Gradual AND Sudden

    VERY serious, DEEPLY committed spiritual seekers, Bill & Susan Morgan, who've spent a good chunk of their lives meditating, including a 3-year silent meditation retreat at the wonderful Forest Refuge (in Barre MA), and who a week ago returned from a 1-year silent meditation retreat, shared some of their insights last night with over a hundred folks who gathered around them for a New Year's online sitting.  

    Bill shared that he had always gone on retreats planning to have the BIG awakening experience - by which he meant the final, once & for all, complete enlightenment, where suddenly, he would be completely transformed forever.  

    But that has not been his experience, and it's certainly not for lack of interest, know-how or effort. Interestingly, and this is important for all of us, Bill & Susan have come to realize that focusing on the goal of an earth-shattering experience can easily overshadow the many, small but meaningful insights we all invariably have on this journey. So while most of us will not experience sudden mind-blowing fireworks, we WILL gradually experience deeper & more abiding levels of calm, peace & gratitude. And this is wonderful!

    Society's present focus is overly self-centered - survival & "success" of our self & closest loved one(s) first & foremost. So it's very counter-cultural & counter-intuitive to shift from striving to achieve a sudden dramatic personal goal and to instead, recognize & value calm, peace, gratitude, equanimity, stillness, silence, interbeing, spaciousness & intimacy with ALL. Even within Buddhism, and some other spiritual disciplines, there is debate over sudden vs gradual awakening (though there is general agreement about the life-long necessity to skillfully integrate spiritual insights into one's daily life).

    Appropriate self-care & self-compassion are important parts of life, in context of the BIG picture, which includes everyone & all else.
    "Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole."
    Iain McGilchrist https://channelmcgilchrist.com/home/ - AN ESSENTIAL DEEP DIVE towards WISDOM & BALANCE 

    “As we travel through life, we are all seekers
     after something larger than ourselves…” Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer PhD

    “The inexorable yearning for something beyond the mundane or the explainable runs deep in the human psyche. It arises from an urge to find meaning in existence, for something bigger than ourselves. It also comes from a need to belong, to experience life in terms of a harmonious interaction – with others, with nature, with God, with the universe. An interaction that was once part of the human condition.
    In hunter-gatherer societies, religious belief was always linked to nature. Facing constant danger, people sought ways to live in harmony with the unpredictable environment by worshiping the earth, its elements, its wild animals. Life was shot through with spirituality. And the powers of ESP, or psi – contact with the dead, premonition, telepathy, astral travel – were accepted as an essential part of man’s interconnection with nature.”
    Maria Coffey. “Explorers of the Infinite. The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes – and What They Reveal About Near-Death Experiences, Psychic Communications, and Touching the Beyond.” Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2008. FASCINATING!

“We clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers
whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no one hears it except in fragments.” Wendell Berry, “Healing”

“We consist of and are sustained by interweaving currents of matter, energy, and information that flow through us interconnecting us with our environment and other beings.
Yet, we are accustomed to identifying ourselves only with that small arc of the flow – though that is lit, like the narrow beam of a flashlight, by our individual subjective awareness.
But we don’t have to so limit our self–perceptions ...
It is as plausible to align our identity with the larger pattern, interexistent with all beings, as to break off one segment
of the process and build our borders there.”
Joanna Macy

 

     Join Bill & Susan Morgan for their daily sit starting Monday, Jan 2, 2023 : https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/online-programs/

Control, Chaos and our Hemispheres

     Clinicians love to cure - definitively fix - the sick, the broken. And many of us, at least when we feel broken, want to be fixed-up once & for all! We all dearly love 'agency,' the sense of control, the ability to reach out, grab & hold onto what we want, and push away what we don't want.
     At some level, we realize that this idea of perfect control over our life & environment is wishful thinking, based on an a childishly unrealistic, simplistic, mechanistic, reductionist model. Life's complexity extends well beyond our comprehension, never mind control.
    However, we dread the idea of being overwhelmed by chaos - being helplessly out of control as our world crumbles around us. So to create some sense of agency, we tend to restrict our attention to manipulating whatever we can. But with this narrowed focus, many of us forget about or even become averse to the big picture that includes the most meaningful dimensions of life that cannot be controlled or even be put into words!
    Our current Western society tends to overuse the perspective of our left hemispheres, and at best ignores, at worse ridicules & actively suppresses the perspective of our right hemispheres.
    This lack of balance causes serious conflicts: rigid partisanship (political, religious, ecological, ethnic, racial, gender, economic, and even academic / educational: 'hard' sciences vs 'soft' sciences & arts) instead of harmonious tolerance, balance & collaboration. It seriously impacts the education of even our health-care professionals: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.com/2012/02/control-and-liminality.html
     Extreme positions eg towards control, often produce unintended, undesired results eg chaos.

