When We End Toxic Divisiveness

      Some foods we consider nutritious & essential for health & even survival; some safe but not essential; some edible but only in small doses; and then some poisonous & to be avoided at all cost. Except for severe allergies, nobody thinks another person's favorite food is toxic.
     But when it comes to self-concepts & worldviews, one person's vision of perfection is another's road to hell! In fact our identification with ideas about who we are & what we (think we) believe can be so extreme that millions of people have been, and continue to be massacred because of it. And "it" is nothing more than sticky conditioned thought patterns in one group of people, aimed against the demonized "other" group of people.
     Toxic divisiveness is killing us, destroying the earth & poisoning civilized collaboration.
     Though the process feels agonizingly slow, our human race, as a WHOLE, is EVOLVING out of hostile self-centeredness, and into unconditional love for all.

     “The Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin claimed that love exists on the fundamental levels of life. Some might think this idea absurd and ask, do quarks fall in love? Teilhard was pointing to the fact that the characteristics of human love such as attraction, irresistibility and union, can be found on the most fundamental levels of physical life. Love is a passionate force at the heart of the universe, according to Teilhard, a core energy of cosmic life, a unitive principle and a cosmological force. He wrote, ‘love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.’ By declaring love a cosmological force, Teilhard indicated that love is an energy ‘present from the Big Bang onwards, though indistinguishable from molecular forces.’ In his poem ‘The Eternal Feminine,’ he speaks of cosmic love in the voice of wisdom:

      'I am embedded in the force field that is driving the cosmos towards greater novelty, towards greater integrity, and eventually towards greater consciousness. From within the fragments of matter, I encourage all possible combinations since I know that not every combination will be productive. I am the principle of union, the soul of the world. I am the magnetic and unitive force that brings the disparate matter together and urges each newly created form to multiply, to beautify, and to bear fruit. I nurture and release spirit from among the crude and complex elements. Each step towards union moves my creation towards greater spontaneity and freedom.’

     This irresistible energy of love, present in the universe, led Teilhard to claim that ‘the physical structure of the universe is love.’ The universe is created not only by the interaction of space-time-matter; it is created from the ubiquitous energy of love embedded in the fabric of the universe. All levels of life are governed by principles of attraction and union. Love is a cosmic force before it is a human one.”
     Ilia Delio. “The Primacy of Love.” Fortress Press, 2022.

    Imagine what we will accomplish when we become less self-centered - personally & tribally!

     FAR TOO MANY OF US, FOR FAR TOO LONG have had to “not only get our bearings, but (felt compelled to) know all the details of the world before we ventured out into it.”           Jack Henry Abbott

 

    WE ARE BEGINNING to grasp 'big picture' ideas, nourish them into reality, "BOLDLY going where no human has gone before!"

 
     “To deal with our existential crises, we need to base our disagreements on the same facts, burst out of our bubbles of tribalism, and see our essential unity. We need a blueprint for renewing our individual and collective consciousness, transforming our organizations and institutions, and re-enchanting our societies.
     The good news is that we can create a new narrative for our lives that will be inclusive and transform our worldview as we broaden our understanding of truth, beauty, and goodness. Think of Universal Consciousness as fields of flowing energy in which we transform our human consciousness, engage our neighbors, and build a society.
     David Bohm described a hidden domain of reality that we take for granted. He referred to the vast star-filled emptiness, the vacuum, the infinity of outer space as a Plenum, something that is infinitely full rather than infinitely empty. He saw the emptiness as fullness, as one whole, living organism – an undivided wholeness in flowing movement. I believe this describes the field of Universal Consciousness.
     Our interactions, our choices in this field of Consciousness, affect all of nature and life in the biosphere. We can help nature and life to flourish, or we can continue to break down the natural evolution of nature and manifest catastrophes like COVID-19.”
     Edwin E. Olson. “Become Conscious of Wholeness – Humanity’s Only Future.” Resource Publications, 2021. 

 

Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from The Well of Being

Transformative Power of Deep Acceptance

      Most of us define ourselves in terms of what we can & cannot accept, and are fairly rigid about these opinions. We all realize, at some level, that deeply meaningful aspects of life powerfully influence us. BUT instead of deeply investigating these via self-reflection, self-inquiry, meditation etc, most of us do whatever we can to avoid such topics, even sliding into nihilism, denying that life has any meaning at all!

     "Existential crisis (existential dread) ... when individuals question whether their lives have meaning, purpose, or value, and are negatively impacted by the contemplation. It may be commonly, but not necessarily, tied to depression or inevitably negative speculations on purpose in life such as the futility of all effort (eg 'if one day I will be forgotten, what is the point of all of my work?')" en.wikipedia.org

      Avoidance is beneficial only when we're too young, or otherwise unable to consciously deal with reality. But avoidance so easily becomes an automatic reaction to challenges, that distraction becomes a way of life. As soon as we feel the slightest discomfort, we immediately try to escape. We rationalize our constant compulsive busyness by blaming external factors, choosing to ignore our fearfully immature inner life.

     Of course the opposite of avoidance & intolerance, is simply accepting life, as it is.

