Sparks of Wisdom Glowing Brighter

    From a very young age, from before I could speak, I've had a calm, intuitive sense of what's right, true & meaningful, and felt a deep empathic connection towards suffering humans & animals. This same sense seems to have given rise to a few sporadic instances of my inexplicably knowing, with a quiet confidence, that an important, specific, future event would turn out well.
    Many get a glimpse of this unusual sense of intimate familiarity or oneness with the cosmos after a few drinks - the feeling of being "in love with the whole world." There's immediate pressure then to quickly dismiss it as "just the booze talking." After all, the only taboo remaining in our Western society is the one against anything that might be deeply meaningful!
    Indeed, by around age 2, we start being conditioned by the prevailing dogmatic belief that human beings & other living "things" are accidental, isolated lumps of matter, in a mechanical, meaningless universe. So, we spend much of our adult lives trying to be as happy as possible given this narrow, stunted worldview.

    “Our talent for division, for seeing the parts (reductionist left hemisphere), is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole (right hemisphere).” Iain McGilchrist

    “Not only is the universe stranger than we think,
it is stranger than we can think.” Werner Heisenberg

    “There is but one cause of failure
And that is man’s lack of faith
in his true Self.” William James

    "All shall be well,
and all shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well." Julian of Norwich, English Christian mystic

    “So long as one is merely on the surface of things,
they are always imperfect, unsatisfactory, incomplete.
    Penetrate into the substance
and everything is perfect, complete, whole.” Philip Kapleau

    "You learn about a thing ... by opening yourself wholeheartedly to it. You learn about a thing by loving it." Barbara McClintock - Nobel prize-winning geneticist

    "Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough." George Washington Carver

    Fortunately, at least a small "spark" of early-childhood's innocent form of unity consciousness survives into adulthood, and many feel that at this pivotal time in human history, this spark is increasingly becoming fanned towards awakening.

    “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.

 Two (imho) EXCELLENT 15-minute Eckhart Tolle videos:

Barnacles upon Barnacles ...

    No matter how it appears to others, we're all doing the best we can with what we've got. After all, we're all trying to be happy. Now our ideas about what happiness means & what level of happiness we can realistically achieve differ greatly! I once asked a young woman what she hoped for in the future. Her response: 'a Lazy-Boy recliner.'
    Many just want to be as comfortable as possible in what they believe to be a hostile, machine-like, meaningless world. Because they have little or no knowledge or experience in these matters, they're absolutely certain that worldviews & self-concepts centering around loving inter-connection & universal consciousness are simple-minded, deluded & mere wishful thinking.

    “I don’t believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.” Terence McKenna

    More & more people - including the brightest & most highly educated - are continuously experiencing intimate, loving, nurturing connection with everyone & everything, and their peace & joy have become independent of their circumstances, including pain, sickness, aging & death. This highly-desirable & sought-after state - awakening / enlightenment - is considered the pinnacle of human consciousness maturation / evolution, shared by shamans / healers, mystics, saints & "ordinary folks" of all cultures & traditions throughout the ages (see 'perennial philosophy' below).

    Despite such vast differences in worldviews & self-concepts people hold, each individual tends to be absolutely certain that they are right, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Our minds seem far more interested in consistency than truth, so we often 'fail to see' or devalue data that contradicts, but gravitate towards & magnify data that confirms our stance.

    “We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anais Nin

    “Whatever I believe to be true is immediately true for me. Whatever I know and am certain is real will be experienced as real to me.”
    Helen Hamilton. “Reality Check. A Simple Guide to Final Enlightenment.” Balboa Press, 2021.

    We all inevitably experience hardships severe enough to cause our immature worldviews & self-concepts to shatter, forcing us to rebuild more mature, more realistic, more trauma-proof ones. It is often a very slow road to discovering our true self & real happiness, which are independent of conditions.

    If we're fortunate enough to live past middle age, then nagging aches, pains, stiffness, & progressive physical & mental deterioration will test us increasingly. Under 60 years of age & used to good health, you may think, 'No problem, I'll be able to handle it.' But in fact it gets tiresomely unpleasant as a wide assortment of barnacles relentlessly stick, progressively weighing down one's only leaky old rowboat! There are many valid reasons for old folks to feel grumpy - temporarily.

