Food and Drink for the Soul

    "Beauty is that, in the presence of which, we feel more alive."      John O'Donohue

 

    "Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace & elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life. 

    ... the beauty of being human is that we are incredibly, intimately near each other, we know about each other, but yet we do not know or never can know what it’s like inside another person. And it’s amazing, you know? Here am I, sitting in front of you now, looking at your face, you’re looking at mine, and yet neither of us have ever seen our own faces, and that in some way, thought is the face that we put on the meaning that we feel and that we struggle with, and that the world is always larger and more intense and stranger than our best thought will ever reach. And that’s the mystery of poetry, is poetry tries to draw alongside the mystery as it’s emerging and somehow bring it into presence and into birth. 

 

    ... there are individuals holding out on frontlines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity, where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they’re able to sustain it because there is in them some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really called to in some way. 

    I love Pascal’s phrase that you should always keep something beautiful in your mind. And I have often — like in times when it’s been really difficult for me, if you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness. 

    … my old friend Meister Eckhart, the 14th-century German mystic … said, ‘There is a place in the soul that neither time nor space nor any created thing can touch.’ And I really thought that was amazing. And what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography, and that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that inner kind of sanctuary."

    above from John O'Donohue's WONDERFUL interview by Krista Tippet: 

    Audio: https://onbeing.org/starting-points/new-to-on-being-start-here/ (also bottom of this page)

    Transcript: https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty/#transcript

    From a wonderful young, living mystic's interview:
    “I don’t think I believe in evil spirits. I think that the words we’re using are making this binary in a way, or categorical. I believe in energy forces. We all speak of this rise of collective consciousness, but with it, we (((inevitably))) can see (((its shadow))) an incredible influx of hatred, anger & violence manifested at the same time. When you look at the state of things nowadays, it’s fairly clear that the collapse is here. We’re not on the brink of it. It's happening. (((BUT RIGHT NOW, revitalization - the OTHER SIDE of the 'collapse' COIN IS ALSO HAPPENING!!! MORE & MORE of us are AWAKENING to our True Nature, which is loving instead of lost in fear.)))
    The collapse is happening for one very simple reason. This is just the expression of ignorance. And when I mean ignorance, I don’t mean intellectual or philosophical ignorance. I mean to not know who we truly are. I mean to believe in an illusion; to believe in the idea of the self, that leads to the idea of separation – that I am this, and therefore I’m not that. I am me and I’m against you because you and me, we have different beliefs, and so we’re enemies; to the condensation of the self, the belief of the illusion of the separate self is what is causing all of this. 
    When you believe in a self, you believe in a country, you believe in an idea, you believe in a social status, you believe in a certain amount of power, in money, in a job that makes you better or not better than anybody. So it’s the story of the self that people believe in and they believe that to be the truth of who they are. And they believe that this is the reality they live and experience, and this belief of separation has caused an incredible amount of fear and suffering. 
    We’re just using words, and language is going to fail us inevitably, because language (((being inherently dualistic)))) separates. Tall only exists because short exists. Narrow only exists because wide exists, or black and white. We create oppositions through words, because we categorize, we label, because we have to. That’s what we found to understand and experience reality. 
    And so we say fear, but fear is just the same way that darkness doesn’t exist. Darkness is a word that means nothing. Darkness is just the absence of light. There’s light and there’s no light. Show me darkness. No. You can just show me the sun disappearing, ebbing and flowing and setting below the surface of the horizon. There’s light and there’s no light. And for the no light part, we created a word, and we called it darkness. 
    And so it’s the same with fear. Fear is just no love. There’s love and there’s no love. And the no love we turned it into fear. But love is what we’re made of. That’s the fabric of who we are. It’s pure love, because pure love is consciousness. And so there’s love and there’s the absence of it. In the absence of it, we made into a word. And that word – fear – has governed much of our understanding, behavioural patterns, and experiences of reality.”
     above from the INSPIRING (1hr 47min) Interview with House of Dragons Actor Emeline Lambert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOTefUSwj4w .
    MORE & MORE WONDERFUL PEOPLE like Emeline above, and untold numbers of less well-known people, like many of the readers of these blogs, are bringing MORE & MORE REVITALIZING LIGHT & HOPE into the dark corners of our world. 

