Religions, Languages & Wonder

     “Religions are like languages: 
• all languages are of human origin; 
• each language reflects and shapes the civilization that speaks it; 
• all languages make meaning out of the raw facts of our existence;
• no language is true or false; 
• there are things you can say in one language that you cannot say (or say as well) in another; 
• the more languages you know, the more nuanced your understanding of life becomes; and 
• as important as languages are, the final ‘language’ of wisdom is silence.” 
       Rami Shapiro. “Holy Rascals. Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries.” Sounds True, 2017.


     About those conversations in my head: http://www.johnlovas.com/2020/04/far-far-beyond-self-talk.html


          “When there is silence,
           one finds the anchor of the Universe
           within oneself.”                                         Lao Tzu


     “Perhaps as a child you sensed a world that touched a deep and mysterious wonder. You may have had an experience you felt certain no one would understand and so you never shared it, but it has stayed in your heart – some kind of knowing that seemed at once completely true and yet confusing to your mind. Perhaps there was a moment in a temple of trees when a shaft of light from the rising or setting sun struck the jewel of your heart. You may have been hiking on a mountain when you suddenly were stopped by joy, wonder, or a sense of awe. It was not just the view, the misty colors of the many ridges you could see in the distance. Your senses touched the Infinite, and you experienced beauty; something vast touched the vastness within you. Its radiance may have come as moonlight playing on the ocean’s waves. It may have shone through a piece of art, a poem, or a dream that touched what connects us.
     You may have had a glimpse while sitting in a church or a temple, when the silence and reverence of place seemed to invite you to the silence within your Self. Perhaps you felt it when a baby gazed into your eyes from the eyes of such innocence that all of your defenses melted in such sweetness. The jewel may have shone through the stories you have read, heard, or experienced from great spiritual masters in various traditions. What sparkles is not the stories or words; it is something deeper that touches your heart.
     The jewel seems to shine most brightly when we experience love – love for a person, a pet, a moment. … 
     It is the jewel that gives rise to our impulse to know it more deeply and to want it to be revealed more consciously. Bubbling from the hidden depths of our Being arises an impulse to know what seems to lie beyond our limited ideas of who we are. There arises a sense of mystery, an impulse to know God, Truth, Self, enlightenment, love, or peace. This is spiritual impulse. Infinite Truth or Spirit has placed a longing in our heart, in the heart of our awareness, to know itself, to awaken itself beyond egoic consciousness. This impulse transcends both ego and self. We could call this impulse ‘the seed of enlightenment,’ a seed that has been planted deep within and perhaps has lain fallow in the rich soil and silent ground of our Being.

     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 and stillness.” 
       Dorothy Hunt. “Ending the Search. From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness.” Sounds True, 2018.

      “Awareness born of love is the only force that can bring healing and renewal. Out of our love for another person, we become more willing to let our old identities wither and fall away, and enter a dark night of the soul, so that we may stand naked once more in the presence of the great mystery that lies at the core of our being. This is how love ripens us -- by warming us from within, inspiring us to break out of our shell, and lighting our way through the dark passage to new birth.” John Welwood

Don Pentz - West River, Keji - acrylic on canvas - fogforestgallery.ca

On Being Goal Orientated

     Renate McNay: “Do you think one has enough time in one lifetime to work through all of the delusions & traumas and become fully free & awake?”

     Reggie Ray: “Maybe that’s not exactly the right question. I personally do not believe that the purpose of life is to reach an end point of any kind whatsoever in human life or any other kind of life. 
     If you look at the universe, the universe never reaches an end point. You can say ‘Well we have the Milky Way. That’s an end point. And we have the Andromeda galaxy. That’s an end point.’ But it’s not, because these two are merging. And then there’s going to be a new super galaxy. 
     In the same way, I see life as a process of unfolding. And each moment of life gives us an imperative of the next step. And so, when your grief (over her son’s death) came up, your imperative was to work with it, to go into it, and to explore it, and to see where it wanted to lead you. And where it lead you was to an amazing place. See also: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2012/03/85-phoenix-process.html But then of course, there’s the next moment, and the next project. Life is a constant unfolding. 
     When Buddhists teach about ego and egolessness, what they’re really saying is that there is no fixed point in our lives, nor should there be. That life is a process of constant, constant unfolding. It’s life & death, life & death, and life & death. 
     Even psychologically we know that we go through cycles. A lot of times people think that the up-cycle is really that’s it, and that’s where they want to be. But if you meditate a lot you realize the down-cycle is so important because it leads to a new and more integrated up-cycle. 
     There’s been a lot of research into the teenage brain. We have a fifteen-year-old son. One of the fascinating things is he dysregulates - meaning he goes into a down-cycle, fragments, comes apart, falls apart, has emotional upheavals – then he re-regulates, and it happens three or four times a day. And research shows that that’s how they grow. That’s what growth is. It’s the light & the dark, pain & the pleasure, happiness & sorrow, going through night & day cycles. 
     And I think that that’s what life is. And I wouldn’t be that surprised, nobody really knows, but I wouldn’t be that surprised if it continues through death and beyond. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