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

    Seniors' conversations often revolve around symptoms, disabilities, illnesses, surgeries, prescriptions, medical appointments, death & dying. And it's unbelievably easy 'to contract around' - to obsessively focus exclusively on one's own & loved ones' problems, desperately wanting to get rid of them ASAP, while feeling frustrated, angry, tired, hopeless & sad. This is especially so as pains & disabilities no longer quickly heal & resolve as they did in youth, but instead relentlessly eat away at one's body, mind & patience. Our usual egoic mind (small self) is specialized to survive & mate. In old age, we're no longer giving birth, and the fact & proximity of death is absolutely obvious. This profoundly unsettles one's ordinary egoic mind. And sadly, this limited, isolated sense of self is ALL many people are aware of! 

    BUT a solid spiritual practice, ideally established before stuff hits the fan, can make the "difference between heaven & hell" during trying times. Despite the current dogma of materialism, one's quality of life CAN be independent of circumstances.

    “The term 'perennial philosophy' (Agostino Steuco 1497-1548), refers to these four realizations:
      (1) there is only one Reality (God, Mother, Awareness, Self, Tao, Dharmakaya, Brahman, Great Spirit, Allah ...) that is the source & substance of all creation;
      (2) that while each of us is a manifestation of this Reality, most of us identify with something much smaller, that is, our culturally conditioned individual ego (the 'small self');
      (3) that this identification with the smaller self gives rise to needless anxiety, unnecessary suffering, and cross-cultural competition and violence; and
      (4) that peace, compassion, & justice naturally replace anxiety, needless suffering, competition, & violence when we realize our true nature as a manifestation of this singular Reality.
    The great sages & mystics of every civilization throughout human history have taught these truths in the language of their time & culture. It is the universality & timelessness of this wisdom that makes it the perfect focus for the spiritually independent seeker."
      Rami Shapiro. “Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent.” SkyLight Paths, 2013.

    "Our true nature is far more ancient & encompassing than the separate self defined by habit & society. We are as intrinsic to our living world as the rivers and trees, woven of the same intricate flows of matter/energy and mind. Having evolved us into self-reflective consciousness, the world can now know itself through us, behold its own majesty, tell its own stories, and also respond to its own suffering." Joanna Macy

    “... grief, if you are afraid of it and pave it over, clamp down, you shut down. And the kind of apathy and closed down denial or difficulty in looking at what we’re doing to our world stems not from callous indifference or ignorance so much as it stems from fear of pain. ….
    That became perhaps the most pivotal point in the landscape of my life: that dance with despair. To see how we are called to not run from the discomfort, and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage or even fear. If we can be fearless to be with our pain, it turns. It doesn’t stay. It only doesn’t change if we refuse to look at it. When we look at it, when we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it, when we keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face. And the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world. Our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.” Joanna Macy, interviewed by Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast https://onbeing.org/programs/joanna-macy-a-wild-love-for-the-world

    "To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe -- to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it - is a wonder beyond words. Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art. Furthermore, it is a privilege to be alive in this time when we can choose to take part in the self-healing of our world." Joanna Macy

 Helen Hamilton - The Way Of The Self

Basics of Waking Up

     MANY have to "hit rock bottom" as a result addictions or other types of major shocks to the system ("shipwrecks") which completely shatter worldviews & self-concepts, forcing them to construct far wiser, shock-proof worldviews & self-concepts from scratch.
     SOME of us continuously observe our internal dialogue, and realize how self-talk keeps us sleepwalking through life, & then we feel the urge WAKE UP and start LIVING deliberately.

     “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Henry David Thoreau

      “The only real purpose of being here on this earth is to learn or to re-remember our original nature state of no limitations.” Lester Levenson   

     “The only service you can do for anyone (including yourself) is to remind them of their true nature.” Stephen Levine 

     When we relax, when we really let go of every conceivable mental & physical contracted armoring; let go of every anxious urge to do something, go somewhere, be someone, etc; when we allow ourselves to become as silent & still as possible; and IF this peaceful state doesn't frighten us, & we now deeply listen to the most delicately subtle sense of aliveness within, THAT ephemeral, untouchable, undefinable, spark of vitality is - imho - who / what we actually are. One wisdom tradition advises: "Rest in 'I am' before 'I am' becomes anything."
      Imho, this spark of life has LITTLE to do with our personal fears, neuroses, preferences, "must haves" & "must avoids" - superficial, transient nonsense we typically (wrongly) assume is who we are. Imho, our ultimate identity has EVERYTHING to do with our transpersonal Buddha-nature, Great Spirit, Brahman, Tao, Yahweh, God, Allah, Primordial Source, The Light, Love, Loving Intelligence, Self, Unified Field, "The Force" (Star Wars), etc.

