kinds of attachments and opinions, judgments, projections and deluded thoughts. If we can just let go of these obscurations, our intrinsic wisdom will shine through.
    So what is it that prevents us from being able to let go of all these attachments? This is what I learned. It always comes down to our image of who we think we are, and our persistent attempts to maintain & protect that image.
    One thing I learned is that there’s no fixed, abiding self. That fact is hard for most people to swallow. How can I function if there’s no self? Can you believe that the notion of a ‘fixed self’ is just that – a notion, a concept, an idea? And even the teaching of ‘no self’ is a concept.
    Concepts can be used to guide, but they’re not the experience itself. Some concepts can lead us astray because they’re like conspiracy theories. Other concepts can guide us to experiences that lead to the lessening of suffering. But remember, the concepts are like the fingers pointing to the Moon - they’re not the Moon, just like the map is not the territory, or the menu is not the meal. Our practice is beyond words and letters.
    What that means is that our concepts do not describe the experience of awakening, insight or enlightenment. The best we can say is that the Self cannot be grasped, it is unknowable.
    The more we are able to let go of our attachments, the clearer the Moon of wisdom will shine within us. So I did not gain anything, but I did let go of attachments that obscured my Original Self. But it’s an endless practice." Roshi Gerry Shishin Wick

        My current favorite serious spiritual practitioner & teacher, Amoda Maa, wrote this on the same topic: 

    “Another tenacious concept that perpetuates the myth of enlightenment and creates much confusion in the spiritual seeker is the belief that the ego dies, and with it all personal history is erased. In this myth, the ‘enlightened one’ supposedly has no sense of self and no story, and therefore he or she is expected to never talk about themselves, to never use the word ‘I’ or ‘me,’ and to never refer to ‘my life.’ The ‘enlightened one’ has supposedly seen that the body and the world are an illusion, and therefore is totally unconcerned with physical well-being or worldly affairs. This image of enlightenment is a fantasy upheld by millennia of religious dogma and patriarchal spiritual traditions. It also taps into our childlike need to enter the kingdom of heaven or nirvana, where bad things never happen, and we are rewarded with endless peace.
    The stark reality is that awakening is not a death of the ego. As long as you’re alive as form, the ego cannot die. Ego, as a primary sense of ‘I-ness,’ must exist, otherwise you’d be unable to discern inside from outside. It’s very likely that, without an ego, the voices in your head would be undifferentiated from my voice, from someone else’s voice, or from the voice of God, and you would be in a state of psychosis. You might even be a blubbery mess, unable to function in three-dimensional reality. If you’ve ever taken too many psychedelics, you’ll know how disorienting and even terrifying this can be!
    As long as we operate within relative reality, the relative function of the ego must continue to operate. A sense of self as a separate entity is absolutely necessary for both physical and psychological survival as form. Death of the ego only happens when form dies. Luckily, as long as there is a functioning neurophysiology, there is a sense of self. It is a sense of ‘I’ that increasingly develops as we emerge from the womb and gives us the capacity for self-reflection and self-awareness. It’s actually the seed of awakening, because without it we would not be able to become conscious of consciousness.
    Awakening is also not a transcendence of ego. Transcendence of ego certainly can happen in a variety of circumstances, such as when you experience a mystical state or a state of expanded consciousness such as in deep meditation (samadhi), long-distance running, or giving birth. It also happens if you have an out-of-body experience or near-death experience. The initial experience of awakening can also be an intensely transcendent experience. But if you continue to identify with this transcendent state, you are likely to develop a ‘spiritual ego.’ There is no transformation or evolution of consciousness in the identification with this state, because when the inevitable return of old egoic patterns and personality traits appear there is a tendency to deny that any of this belongs to you.
    In true awakening, there is neither a death nor a transcendence of ego. Instead, the location of self is released from its entanglement with the unconscious ego (in other words, the conglomeration of conditioned mental, emotional, and physical responses.) Liberated from the prison of egoic identification, the ‘I-ness’ becomes nonlocalized and unattached. Having recognized awakeness as the inherent nature of all that is (including the self), the self becomes an ‘awake I,’ undefined and unrestrained by relative reality.
    Another way of saying this is that the self experiences itself as inseparable from the totality of existence. While certain survival-based impulses continue (protecting the body from danger, the impulse to eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, or rest when tired, and so on), they now happen without interference. They simply happen as life’s natural and intelligent movement toward what needs attention while form is alive. The ‘awake I’ is therefore free to respond intelligently & creatively to the moment, and this gives you access to a power that is at one with life itself.
    So what happens to the ego in all this? From one perspective, nothing happens. From another perspective, everything changes. In the process of liberation, the once ('noisy') unconscious ego transmutes to an evolved ('quiet') or ‘aware ego’ and gives itself in service to the ‘awake I.’ In other words, the ego stops being the master and bows down to awakeness.
    ((From an Internal Family Systems [IFS] perspective, this represents unburdening of protective 'parts' [subpersonalities], resulting in becoming Self-led. IFS psychotherapy appears to be an exceptionally valuable link between traditional ego-strengthening psychotherapies and spiritual practices serving to evolve consciousness.))