     Iain McGilchrist spent 20 years researching & documenting the neurological basis & Western cultural rationale for a healthy balance between the two hemispheres, perhaps summarized in Reinhold Niebuhr's 'serenity prayer':
          Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
          courage to change the things I can;
          and wisdom to know the difference.

     “Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focused, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.

     Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does – they are both involved in everything – but how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans & many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilizing the world, the other better at understanding it.
     Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal.
     Because of the way we prioritise the left hemisphere’s take on the world, we have ceased to appreciate the meaning of continuity & flow, instead prioritising discrete chunks of experience we call things. This has serious consequences for how we see our selves as human beings and our relationship with the wider world. … the world in which we live in the West is shaped by a set of beliefs about reality which we know from experience, and feel intuitively, to be almost certainly false. Though the consequences of this are widely deplored, we seem strangely powerless to resist it. We are as if in a trance, whistling a happy tune as we sleepwalk towards the abyss."
     Iain McGilchrist. “The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.” Yale University Press, 2019. (An exceptionally worthwhile read IMHO)

     “It’s just not compatible with the left hemisphere’s view that there could be anything wrong with itself. It has a polished, perfectionist view of what it’s doing. It’s therefore very unwilling to accept the contrary argument. As a society I would say, I believe we exemplify this mentality in our world. 
     In a nice piece of research ... they sent questionnaires to over two thousand executives to see how much they knew about their own industries. Managers in the advertising industry were 90% confident they were correct, but were actually wrong 61% of the time; people in IT 95% confident they were correct, only 20% were right; 99% of them overestimated their success. This is the world we’re now living in. 
     Now how did we get trapped in this worldview of the left hemisphere, which is that of the static, the fixed, the certain, the isolated, in competition with others, a detached, unempathic, unflowing world, which has only one value – that of utility? As opposed to a world in which things are seen as seamlessly interconnected, flowing, never certain, constantly changing, but with which we have a relationship of care. 
     How did we get into this trap? I think there are briefly a few reasons: one is that it gives us power, it makes us powerful, and that is hugely seductive. This is the hemisphere about getting. The left hemisphere controls the right hand with which we grasp; it controls the bits of language (not all of language) the bits with which we define things and pin them down, and say we’ve grasped them – so it’s the grasping part us. That makes us powerful but it’s version of the world is also extremely simple. It’s that it’s made out of bits which can be understood, and then we’ve got there. And all the bits that don’t fit with that are sheared off from the model. And so it’s possible at the end of the day to go, ‘I’ve explained everything,’ because actually you’ve only explained the things you’ve allowed into your model. Another thing is that it’s what I call ‘the Berlusconi of the brain,’ because it’s the one that controls the media. It’s the one that actually does the talking and constructs the arguments, so it’s a piece of cake for it to make its points, whereas it’s quite difficult for the right hemisphere to express things that are subtle, often contradictory and implicit. And I think the fourth reason, at the moment, why we are trapped in this is because we’ve evolved a world out there which reflects the left hemisphere’s world inside. So all around us we have the rigid, lifeless, fixed, represented world which is that of the left hemisphere.”
       Iain McGilchrist @ Schumacher College: Things Are Not What They Seem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXiHStLfjP0
 
      “… we know intuitively that there is a dimension of ourselves and of nature which eludes us because it is too close, too general, and too all-embracing to be singled out as a particular object. This dimension is the ground of all the astonishing forms and experiences of which we are aware. Because we are aware, it cannot be unconscious, although we are not conscious of it – as an external thing. Thus we can give it a name but cannot make any definitive statement about it … 
     Our only way of apprehending it is by watching the processes and patterns of nature, and by the meditative discipline of allowing our minds to become quiet, so as to have vivid awareness of ‘what is’ without verbal comment.

     … seen as a whole, the universe is a harmony or symbiosis of patterns which cannot exist without each other. However, when it is looked at section by section we find conflict.
                       ‘for the world is a shen vessel 
                        and cannot be forced.’
     ‘Shen’ presents problems for the translator... I take it to mean that innate intelligence (or li) of each organism in particular, and of the universe as a whole, which is beyond the reach of calculation."
       Alan Watts. “Tao. The Watercourse Way.” Pantheon Books, 1975.