      “The term 'perennial philosophy' was coined by Agostino Steuco (1497-1548) and refers to a fourfold realization:
      (1) there is only one Reality (call it, among other names, God, Mother, Tao, Allah, Dharmakaya, Brahman, or Great Spirit) that is the source & substance of all creation;
      (2) that while each of us is a manifestation of this Reality, most of us identify with something much smaller, that is, our culturally conditioned individual ego;
      (3) that this identification with the smaller self gives rise to needless anxiety, unnecessary suffering, and cross-cultural competition and violence; and
      (4) that peace, compassion, & justice naturally replace anxiety, needless suffering, competition, and violence when we realize our true nature as a manifestation of this singular Reality.
      The great sages & mystics of every civilization throughout human history have taught these truths in the language of their time and culture. It is the universality and timelessness of this wisdom that makes it the perfect focus for the spiritually independent seeker."
      Rami Shapiro. “Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent.” SkyLight Paths, 2013.

      “The two extreme worldviews are probably represented by materialism and the perennial philosophy, the central core of understanding common to the great religions. The materialistic perspective suggests that life and consciousness are accidental byproducts of matter, and that their evolution is driven by the interplay of random events and the instinct for survival. The purpose of human life and evolution is solely what humanity decides it is.
      The perennial philosophy, which lies at the heart of the great wisdom traditions & religions and is increasingly said to represent their deepest thinking, suggests that consciousness is central and its development is the primary goal of existence. This development will culminate in the condition variously known in different traditions as enlightenment, liberation, salvation, moksha, or satori.
      The descriptions of this condition show remarkable similarities across cultures & centuries. Its essence is the recognition that the distortions of our usual state of mind are such that we have been suffering from a case of mistaken identity. Our true nature is something much greater, an aspect of a universal consciousness, Self, Being, Mind, or God. The awakening to this true nature, claimed a Zen master, is ‘the direct awarenesss that you are more than this puny body or limited mind. Stated negatively, it is the realization that the universe is not external to you. Positively, it is experiencing the universe as yourself.’ … Typical is the claim by an Englishman that to realize our true identity is to ‘find that the I, one’s real, most intimate self, pervades the universe and all other beings. That the mountains, and the sea, and the stars are a part of one’s body, and that one’s soul is in touch with the souls of all creatures.’ Nor are such descriptions the exclusive province of mystics. They have been echoed by philosophers, psychologists, & physicists. ‘Out of my experience … one final conclusion dogmatically emerges,’ said the great American philosopher William James (1960). ‘There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness against which our individuality builds but accidental forces, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea.’
      From this perspective, evolution is a vast journey of growing self-awareness and a return to our true identity. Our current crises are seen as expressions that arise from our mistaken identity. But they can also be seen as self-created challenges that may speed us on our evolutionary journey toward ultimate self-recognition.”
      Roger Walsh. "Human survival: A psychoevolutionary analysis." ReVision 1985; 8: 7-10. (available for free on the web)

     “… there is one, indivisible, unborn, ultimate reality beyond time & space, name & form. The discovery of this reality as our own true nature is the real opportunity, possibility and purpose of human existence. … suffering & delusion (is) caused by ignorance of the real Self.” Mooji

     “Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe towards which this world is headed - be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization - will be unavoidable. . .
     The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility.”
       Vaclav Havel, address to the U.S. congress, when he was President of the Czech Republic (1993-2003)

     “Survival and fully being alive & fully living are not the same thing.”
      Gabor Mate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2cJb1QeMIQ  a truly EXCEPTIONAL interview!

 

The Same Old, Same Old is Perilously Obsolete

     From the outside, it's so easy to see how others are stuck in a mind-numbingly dreary, repetitive life pattern. However from the inside, all we may feel is security, comfort & even righteous self-satisfaction - even as we glide towards disaster in our waking dream.

     A seriously limiting mindset we're mostly not aware of, but are stuck in, is scientific materialism or physicalism - the prevailing, unexamined pseudo-religion of our age, which many believe in as a secular dogma, but which is just a weak idea. It has nevertheless managed to disconnect & alienate many of us from our own true nature, leaving many of us self-centered, cynical, anxious, depressed & hopeless.