    So, yes, in awakening there is a death. There is a death of the self-identity that is wrapped around the ego. But there is also a birth of a whole, integrated human being that includes both the surface sense of self as a separate entity (the self that is born & then dies) and the deeper layer of undifferentiated beingness (the self that was never born & can never die).
    Awakeness embraces the paradox of self & no-self. There is no conflict in this apparent duality. While the mind finds this intolerable, the heart abides in unfathomable acceptance. When the silent mystery of spacious acceptance becomes overridingly preferable to the habitual struggle of making sense of it all, the search for a mythical state of enlightenment comes to an end. However, the ever-unfolding deepening into authentic awakening never stops.”
    Amoda Maa. “Embodied Enlightenment. Living Your Awakening in Every Moment.” Reveal Press, 2017. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BOOK

The Fall Season's Beauty

Love and Live!

    “We are all faced with a series of great opportunities – brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” John W. Gardner  

    We are, as Bruce Cockburn sang, "lovers in a dangerous time." We anxiously twitch to echos of the worn out phrase, "It's Do or Die!" in far too many, far too popular blow-em-up action movies, in our own tortured imaginations, and even in the reality of war-torn lands.
    Most of us have almost forgotten our true nature, which is always gently whispering encouragement, "Love and Live!"

“And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts;
a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused,
whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky,
and in the mind of man; a motion and a spirit that impels
all thinking things, all objects of thought,
and rolls through all things.” William Wordsworth 

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.” William Wordsworth

    “How can an Ego that is lost & entangled … find its way out and recover the right relationship to the Self (Universal Consciousness, Ultimate Reality)? The answer is this: since the Ego has become lost through forgetfulness & fear, it can find its way home through the opposite of these two: mindfulness & trust. In its innermost heart, the Ego never fully forgets the Self – the puppeteer – but its memory is dulled, as in sleep. The Ego can be aroused from that sleep and return home to the Self – becoming ‘I myself’ again, like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
    It is important to remember that the Ego is not a third entity in addition to the I and the Self. The Ego always remains the I, but it is an I all shriveled up, because it lacks the expansive awareness of the Self that unites it with every other I.”    David Steindl-Rast. “You Are Here. Keywords for Life Explorers.” Orbis, 2023. EXCELLENT, PROFOUND & PRACTICAL!

    Iain McGilchrist's 2021 two-volume book, "The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World" covers in masterful detail, how we deal with reality in two very different, complementary ways: left-hemispheric dominance (essentially serving the "Ego") and right-hemispheric dominance, with an appropriately subordinate supportive role for the left hemisphere, (essentially serving the "Self").