 

Beannacht / Blessing
John O’Donohue

For Josie, my mother

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

 

John O'Donohue — The Inner Landscape of Beauty

 

Not Separate!

    "There is something in all of us that seeks the spiritual … 

     The spiritual is inclusive. It is the deepest sense of belonging & participation. We all participate in the spiritual at all times, whether we know it or not. There’s no place to go to be separated from the spiritual, so perhaps one might say that the spiritual is that realm of human experience which religion attempts to connect us to through dogma & practice. 

    Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it fails. Religion is a bridge to the spiritual — but the spiritual lies beyond religion. Unfortunately, in seeking the spiritual we may become attached to the bridge rather than crossing over it."      Rachel Naomi Ramen MD

 

    More and more brave, intelligent adults are freeing themself from religious & secular orthodoxies, evolving & awakening into their authentic, mature, spiritually-independent Self. 

     “We write here in conversation with Rilke and each other, opening to a ‘wiser way’ than is more generally offered in our hectic, demanding societies, where individuality is so highly praised and our inevitable interconnectedness is so poorly understood. It might well enable you to ground your life in what the ancients knew as the ‘transcendentals’: ‘the true, the good, and the beautiful.’ Those are the collective attributes we find singly and learn to live socially. 
     Rilke suggests in one of his early poems that ‘you are the future.’ You! 
     Is it the ‘you’ of the divine one Rilke often addressed simply as ‘Lord’ but equally call ‘neighbor’ or ‘friend’? Is it the ‘you’ of the poet himself? Or the ‘you’ of the reader? Rilke refused, characteristically, to define whom he is addressing. For in the deepest things in life, the truest things of the heart, the most enduring things of the soul, these three are not different. Not distinct. Not separable. 
    You are the future.”
     Mark S. Burrows, Stephanie Dowrick. “You are the Future. Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke.” Monkfish, 2024.

    It's fascinating to frequently hear a wide variety of spiritual experiences in which the experiencers are completely surprised by their experience, that it was nothing at all what they expected. Indeed one may be at a complete loss to identify the source of a powerful, authoritative voice, that neither quite sounded as if it were God, nor themself. 
    And many decades later, the awe remains ... and probably there is no difference, no distinction, no separation between Self and God.

    We CAN pull up our big adult spiritual pants and
stop externalizing the Divine!

 

"Every Day, Think As You Wake Up, 
Today I Am Fortunate To Have Woken Up, 
I Am Alive, I Have A Precious Human Life, 
I Am Not Going To Waste It 
I Am Going To Use 
All My Energies To Develop Myself, 
To Expand My Heart Out To Others, 
To Achieve Enlightenment For 
The Benefit Of All Beings, 
I Am Going To Have Kind Thoughts Toward Others... 
I Am Going To Benefit Others
As Much As I Can."

H.H. The Dalai Lama

 

Courtesy of Buddha Doodles  www.buddhadoodles.com

Spiritual Evolution

Reality is more complex than we would like.
If we insist upon it making sense,
we will find ourselves despairing.
Reality cannot be neatly packaged ...
Reality is all that is, and this is often at odds
with what we imagine it should be.
Rabbi Yannai, an early Jewish sage 

 

 

    “Always keep an open mind about whatever you experience. Try not to jump to conclusions. Simply keep observing & investigating your experience thoroughly & continuously. Jumping to conclusions will prevent your understanding from deepening.”
    Ashin Tejaniya “Don’t Look Down on the Defilements – They Will Laugh at You." http://sayadawutejaniya.org/teachings/

      In medicine, a well-recognized source of diagnostic error is "premature closure" - when physicians fail to listen to patients long enough to hear the full history, wrongly assuming they already "know" because they've "heard it all before." 

    It takes effort & humility to patiently, intentionally retain an open, beginner's mind, especially for 'experts' burdened by dogma.