     “Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era. It is the causative reason for ecological devastation & climate change. Therefore I attribute absolute highest importance to consciousness change.” Albert Hoffman

     "Consciousness can & does exist beyond the brain.
     In the new concept of consciousness, the flow of sensations we call consciousness is as real as energy, frequency, amplitude, phase, and information, and more real than ‘matter.’ The brain is not a material turbine that generates consciousness, and consciousness is not its by-product. Consciousness is a real-world phenomenon. The brain is not its generator, only its receiver & transmitter.
     Consciousness exists as a real phenomenon in the universe, and this phenomenon is universal; it is ‘one.’ Famed quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger said that consciousness in the world does not exist in the plural: the overall number of minds in the world is one. In his last years, Carl Jung came to a similar conclusion. The psyche is not a product of the brain and is not located within the skull; it is part of the one-universe: of the unus mundus. In David Bohm’s quantum physics, the roots of consciousness are traced to the deep reality of the cosmos: the implicate order.
     A number of contemporary scientists, such as Henry Stapp, elaborate this concept. Consciousness, they say, is nonlocal: it is present throughout the universe.
     The quantum scientists revive an ancient wisdom: We are connected through our participation in the world’s one-consciousness. This is a very different condition from being a separate entity with a separate brain producing a separate consciousness. The new concept of consciousness is more than a theory of consciousness: it is a revolution in our understanding of being."
     Ervin Laszlo https://noetic.org/blog/the-consciousness-revolution/

     “It is our task to liberate and engage the power of quantum physics’ revelations for the benefit of everyone. The best way to do this is to partake in the most radical, subversive, and powerful form of activism that there is – recognizing & then consciously engaging our own quantum nature.”
      To help understand the current, very different concepts of how consciousness & the world interrelate, this is imho a pivotally important & intelligently mind-expanding book:
     Paul Levy. “Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality.” SelectBooks, 2018.  Imho this book is best listened to (eg via Hoopla www.hoopladigital.com ) AND ideally followed along with the hard copy.

"To remain indifferent to the challenges we face is indefensible.
If the goal is noble,
whether or not
it is realized within our lifetime is largely irrelevant.
What we must do, therefore,
is to strive and persevere,
and never give up."
The XIV Dalai Lama

 

More than One Way of Knowing

    One might wonder why a hyper-rational perspective so dominates industrialized societies these days. By hyper-rational I mean unbalanced, very narrow & machine-like, as if human beings were isolated machines, manipulating completely separate, unrelated external mechanical objects, in a totally random, dead, meaningless universe. Seriously??
     This is physicalism - the current orthodoxy under which we unknowingly live. But like other dogmatic belief systems, it cries out for open examination & wise correction!

     “Materialist or Reductionist Science … has concluded that we are the only sentient beings in an inanimate universe that is without life, meaning, purpose, direction or intelligence. This bleak ‘philosophy’ has taken on the power & absolutism of an ideology.”
     Anne Baring – Awakening to a New Story – The Evolutionary Imperative of Our Time” : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hITMBPOwyDY

     “Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.”
     Bob Samples. “The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness.” Jalmar, 1976.

     "Our understanding of knowing is multifaceted and education emphasizes memory, reasoning, learning style, language, intelligence, & on & on. Acknowledging the vast array of distinctions, I want to cut beneath these to claim that with respect to education, consciousness, & culture today, there are two ways of knowing. That is, there are two fundamental ways that the mind works to know the world. There are myriad variations to be sure and certainly plenty of other ways to slice this rhetorically, but the most salient concern today comes down to this.
     One way we will call categorical. This knows the world through abstraction, through separating it from us, through taking apart to understand. In a sense everything is reduced to parts, to lowest units that are differentiated, named, catalogued. It reaches its apex in metaphor of computer zeroes & ones. Categorical awareness narrows in to focus on detail and seeks precision, objectivity, & presupposes certainty. It simplifies & represents, proceeds linearly & sequentially, and generalizes. Our schooling emphasizes this way of knowing, and for the most part, only this.
     The other knowing is through contact (experiential) instead of category. Its style is direct, relational, embodied, and recognizes wholes & connections. Awareness through contact enables a broader view, one connected with the world & the body, scanning for changes in the environment. This knowing seeks novelty, picks up implicit meaning & metaphor, is able to read faces & other cues of individuals instead of simplified, predetermined, and generalized categories. Knowledge through contact is evolving, implicit, & indeterminate since it always exists in relationship to something else and is not ever fully graspable.
     Iain McGilchrist, drawing from a vast body of neuroscientific and phenomenological data, makes a compelling case that these ways of knowing have neurological substrates corresponding to the anatomically distinct hemispheres of the brain.”
     Tobin Hart. “The Integrative Mind: Transformative education for a world on fire.” Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

      "Iain McGilchrist, author of, 'The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,' says that we are dominated by this left-hemisphere analytical view, which of course you see going straight into artificial intelligence. And we’ve neglected the right-hemisphere creative, intuitive, holistic side of ourselves. For him, the master hemisphere, in terms of his book’s title, is the right hemisphere, not the left hemisphere, because  

     • FIRST the right hemisphere gives us an idea of the whole, then  

     • SECOND information is sent to the left hemisphere for analytical elaboration, finally

     • THIRD it should be sent back to the right hemisphere for a higher level of integration. 