    “I found out from robots the most crucial rule of all for living. Human minds are constantly being thrown off the track by complications. The picture is rarely clear. We are told everything has buddhanature (Divine Nature), and we try to act accordingly. But then we discover that someone we know has done something perfectly execrable (dreadful, appalling), and we begin to doubt. ‘How,’ we ask ourselves, ‘could anybody who would do an evil thing like that have the Buddha (Divine) inside him?’ We feel that our trust has been betrayed, and we resent the person even more.
    But robots are simpler than people. So are mountains and rivers and plants and animals and insects. Suppose these less complicated creatures begin to cause us difficulty. In that case, we have no trouble seeing that the fundamental cause is our failure to function in accordance with the principles of the universe. The machines, the mountains, the rivers, the plants, the animals, the insects all tell us that we, filled from head to toe with the buddhanature (Divine Nature), have nevertheless not succeeded in being what we ought to be.
    When we forget to respect the buddhanature in the wind and the water, typhoons and floods inform us of our lapse and show us in no uncertain terms how we have not lived up to the buddhanature within ourselves. When we forget the buddhanature in automobiles and other machines we have created, a warning comes to us in the form of accidents or pollution. Everything in the universe constantly tells us that the way to perfect our buddhanature is to respect the buddhanature in other things & people.”
    Masahiro Mori. “Does a Robot Have Buddhanature? A Leading Figure in the Field of Robotics Investigates.” Tricycle March 21, 2023.

    “All that we behold is full of blessings.” William Wordsworth

    When we sit and meditate, the Ego does its best to retain control by chattering on, the same circular "story of me" we endure day in and day out.
    Mercifully by relaxing, remaining still, and listening deeply to the silence, we periodically return home, disappearing in Mystery. Each time we return with a mind-heart a little bit more open & wiser.

"Hurdy Gurdy Man" by Donovan

 

Not One, Not Two

Faces and Vase

     Neil Theise: “When I think of the word ‘enlightenment,’ or ‘kensho’ in Japanese Zen, or ‘awakening experience,’ to me it's not so much about what you discover, but it’s that you have that moment when you see the two faces and then suddenly you see the vase.
    Someone asked me, in a yoga group when I was giving this talk, ‘What’s enlightenment like?’ – like I know (laughing). I had used a video of a murmuration of starlings (see below). And if you’ve ever actually been present for starlings, you may first just hear this sound coming from up there, and you look up and there’s this thing in the sky and then there’s this moment you realize, ‘Oh no, it’s starlings.’ It’s an extraordinary moment! There’s a joy to it and an excitement to it. That to me is an enlightenment experience.
    You saw reality one way (face / black cloud), you saw it another way (vase / starlings). The most extraordinary enlightenment experiences are, when you see the world of everyday reality, samsara, and then suddenly you see its non-dual pure awareness aspect (ultimate reality), and they aren’t two. It’s just, do you see it this way (face / everyday reality), or do you see it this way (vase / ultimate reality)? I think in Zen practice, in Buddhist practice, the question, the aim, how do you alleviate suffering, is learning to flexibly move between these 2 views. We’re separate. I hurt. I’m alone (face / everyday reality). We are seamlessly one whole thing within which everything is just as it should be (vase / ultimate reality). I’m separate. I’m alone. I hurt (face / everyday reality).

    Rick Archer: “And my sense is that … it’s not strictly 'either or.' So as you go along, it becomes more & more blended, 'both and.' And that it may be that, like my video camera right now, I’m in focus and the background is a little bit fuzzy, but then the camera could be adjusted so that I’m a little bit fuzzy and the background is clear. And I think that’s the way it works. As one goes along, eventually there’s always this continuum of pure awareness or self-realization or whatever you want to call it, in the midst of whatever else that's going on.”

    Neil Theise: “Right. And you’re just able to do it that much more flexibly & freely. You know, the freedom, when people talk about in Zen terms ... People talk about the freedom of a Zen master, of a Zen adept. The freedom is the freedom to move back & forth (face, vase, back & forth) with ease.”