'Shen'

On Nature

     Nature delights in discovering herself by manifesting infinite variations of phenomena.       Ralph Waldo Emerson? - please do send me the accurate quote & author
 

     "There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent."         Ralph Waldo Emerson


     “Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.” 
Ralph Waldo Emerson


     "When we pay attention to nature's music, we find that everything on the Earth contributes to its harmony."         Hazrat Inayat Khan


          “We are so lightly here.
           It is in love that we are made.
           In love we disappear.”                   Leonard Cohen 



     “The purpose of life is not to transcend the body, 
       but to embody the transcendent.”          Dalai Lama 
 

Courtesy of Buddha Doodles www.buddhadoodles.com

United We Stand

"The health and vitality of any living system - be it an individual, family, organization, or society - is a reflection of how fully and freely each unique, diverse, individual element of that entity is differentiated - and - how closely linked, connected, and attuned those diverse elements are with each other. Any tendency toward walling off, rigidity, exclusion, disrespect, domination, or scattering chaos will undermine and severely diminish the health, vitality, and overall potentiality and adaptability of that living system. Any movement toward honoring diversity, aligning and attuning different people or elements in synergistic ways, developing empathic resonance and mutual care will ultimately enhance the health and well-being of the whole system."

Joel & Michelle Levey 

~~~

"If we have no peace,
it is because we have forgotten
that we belong to each other."

Mother Teresa

~~~

"When we seek for connection,
we restore the world to wholeness.
Our seemingly separate lives become meaningful
as we discover
how truly necessary we are to each other."

Margaret Wheatley 

 

 

 Daiensai & Samantha Ryder

 www.kirstengallery.com

Less Noise, More Meaning Please

     Identification with, and radical allegiance to a caveman leader or any cult-like group are attempts at instantly manufacturing a noisy ego, by those lacking self-esteem. Such allegiances are fear-based, so the ensuing rationalizations are funny.
     “People ... would rather believe in some other reality, even if it is only an illusion, so long as it makes them feel bigger.” Suzy Kassem 

     "The more you listen, the more you will hear. The more you hear, the more and more deeply you will understand, and the more wisdom, harmony, and balance you will bring to your life and world. As you practice mindfulness it is inevitable that you will encounter many aspects of your life and your world that are unsettling or challenging to face or embrace. It takes courage to create and sustain your mindful practice, but staying with it gives you the strength, compassion, and courage to cope with whatever life throws your way. Imagine how different our lives and world would be if we and others were to learn to listen more deeply to ourselves, each other, and the world around us!"
        Joel Levey, Michelle Levey. "Mindfulness, Meditation, and Mind Fitness." Conari Press, 2015.

     Though referring to creativity in visual arts, Keith Haring may just as well have been describing religion / spirituality:
     "When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about."  

Mob Mentality at a Soccer Match

Bringing Harmony to Relationships

     "The cardinal rule in bringing harmony to your relationships is to remember that your work is on yourself. It is not about changing, coercing, or manipulating others. Over the course of a lifetime, we have the opportunity to learn from and grow within the context of many different relationships. Lessons learned in one relationship will offer valuable clues for other relationships. As we learn and grow, we change, and as we change, our relationships change. On the other hand, many of us have learned by now that though we may leave a relationship with someone, the same difficult issues we had with that person may keep showing up in other relationships until we work it out in a balanced way. If you have a lesson to learn and you don't learn it in one relationship, it will certainly keep resurfacing until you get it.
     So it is crucial in all relationships that we ask ourselves again and again: what issues or qualities in my own life, attitudes, or beliefs are being reflected back to me in the mirror of this relationship? Is this relationship asking me to be more patient, more honest, more mindful, more loving, more lighthearted, more focused, more present, more caring, or more generous with my time and attention? Look, listen, and feel into the relationship for what is really being asked for in order to realize harmony and balance between you. Deepen your empathy to know and understand both what is true for you, and as best you can, what is likely true for others. Balance both reasoning* and intuitive intelligence** to discover what is most alive in each relationship.
     In extending love to others, the key point to remember is this: though the people with whom we live and work maintain an air of having it together and having their life in control, just like us they all carry deep wounds from previous experiences that lead them to act in ways that are difficult for us to understand, even if we think we know them. This simple yet challenging fact of life creates a learning laboratory in which we are constantly being invited to learn more about ourselves and one another as we dance together in life." 