     So he never says we only need one hemisphere. He says we must create a culture in which these hemispheres are working together and we therefore re-establish our balance."
      David Lorimer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn00MFFVyIo

 

     "To cut a long story short, it struck me that it was a problem with our thinking ... about things out there that were objects, that didn’t have any kind of embodied reality for us. And that interested me in what's going on in our brains. And when I studied medicine, I was very much inspired by Oliver Sacks and his writings, principally “Awakenings,” an extraordinary book. That book shows that when something goes wrong brain, it affects their whole world. Or something goes wrong with their mind, it affects their body. These things are deeply, closely connected. So I studied medicine, and went off to neurology & psychiatry, which is the area of overlap.
      It was there that I started to ask myself questions. Why is the brain divided? In medical school, nobody ever said why the brain is divided in two halves. Nobody knew, and nobody even asked the question why. And later, I learned that the two hemispheres have completely different ways of looking at the world. There was a lot of nonsense talked about hemisphere difference that put serious scientists off the topic altogether. I was told, ‘Don’t even touch this topic because it’s career death. It’s pop psychology. It doesn’t have any basis.’
      And yet, when one came to look at scholarly research on people who had damage to one or other hemisphere, you could see that they had completely different effects, depending on where it was - the left or the right hemisphere. And that was being overlooked & ignored. People say, ‘Ah there aren’t any really serious differences.’ But I think what they were doing wrong was they were thinking of the brain as a machine. And so they were asking the question you would ask of a machine, ‘What does it do?’ And they said first of all, well the left does reason & language, and the right does emotion & pictures.
      And then they found that this was completely untrue, because each hemisphere got involved in all those things. But what they didn’t seem to be asking, was the question you would ask a part of a person which is, ‘How, in what way does each hemisphere get involved in these things?’ And if you do that, you find that each hemisphere is involved in every single thing that makes up parts of our lives, just with a completely different take on it. That was the difference! To begin with, I couldn’t quite see how staggeringly important this was. Then I realized, the two halves of the brain were attending to the world in two different ways. And we know that when you attend differently, you see different things. There are lots of clever demonstrations, some by Darren Brown the illusionist, and so on, which show that if you’re not expecting to see something, you don’t see it; if you look with a certain kind of attention you see one thing, if you look with another kind of attention, you see something completely different. Quite apart from those clever demonstrations, in our daily life, when we look at things with a certain kind of attention, we find a different kind of world from what is apparently the same world on a different day when we’re attending to it differently.
      I heard a lecture by John Cutting, whom I considered the most interesting living psychiatrist. He had done what no other physician had been doing, which was looking at what happened after right hemisphere strokes. Everyone was focused on left hemisphere strokes. And they thought well nothing serious happens to somebody with a right hemisphere stroke because they can still use their right hand, and language is usually unimpaired. But actually it turns out that they’re much more seriously impaired, & harder to rehabilitate after a right hemisphere stroke than after a left hemisphere stroke, even though, after a left hemisphere stroke, it’s very probable that you won’t be able to speak or be able to use your right hand. Now that surprises people. But what John was saying is when the left hemisphere is damaged, you see these very obvious results, but when the right hemisphere is damaged, what you don’t immediately see is that their whole experience of the world has changed. And he alerted me to some things in this lecture which rang a bell. He said, the left hemisphere fails to understand implicit meaning – it doesn’t understand metaphor, jokes, irony, sense of humor. It takes things very literally, in a sort of mechanical way. It is less in touch with the body than the right hemisphere, and literally the body image, which is not just a visual image but an image in all senses in the brain of ourselves as embodied beings, is in the right hemisphere. And he was saying also that the general ideas, as it were, get collected abstractly in the left hemisphere, but unique instances, embodied concrete instances of things are better appreciated in the right hemisphere.
      ... it’s the left hemisphere that does the talking. It’s my left hemisphere now that is speaking to you. And it has set up a kind of language that works well for it. But it’s much harder to convey the meanings & knowledge that the right hemisphere has.
      And often, when you make something explicit, you utterly change its nature. You see this with sex, you see this with religion, you can see it with jokes, you can see it with poems. And when you disembody something, you utterly change its reality for us and how we relate to it. And when you abstract and generalize something, you’ve completely lost what was unique & special about it. You’re doing a rather paradoxical thing – you’re destroying the thing you’re trying to examine, in the process of examining.
      And very often, I think, what we as a society have been tending to do in the last 150 years, is increasingly to denature the world by our way of talking about it abstractly, mechanically, reductively. And we have not attended to, because it’s harder to see, what is lost and, what, as it were, the part of us that understands the implicit, knows.
Now the implicit is enormous compared with the explicit. The bit that we actually see explicitly, in the center of the focus of our consciousness is minute. It’s conservatively estimated to be much less than 5% of all the stuff that we’re knowing & experiencing, and probably it’s very, very much less than that. So the unconscious mind, which includes the whole of our bodies as well as the other parts of the brain and so forth, is taking in, dealing with, assessing & responding to the world – knowing things as it were, that in our explicit, conscious mind we’ve ruled out, we don’t talk about, and we say we don’t believe in them. So that actually skews the picture of what the world is, who we are, and how we relate."
      Matter is a Relative Matter with Iain McGilchrist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kAlwrnpHIs
 