    Rick Archer: “And again, to have both there all the time. And sometimes the fact that it’s there might not be obvious. Always there might not be obvious. If you could sort of say that pure awareness is like a tone, the tone is always going, after a while you wouldn’t be paying so much attention to it, you’d be doing this or that, but any time you want to check, oh yeah, the tone is still there.
    And so, you know, like in my experience, like sometimes if I injure myself, like I fall off my bicycle or something like that. The contrast of that experience makes it, vividly evident that there’s something that’s not affected by that and that something is always there and it just, you don’t have to pay attention to it as 'a thing,' because it isn’t one, but it’s just this, like the screen of a movie – they always use that analogy. The screen is always there no matter what movie is playing on it. But awakening is more like a state where you actually see the screen AND watch the movie at the same time. The movie no longer overshadows the screen.”

    Neil Theise: “And not get caught by either. ‘Oh this isn’t real. I’m not going to react emotionally what’s going on because I know it’s just light on a screen. But on the other hand, ‘Oh my God, what a story!’

   Rick Archer: “You want to enjoy the movie - you paid for it. That’s the task, right?”
    Neil Theise interviewed by Rick Archer: https://batgap.com/neil-theise/

 

    "Enjoy the problem you're trying to solve!" Wise advice I heard on TV.

    “We are all faced with a series of great opportunities – brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” John W. Gardner

    "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

 

    David Steindl-Rast PhD (psychology) is a highly- & widely-respected Benedictine monk, 97 years young when he wrote this, his most recent book. As one expects from mystics, Steindl-Rast's book beautifully resonates with Neil Theise & Rick Archer's discussion above:

    "I have been privileged to meet people whose I seemed completely translucent, letting the Self shine through. In their presence, it becomes easier for me to be myself. At such moments, I’m aware of being a unique expression in space and time of the one great Self. Different traditions call the Self under this aspect by different names. For the Native American Pima people it is I’itoi; for Hindus, Atman; for Buddhists, Buddha Nature. Christians call it the Christ within us. St. Paul points to this when he writes, ‘I live, yet not I, Christ lives in me’ (Galatians 2:20). To become ever more transparent for the Self in this sense is the great task of ‘becoming who we truly are.’

    That task involves ‘playing my role in life well,’ …

    There is only one Self. To forget this fact amounts to forgetting that it is ultimately the Self that – through its countless manifestations – plays all the roles on the world stage. When I forget that, I become like the actor so lost in my role that, in the end, I can no longer distinguish myself from my role. To the extent to which this happens, my I loses awareness of the Self and, by doing so, becomes an Ego.
    Ego is simply the Latin word for ‘I,’ but we’ll be using it with a negative connotation because we need a word for the I when it loses – partly or completely – awareness of the Self. The more the I forgets the Self that makes it one with all others, the more it feels isolated and becomes the Ego.”
    David Steindl-Rast. “You Are Here. Keywords for Life Explorers.” Orbis, 2023.

 

    “Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts.” David Whyte, poet & philosopher

    “True adulthood … is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard-won glory, which commercial forces & cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.” Toni Morrison 

    “There are only two ways to live your life.
     One is as though nothing is a miracle.
     The other is as though
     everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein

    Michael Singer does an amazing job of illustrating how everything is miraculously amazing even with the restricted vision of materialist science: Michael A. Singer “Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament” Sounds True, 2022.

    “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

    "... one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn't create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.” Ram Dass

 

    We are called “to serve not our limitations but what’s whole & unbreakable, our true self. It’s easy to identify with all the places we’ve been hurt & abandoned, but can we identify with the timeless wholeness that weathers every condition? If we can’t, we may spend this life protecting ourselves and never risk really living.” Bonnie Myotai Treace

 

"A murmuration of starlings"