     One definition of an expert is one who's incapable of further learning. This patronizing, colonializing hubris keeps governments, religions, professions & other large institutions fossilized decades, if not centuries behind progressive ideas.

      “While religion at its best calls us to a community of the curious and a unity beyond dogma & tribalism; religion at its worst calls us to worship the very things that divide us and to pit people against one another in the name of one fantasy or other.”
       Rami Shapiro. “Holy Rascals. Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries.” Sounds True, 2017.  

    Dogmatic secular scientism & dogmatic religions are equally captivating, both promising certainty. For both, it's an open & shut case, all other worldviews are fiercely denounced, now adherents can get back to being busy doing stuff, end of discussion, thank you & good night!

      Reality is far too complex, paradoxical, and takes way too much effort for the vast majority to spend a lifetime exploring with an open mind / heart!  

    “The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching…” Joseph Campbell 

    Increasingly, people are becoming "spiritual revolutionaries, spiritually independent" or "mystics" - no longer followers, and find marching lock-step with any crowd spiritually confining, even suffocating. Their individual ego (small self) is sufficiently secure, so they do not depend on a group ego, a charismatic guru, or an all-powerful separate "other." Nor do they "other" the Divine, but instead experience Oneness with Source. This felt sense is often referred to as "Self" by mystics, Jung, Internal Family Systems, etc. Some of them resonate with the mystical level of some spiritual traditions, which may or may not be one in which we were raised.

    We ALL have firm opinions about people & things, based on minimal or wrong information.
    AND, we ALL consider others with such baseless opinions, to be bigots, red necks, etc.
    So, in the spirit of open-mindedness, I invite you to watch this 68 minute documentary about a couple who spent a very productive lifetime actually being open-minded enough to learn a great deal of valuable, worthwhile information about shamanism - about which our materialist culture only has disparaging innuendo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNloOTQoRzA

    “There is widespread agreement that seven kinds of practices are central & essential for anyone who would live a life to the fullest. These seven practices are:
        1) Living ethically,
        2) Transforming emotions,
        3) Redirecting motivation,
        4) Training attention,
        5) Refining awareness,
        6) Cultivating wisdom,
        7) Serving others.
    These are the seven practices that sages the world over emphasize as central & essential for a full spiritual life. Together they constitute a ‘technology of transcendence’ for awakening our potentials and living life to the fullest. Shamans were the first to develop this art …

    Shamanism can be defined as a family of traditions whose practitioners focus on voluntarily entering altered states of consciousness in which they experience themselves or their spirit(s) interacting with other entities, often by traveling to other realms, in order to serve their community.”
    Roger Walsh MD, PhD. “The World of Shamanism. New Views of an Ancient Tradition.” Llewellyn Publications, 2007.

“The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell,
don’t go back to sleep!
You have to ask for what you really want,
don’t go back to sleep!
You know, there are those who go back and forth
over the threshold where the two worlds meet,
and the door, it’s always open, and it’s round,
don’t go back to sleep!”

Jalal al-Din Rumi

 

      “Spiritual practices are methods that can begin to soften our stance toward our self, toward life in general, and to open us to what transcends the habitual. They are invitations to become intimate with the wisdom of silence & stillness.”
      Dorothy Hunt. “Ending the Search. From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness.” Sounds True, 2018. 

      “Silence is the basis and the background of everything. We are an expression of this primordial silence & stillness. But the habits of our mind overlay this simple truth & keep us from experiencing ourselves as a full-spectrum human being."          Sharon Landrith

 

 

Awakening - the Next Stage in Human Evolution

     It's blatantly obvious, when an elderly person observes how babies physically mature into toddlers, then gradually teens, young adults, middle-aged folks, seniors and elderly. However, at none of the earlier stages can we fully appreciate the lived experience of any of the later stages of life. Our inability to understand the lived experience of later stages of psychosocialspiritual development is a far more serious problem.