     "There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe." Teilhard de Chardin

      “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince”

     “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince”

     Insights from a present-day, 84-year old mystic & long-time meditator, John Butler:
     “The more I appreciate the wonder of the world around me, the more I realize my own ignorance & incapacity to understand. And I love the verse from scriptures that says, ‘My ways are higher than your ways, my thoughts than your thoughts,' says the Lord. And also another one that says, ‘The wisdom of man is foolishness to God.’ I suppose that’s why, as we grow in spiritual awareness, what we call knowledge – the answer to questions, also goes through as it were a process of evolution.
      Now faith is really higher knowledge. Lower knowledge is concerned with facts & answers. So we study, we read books, we ask questions, search the internet. Why do these things happen? We try to analyze the different parts. As you stand more at the top of the mountain, somehow these questions rather fall away, and you acquire a deeper understanding – an understanding of wholeness. It’s not so concerned with the bits & pieces of separation. You see the wholeness of things.
      If you lie on your back and look at the sky, you don’t normally say, ‘Why is this bit of cloud like that? Why isn’t the other bit shaped in the same way? Why are some dark & shadowy? Why are other bits light?’ We’re used to looking at the sky as a whole, aren’t we? And we can see the comings & goings of things, within a greater unity, within a greater harmony.
      And so, a part of spiritual development is that partial knowledge ie knowledge of different parts, bits of this & bits of that, what you could refer to as ‘name & form,’ gets replaced by a higher knowledge, which is called, faith. Now faith is the evidence of things not seen. You don’t see with the eye of flesh. You see with the eye of heart.
      We’re to understand what can never be explained in terms of ordinary encyclopedic knowledge. Begin to understand the meaning of love, and of peace, and of freedom. No one can explain what these things are.
      Yet we all know instinctively what they are. We talk about them every day, like we talk about God. Who really knows what we’re talking about? We may have a sort of inkling, but... Yet there is faith, isn’t there? Faith is a sort of knowing, but a fractured, partial knowing. It’s a knowing that enables one to have faith or trust. And these statements, ‘All things happen for the best, to those that love God.’ It’s really a statement of faith, of higher knowledge, that knows it perhaps instinctively, better than in analytic knowledge. I mean who can ever say, what’s best and what’s worse?”
     John Butler : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3R_2jOcqSU

 

     "William James more than 100 years ago, speaking of mystical experience said that one of it's characteristics, besides ego dissolution & transcendence of space and time, is its 'noetic quality.' And this was the quality that what you learned, the insights you had, were not merely opinions but were revealed truths. And they have a stickiness & a power that is central to the experience, and it is what allows people to change."
     Michael Pollan interviewed by Katherine May, "The Future of Hope 4": https://onbeing.org/programs/michael-pollan-and-katherine-may-the-future-of-hope-4/

 

     “When you consider all the saints and prophets as legitimate and no longer differentiate between religions, you have arrived at the stage of truth.”
     Ostad Elahi (1895-1974) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oo_QhUQToA

     “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
      R. Buckminster Fuller

 

John Butler's - 33min talk