     "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." Marie Curie

     "In time we hate that which we often fear.” William Shakespeare

     "It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live." Marcus Aurelius

     "Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility." Sigmund Freud

     "The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." Joseph Campbell

     "Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire." Dan Brown

     “You take up the spiritual path only when you feel you cannot do otherwise.” The Mother

      “Most people go to their graves believing suffering is unavoidable. How sad that is. If you turn from the possibility that it could be otherwise, you will suffer needlessly until the day you die. But here is something: the end of suffering would be the least of the benefits, if you become free. The real miracle is not the profound undoing of anguish, but the riches that would flood the freed-up ‘space.’” Jan Frazier, “When Fear Falls Away”

      Eckhart Tolle had a very difficult childhood & severe depression, however, as a result of acceptance, his life transformed into a lasting, profoundly positive, meaningful experience. His description:

     “In my case, grace erupted into a bad karma situation: unhappy childhood, parents continuously fighting, no harmony in the environment, often lack of money, then my parents divorced which was uncommon at the time & I felt great shame about it, my Dad was like an unexploded bomb that was always ready to & did periodically explode. So the young adult became unhappy. He had absorbed unhappiness from the environment.
     So all that’s not good karma, and because of that, suffering became unbearable, and then a surrender happened (choiceless acceptance), and then there was an eruption suddenly of grace. The fact that surrender happened in the midst of the suffering, is probably grace. So, surrender happened, and with surrender, grace could suddenly flow in fully. Grace is the essence of who you are, coming through the form (physical body & personality). So in grace then, you’re not the density of the form – the form’s density lessens. As it lessens, grace is able to flow through. The density of the form lessens through surrender or acceptance of the present moment as it is, as a spiritual practice. If you can make that your spiritual practice, you may not succeed all the time. That’s fine. Have compassion with yourself. So you have another level of acceptance behind the non-acceptance. If you don’t succeed in accepting what is, then accept that at this moment I can’t accept what is. Allow the emotion to be there, you still have space then, and grace is space.
     Grace can enter – grace is the spaciousness of the unconditioned, the divine (primordial) consciousness. The quickest way of inviting grace to into your life is by becoming friendly with the 'isness' of this moment - no matter what form it takes. It already is anyway, so why not say yes? It doesn’t mean you can’t take action, but at the moment, it is. So you ‘go with the flow’ of life. The flow is always here & now. You never go against it. The starting point is the isness of this moment.
     With that acceptance, the gate is open for grace to come in. If you complain about difficulties or the unsatisfactory nature of this moment, the gate or the shutters are closed so the sunlight can’t come in. It doesn’t mean you’re more powerful than the sun. The sun isn’t concerned about your shutters. So when you are somehow against the present moment, or you treat it only as a means to an end because there’s a more important place you want to get to, grace can’t operate in your life, or you only get a trickle, just to keep you going. Occasionally, for example when you’re in awe of a beautiful sunset, just for a moment the ‘complaining entity’ subsides, and in that moment grace can come in, and you can live on that one sunset for three weeks. But of course that’s only a trickle. To go from form to formlessness, is done by accepting whatever form arises in the present moment, whatever form this moment takes. With the acceptance of form, the formless opens up in you.
     And the ultimate truth of that is in the image of the crucifixion, which I see as going beyond religion. Some people dislike it. They say it’s all to do with suffering, and it’s unhealthy, and so on. But there is a deep meaning there, that for a long time, perhaps could not be expressed in an abstract way. That meaning is that here you have the image of complete suffering of a human. He is nailed to the cross, which is a torture instrument, and this human is able to surrender & accept, ‘Not my will but thy will be done,’ and then suddenly the torture instrument becomes a symbol of the divine. Isn’t that strange? The torture instrument has become a symbol of the divine. So through acceptance, whatever looks like an obstacle, or even a dreadful thing, becomes transformed.
     Every situation that’s accepted deeply – and if it’s a very big thing like a crucifixion, there needs to be very deep acceptance – and immediately, there’s a transformation. So grace is hiding also in that which looks dreadful. The dreadful sufferings we see all around us - they are there, but grace is hiding there. And you can only see the truth of this in yourself. I’m not saying anybody should believe in that. You have to find out for yourself that grace is hiding in what the seemingly dreadful things – even in little things that go wrong – but even more so in big things that go wrong.
     And ultimately you see it’s not wrong, it didn’t go wrong – what it looked like in the moment when you judged it. So that’s inviting grace into your life, through bringing this deep yes to the present moment. Then your evolution accelerates. And the more you do that, the less you need the disasters, because you can operate with the flowering of consciousness. Consciousness wants to flower into this dimension, in this dimension. So it’s really welcoming what is.”
     Above transcribed from the superb video below:

Fantasy, Existential Attitude, and then ...

     "A sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world" is an essential "reality check" in one's maturation to adulthood. Before we experience this 'existential attitude', we're living a fantasy, not fully aware of existential realities: constant change, aging, sickness and death.

     Thousands of years after the Buddha, Soren Kierkegaard also realized that "each individual — not society or religion — is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely ('authentically')."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

     See also: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2013/02/spirituality-in-health-care-meaning.html
     and: http://www.johnlovas.com/2012/01/intention-shifts.html

 

Photo: Ipinheiro   www.dpreview.com

Concepts of Self

     “The image of flowing water rather than a tray of ice cubes captures well the existentialist conception of identity.
     Existentialism recognizes selfhood as a more or less managed process of self-creation based on the interaction of choices (human agency) and the social context in which such agency occurs (culture and structure). This is a matter of maintaining what is referred to as ‘ontological security’. This term refers to the important need to maintain a sense of security in a context of constant change and potential threat. Ontological security is what is lost when, at times of experiencing a major loss or a trauma, we lose our sense of who we are.”

     Thompson N, Pascal J. “Reflective practice: an existentialist perspective.” Reflective Practice 2011; 12(1): 15—26.

     Buddhism, and perhaps other non-dual wisdom traditions, has a more challenging perspective on "self": enlightened practitioners experience that there is no solid, abiding, unchanging self. The advice is not to worry about this, it can't be grasped through intellectual analysis alone. The realization comes on its own, when we're ready for it.

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