    As an example, someone who is angry, bitter & cynical, blaming others for his misfortunes, just wants to wreak havoc on "the system" and fervently believes every conspiracy theory YouTube video out there, cannot be reasoned with. His powerful emotional charge (misdirected Life Force) has to gradually run down like an old battery in cold weather before it can sense the way Home. Even then, psychotherapy, possibly with medications, may be necessary to allow normal psychosocialspiritual maturation to get back on track.

    Many of us, even if we've lived a reasonably successful life, and are reasonably comfortably retired, do not seem to be ready, willing or able to actively participate in normal psychosocialspiritual maturation. DO NOT IGNORE this resistance! Life is shorter than you think & you have no idea what you're missing!

    As most of you who've been following my posts realize, I understand true spirituality as Perennial Philosophy - the common meeting place of ALL serious seekers of truth / wisdom, regardless of what tradition they started in or continue to support, be it Aboriginal Wisdom / Shamanism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc. 

    For those who are ready, willing & able, I HIGHLY recommend this 67-minute video which beautifully summarizes the current spiritual understanding of many of the teachers I most respect: https://awakentheworld.com/film/awakening-mind-film-part-1-know-thyself/ 

I Am

         Within 18 months, even after major life changing events such as a major accident causing permanent disability or winning millions in a lottery, people tend to return to their individual baseline level of happiness. This is referred to as hedonic treadmill or adaptation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill The topic is further complicated when we consider locus of control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control and openness to experience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience

    These Western psychological concepts likely overlap somewhat with one's level of spiritual maturity. I have no idea if & how spiritual maturity could be assessed, except perhaps by someone with an exceptionally high level themself and has integrated this as completely as possible into their day-to-day life ie consistently 'walks the talk.'

    NOW as individuals, as a human race, and perhaps as the entire cosmos, we are ALL in the process of evolving spiritually and integrating this higher state of being into our day-to-day, moment-by-moment behavior. We are ALL starting to experience peace, unconditional love & joy that is independent of external conditions. 

    “By shifting our attention from the fluctuating nature of experiences ("I am this" or "I am that") to the simple, ever-present sense of "I am", we recognize the foundational being-ness that underlies them. As this recognition deepens, being-ness imbues all experiences, revealing a ground of peace that transcends understanding.” Amoda Maa

    Let us continuously remember who we truly are, our true nature, our authentic Self.

Amoda Maa "Recognizing the 'I Am' That is Always Present"

Perennial Mysteries of Life & Death

    The excerpts below, are from an imho EXCELLENT 88-minute discussion: "WHAT IS LIFE?" between Tim Freke & Iain McGilchrist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD7BHJHkufY 
    To get value out of this, savour slowly, with all your senses open. Enjoy!

    Tim Freke (TF):     “You & I are both human beings on this bittersweet journey of being alive, and we both got older. What is it? How have you come to terms with that mystery? How do you see it as you make that journey?”

    Iain McGilchrist (IM): “I think intrinsically it’s that mystery one never comes to the bottom of. As William James said, ‘We can never close our accounts with reality.’ And I think just being aware of that is both very valuable, and as you say, somewhat rare. We take the most mysterious things for granted, such as the nature of time and consciousness, and that we’re alive at all, or that there is anything at all rather than nothing. So these things are eternally intriguing, but that’s part of their value.
    I mean if we could say, ‘Oh I know exactly what it is,’ well first of all, you’d be a fool, but secondly, you would have lost something of what it is that makes life have meaning. The odd thing is that if we could narrow down the meaning of these things in a simple way, to what we normally mean by, ‘Oh that means that,’ then it would have no meaning. Its meaning depends on its meaninglessness at one level, much as the idea of purpose would be vitiated* if it was clear that there was a purpose in the sense of a utility - you know we do this, because of that. (* vitiate – spoil or impair the quality or efficiency of)

TF     “One of the things that I’ve explored a lot is the coexistence of opposites … and one of the opposites that plays itself out for me all the time, is the way in which I feel that I can live with an appreciation of the mystery – the numinous nature of existence, AND a story I’m telling, which I’m constantly trying to define. One of the reasons I want to have these conversations is that it refines my story, my understanding. … generally we don’t realize we’re embedded in a story, that there is a cultural story which we take for granted. And that part of the function of doubt & mystery is to come out of that story, and actually see, to actually be conscious in this moment - this breathtaking mystery, we don’t know what it is, and then we have the best story we can find to navigate it, and deeper stories open up deeper experiences.”