       Michelle and Joel Levey in: "Living in Balance: A Mindful Approach for Thriving in a Complex World." www.wisdomatwork.com

* & ** See "Two Levels of Consciousness": http://jglovas.wix.com/awarenessnow#!Two-Levels-of-Consciousness/c17jj/56f14e0c0cf266a292561f27


Unconditional Love for Self exercise: http://www.johnlovas.com/2013/02/unconditional-love-for-self-exercise.html

in a special little girl's room

 

Not One, Not Two

     "That oneness is the true feeling of who you are. You are not the personality, or any particular aspect of essence. You are the whole thing, including emptiness and space, and you experience everything in complete harmony. When this happens, there is a sense of intimacy, an exquisite, personal intimacy, the feeling ...that you are you, with nothing excluded, nothing rejected. You also feel that you are both a person and a universal existence, that what is personal and what is universal are completely harmonious and can coexist. When your whole organism is in harmony on all its levels, there is no conflict. The expression and radiance of that harmony is love. You become a channel of love, a manifestation of love. You feel completely yourself and not separate from anything. It is possible to be you, completely you and not separate from the other at the same time. This is the action of love. The action of love is to unite, to reveal the connectedness. A loving person doesn't love you - a loving person is love. Love isn't given. It overflows. It's not even your love - it's everyone's love interacting. Love emanates from us like the scent from a rose."                A.H. Almaas

Harmony

     "That oneness is the true feeling of who you are. You are not the personality, or any particular aspect of essence. You are the whole thing, including emptiness and space, and you experience everything in complete harmony. When this happens, there is a sense of intimacy, an exquisite, personal intimacy, the feeling ... that you are you, with nothing excluded, nothing rejected. You also feel that you are both a person and a universal existence, that what is personal and what is universal are completely harmonious and can coexist. When your whole organism is in harmony on all its levels, there is no conflict. The expression and radiance of that harmony is love. You become a channel of love, a manifestation of love. You feel completely yourself and not separate from anything. It is possible to be you, completely you and not separate from the other at the same time. This is the action of love. The action of love is to unite, to reveal the connectedness. A loving person doesn't love you - a loving person is love. Love isn't given. It overflows. It's not even your love - it's everyone's love interacting. Love emanates from us like the scent from a rose."                A.H. Almaas

www.wisdomatwork.com

 

www.wisdomatwork.com

One Love, One World

     "In a real sense all life is inter-related. All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality."

     "Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that. Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it."                                                           Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

www.wisdomatwork.com

Two Levels of Practice

     "There are two levels of practice.
     The first is the foundation, a development of precepts, virtue, or morality in order to bring happiness, comfort, and harmony among people. 
     The second, more intensive and unconcerned with comfort is the practice of Buddha Dharma directed solely toward awakening, toward the liberation of the heart. This liberation is the source of wisdom and compassion and the true reason for the Buddha's teaching."

 A Still Forest Pool. The Insight Meditation of Achaan Chah.
Jack Kornfield and Paul Breiter eds. Quest, 1985.

Raindrops

Work a Concentration Meditation; Retirement an Open Awareness Meditation?

     There are interresting parallels between the relatively narrow focus of working life and concentration forms of meditation; and then a broader opening up to life in general when one retires (or is on a retreat) and open awareness forms of meditation.
     If one can sense the totality of life as one living organism, and resonates with Valera's understanding http://www.johnlovas.com/2014/06/appropriate-behavior-health-depend-on.html that communication between all parts of this one massive Self is essential, then we can appreciate the relative tunnel vision of work-life to be potentially problematic. Also, after a lifetime of specialized work, when (if) people retire, they may well find it challenging to open their mind-hearts to the big picture.
     The capacity, indeed the seamless, effortless ease of connecting deeply & being congruent with LIFE is always, throughout life, critical, IF we are to perform our small, individual, specialized roles in harmony with the one orchestra.

Venice, Italy, June 2014

Civilization Depends on Every Individual's Evolution of Consciousness

     Confucius reasoned that society's political & civil harmony, depends entirely on each individual achieving moral harmony. Unless large sheep herds are normally composed of individual horses, Confucius is correct.

     "The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.
      Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.
      From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides." Confucius (551 – 479 BC)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Confucius

Steve McCurry   http://stevemccurry.com/

Healing, Growth

"All are nothing but flowers
in a flowering universe."                                Nakagawa Soen-Roshi

     "Healing is the ever-deepening process of bringing together or integrating that which is split or separated in an individual so that all aspects of that individual function as one, in harmony with self and environment."

     Bub B. "Communication skills that heal. A practical approach to a new professionalism in medicine." Radcliffe Publishing, 2006.

     "Growth fundamentally means an enlarging and expanding of one's horizons, a growth of one's boundaries, outwardly in perspective & inwardly in depth. ... Growth is reapportionment; re-zoning; re-mapping; an acknowledgment, and then enrichment, of ever deeper and more encompassing levels of one's own self."

     Wilber K. "No boundary. Eastern and Western approaches to personal growth." Shambhala, 1979.

 

Rudy Pohl   http://www.flickr.com/photos/rudypohl/sets/