IM     “I’d like to pick up the word ‘story’ because of course nowadays, it can be used to mean a lie - ‘telling stories’ as children say. And the word story, and the word fable, and the word myth, which are now all used to mean things that are fundamentally unlikely to be true, started off as words that designated a perfectly truthful approach to reality. When philosophers and scientists normally talk about a narrative or a story, the background to that is often that we make it up in order to comfort ourselves, because we need some sort of meaning, so we invent it. And there again, that word has changed. Invention used to mean discovering something, finding it, whereas now it means making it up.
    So I believe there is, very importantly, a way of dealing with these imponderables that you mentioned, which is not head-on. The more you try to analyze it directly, the more you come away with a handful of dust. You need to approach it in a more oblique way, implicitly. And this is where art, music, poetry & religion take their value – from being able to embody things that normally we can’t talk about directly. If the tendency then is to dismiss them, because they can’t be talked about directly, or because this involves a narrative or a mythos or something, is to misunderstand another way of grasping reality.” 

TF      “One of the things that strikes me about that is that there seems to be the intellectual mainstream, which within its own domain is vocal & dominant, which then percolates through. When it says, ‘Oh you tell a story about it, or you make up meaning,’ seems to imply that the imagination is somehow unreal, that it’s a bolt-on extra. There’s reality, which is physics and biology – kind of, and then there’s this bolt-on extra, which is the whole realm of the imagination. Whereas it seems to me that the imagination is the most emergent level of reality. It’s the whole journey of evolution over these 13.8 billion years has led to imagination. It’s gone from hydrogen to ideas. It’s gone from matter to something not made of matter, and that realm of ideas where we’re creating stories is not a bolt-on extra. It’s actually another level. It’s not the most real exactly, but the most emergent, the latest level of reality. It’s all been leading to this.” 

IM     “I haven’t thought of imagination as something that’s a product of evolution, partly because I imagined that imagination is foundational, that it is an important part of creative consciousness, and that actually everything that exists partakes of it.”

TF      “You had mentioned purpose, and one of the key things for me which makes me want to understand this is not just what is it, but what shall I do with it?
    I’m alive. I know that I’m going to die. Life is full of joy and suffering. Does it have a purpose? Who would know anyway? And yet, it feels like we live from those purposes.
    A lot of my method, I guess, is to look at the moment, because that’s what I’ve got. And to see what’s in it. And one of the things which came from that, ‘Oh, each moment’s the realization of a new potentiality. Every moment’s new and every moment contains everything that’s ever happened before. It’s implicit within it.
    Me arriving here is implicit of our communication, the whole of the Big Bang, everything. The past is present & hasn’t gone anywhere is a very powerful idea I associate with Rupert Sheldrake. This process has been one of evolution realizing potentiality. So that the purpose of existence ... is intrinsic to the very nature of what it is, which is the continual realization of potentiality. And because of the accumulation of everything that’s happened in the past, there’s a tendency towards more & more emergent realization, so that now we can have conversation because soul has emerged, psyche has emerged, which wasn’t happening when there was just hydrogen. But that was a precursor for this. So that there seems then a very deep purpose with which we are intrinsic parts which is to continue that realization of ever deeper, more emergent potentials. And actually, I think we’re doing it right now in having this conversation, because the new potentials now are being realized in the imagination. They’re not particularly biological or physical anymore. They’re happening on this imaginary or cultural soul level.” 

IM     “Well, I want to pick up two ideas that you just raised. One is to do with meaning and the other to do with purpose, and they have something of the same structure to them.
    There’s a certain way of thinking about what meaning is. For example, I can tell you what the meaning of the instructions for how to operate a new piece of machinery I’ve got. What that means is very easy to do.
    But quite what King Lear means is another matter.
    Even more problematic is, I can say, ‘My wife means the world to me.’ And people say, ‘What does she mean then?’ And there isn’t a way you could possibly work with that. Nor does it work with great music. It seems to me that some of the most wonderful experiences, pregnant with meaning can be derived from listening to Bach – there’s no conceivable way they can be reduced to a meaning in what I would consider the left hemisphere sense, which is, ‘Come on, what’s the meaning in sentences we can analyze & understand?’ But there is another kind of meaning which we experience with the whole of our being and is more implicit and can’t be articulated because by articulating it, we reduce it, we cut bits off artificially from it, and reduce its meaning by giving it an explicit meaning.
    Now the same thing happens with purpose. When we say something has a purpose, we normally mean, ‘I can see that doing this causes that,’ and that’s an outcome that I wanted. That’s a kind of purpose, a kind of utilitarian purpose. It would seem to me that when we discover that we have no purpose, it’s that kind of purpose we discover. There is no utilitarian purpose in that sense. It’s not all designed by some engineer God to produce a certain result.
    What happens instead is that guaranteed by the fact that it is not produced to an instrumental purpose, in order to serve something outside of ourselves because the engineer is serving his own purposes. Our lives are not engineered. This universe is not engineered in that sense, but it seems to me full of purpose. And that purpose is I think, and this is where we agree, the fulfillment of potential. It’s simply in what is there potentially, becoming being. And once it’s become being, the process moves on. And that’s where you say everything that’s happened is already still there, is that something is left behind by this process but it’s also changed by the continual becoming. So even though in retrospect, it looked like this, now with further retrospect, it looks different. So the whole of everything is changing, and I would see the present moment as a something that is traveling through a medium of potential and actualizing as it goes, leaving this actual path behind it. And it’s not determined from behind by a series of steps but actually drawn towards fulfillment of purpose."

TF     “Yes, beautiful, there’s so much in there. ... so the moment right now seems to be the meeting of the past and the possible, always. And the possible is what you mean by the creative or the cosmic imagination, that kind of sense that there’s something which is giving birth to something new – doing it now, and now, and now. … It’s that journey of realization potential which seems to be fundamentally what a life is, as part of this greater journey, that ‘I am doing that.’
    John Keats said ‘the world is a vale of soul-making.’ I love that. That’s a very essential message for me. It feels like I’m making my soul, because I’m made of my past. I’m made of everything I’ve ever experienced, everything I’ve ever been. This is now who I am and I’m making myself. Or I’m being made as well. It’s not just me doing it.”

IM     “I think that remark of Keats is both beautiful and quite deep. It’s suggesting that the soul is not a being, an entity, a thing, but is instead an aspect of a process which we help to nourish or can stifle. So in our lives we can grow ourselves or we can stunt ourselves. It’s those choices that make our life what it is. So I think it’s a very good remark.
    This is where we get into the realm where language is extremely difficult, but the present is where the past and potential meet. I think it’s very difficult not to almost spatialize when talking about time, so we see two things that meet but of course they’re not two things that meet. The present is an infinitesimal moment that travels through this business, actualizing as it goes. … The Buddhist concept of emptiness is often misunderstood. We think of things in binary sort of ways, that is, there is nothing, but there is no thing there. This emptiness – the word 'sunyata' - is derived from a root that means a seed that is potential to grow, and it’s an emptiness as that of a womb that is a potential for something to grow in. And so quite often what we need to be doing is the idea of negation, which in the Western tradition just looks like the absence of something important. But negation is the stopping doing things that get between us & something that is there for us to discover. Often what we need to do in order to be creative is not to make something happen, but to create a space, in which what is already potentially there is invited to grow, to flourish & fulfill itself.”

TF      “My strange life has led me to be interested in what traditionally gets called spiritual awakening or waking up in consciousness to this presence which is completely spacious, emptiness. And I want to invite you to do two things: to mention just the essence of left vs right hemisphere dominance, and the thing I’m particularly interested in is how that or does that have anything to do with awakening or spiritual experience, because one of the things I notice is that a lot of people come to me and say 'Look I understand this all intellectually, but I don’t experience it.' 

    And one of my jobs is to help them experience it, and that’s probably what I do most. And I wonder, is that to do with being trapped in a left brain conceptual understanding and needing to free up into a more right brain understanding? For me the gnosis that arises, the deep knowing, the most central thing, which is before words. And I try then to put it into words and what I end up saying sounds very naïve & a bit child-like, ‘It’s all good really, despite everything. I know it’s awful, but it’s also good. It really is.’ It’s very childish intuitions, but they’re the deepest things I know. And I wonder is that also to do with the left brain and right brain thing, or is that something separate?”

IM      “Everyday language arose to enable us to utilize the world effectively, and we have to use special kind of language to deal with things that are not everyday realities for us because, unless we’re careful by expressing them in language we reduce them to familiar things, whereas the whole point about them is we’re trying to convey something that is unfamiliar. As Nietzsche said, ‘Words make the uncommon common,’ and what you’re talking about are things that are generally-speaking, unusual but nonetheless very deep in meaning. We wouldn’t expect them to translate easily into everyday words, so I think that everyday language is a problem for certain kinds of understanding, because it tells us that we’ve got it. It says, ‘I understand that.’ ‘I grasped it.’ Whereas, in fact what it needs to do is to abdicate that power because it’s actually a destructive process. It’s getting between us and understanding something that only by removing language we can contact, and for me as a psychiatrist, one of the things has been an understanding that people who are particularly articulate often need special help with realizing things of a deep emotional kind. This can be done by using implicit therapies rather than explicit therapies. A lot of therapy takes place in language, but there are therapies that don’t involve that, that involve either metaphors of bodily movement – of enacting things, or of painting or sculpting.
    And often city lawyers would be very reluctant to go and do these therapies, and I’d need to persuade that it didn’t matter that they had no artistic skill. But the trouble is they were so good at articulating things in everyday terms that that got between them & something which, only when they were able to adopt a more implicit approach a more oblique approach, came to life."

    I personally found it worthwhile to transcribe the entire conversation. In my next blog, I plan to continue where we just left off. Enjoy!

 Well worth deeply listening to the full 88-minute discussion:

 

A New Relationship

    “The loss of a relationship is not the same as the loss of a life. Suffering a sudden betrayal is not the same as dying from heart failure. Yet both can teach us how to cultivate a new relationship to surrender and acceptance.” Sunita Puri MD

    “Jesus cried out in a loud voice, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? ' ” 

    Betrayal by the Divine, Nature, Source, God, the Force, Ultimate Reality; by a human being we love dearly; or even by a pet that 'suddenly turns on us,' is perhaps the ultimate shock to the system. Even the death of a loved one is a kind of betrayal. Even dropping & breaking something we've worked so hard to make for someone else is a kind of betrayal. We assume that if we're doing good, surely then the Force is with us. Nope, not necessarily.
    Nature is constantly reminding us who we already ARE - to BE who we are, have always been & will be, and not to be so busy trying to do more, trying to become someone else, to go somewhere else.
    We resist hard truths. To the extent we attempt to resist reality, we suffer needlessly. We demand not 'a spoonful of sugar' to make the medicine go down, but gallons of syrup. In the 1992 movie "A Few Good Men" Jack Nicholson's character famously yells, 'You can't handle the truth!'

    In the 2016 movie, "The Dreamseller" (Netflix) the main character, once a workaholic billionaire who prioritized his business over his wife & young daughter, sees his wife & daughter perish when his private jet explodes. At the same time, he loses his business empire when his best friend & colleague betrays him. These events completely transform him - which many see as 'madness.' He now understands that true success is attaining what money can't buy. 

      Spiritual maturation or evolution or 'pulling up our big boy pants' involves a new relationship with reality. Aging involves losing EVERYTHING we've worked so hard all our lives to learn, master, accumulate, depend upon etc.
    NOW we must learn to accept loss after loss, after loss, till we have no thing left to lose - the material evaporates - ONLY THEN the Mystery!

Leonard Cohen - Anthem