Reggie Ray ‘Finding Realization In The Body’ Interview by Renate McNay

Processing Trauma with Sitting Meditation

     “As long as there are prisoners in the dungeons and torture chambers of our own depths, there can be no freedom, because our current awareness, which we may think of as quite spiritual, are the wardens of the prisons. Our current awareness is keeping all those prisoners in their locked cells & torture chambers. A huge amount of our psychic energy, as we know from modern psychology, when we have unresolved trauma (the prisoners, our former & present selves) a huge amount of our psychic energy is tied up keeping them under wraps and keeping them down below, because we don’t want to experience the pain, the unbearable suffering that’s going on. But the point is that unbearable suffering is going on all the time, whether we know it or not. And again, as we know from psychology, it affects us and those unconscious parts of ourselves, those parts of ourselves that we do not want to face, strangely enough, they’re in control. 
     As you know, sitting in (a meditation retreat) hour after hour, day after day, one of the things we are learning is that our persona – this person that we would like to be, and would like to present to others – it comes and goes. It’s actually not that solid. And we learn to actually sit in a way where we’re not constantly rehearsing our inner narrative all the time. We can actually, periodically, have a moment of silence inside. And that ability to be in a place where the ego narrative isn’t reaffirming itself, is an incredible capacity. It means that we no longer have to put all our energy and attention into constantly maintaining ‘me’ all the time. It makes us relax. It makes us realize that, ‘OK I’m me, I’m doing it, I’m confident, I’m great,’ and then there are other moments when there’s nothing going on at all, there’s no ‘me,’ and then there can be other moments when I can be the prisoner in the dungeon. 
     And until those prisoners, which are ourselves – our former and present selves, formerly they were conscious and now they’re unconscious, controlling a lot of our behavior and tying up our awareness, until we can be them, we can’t see them. And until we see them and be them, we can’t give them their voice. This is the hero’s journey. Shamanism has a lot of outer things – there’s a kind of outer shamanism. But this is the inner shamanism. This is the hero’s journey into the darkness. And when we let go of our daylight adult personality, our persona, then we descend into the darkness and we become the tormented, the damned. It is dismemberment and death of our adult person. And when we do that, time after time after time sitting (in meditation) here, and going through all of these experiences, all of a sudden, fresh air begins to waft through those dungeons and torture chambers. 
     And the prisoners begin to wake up. And we begin to develop a relationship with them through seeing them, being them, and giving them their voice. Color begins to come into their faces. And they begin to breathe again. And they begin to become companions, strangely enough. And they remind us that they’re with us, and that we need to meet them over and over and help them. It’s a long process, but the prison doors have been thrown open, and the damned have been redeemed to life. And things begin to change. And our adult person becomes so much softer, and so much more tender about the whole thing, so much more sympathetic to how it is to be human, and more understanding of everybody, and the ongoing jostling that we do as humans, and rubbing against each other and bouncing off each other and having problems with each other, and being activated by each other becomes not an unwanted and condemned part of our life, but it becomes a morass that is a turgid with life. It’s a muddy bog that is filled with life that is about to bloom. 
     When we begin to see this very strange thing, that after we have been down in the dungeons, and we return, something is different in us. It’s the strangest thing. … When we return to the surface, after going through what we go through here, it’s different. We're more alive, more open, and feel inspiration that we didn’t know we had. And so what can I say? What can you say? 
     And that’s our process. We are rescuing, from the depths, sentient beings because … when you’re down in the dungeon, and you’re freeing some pitiful soul, who’s been chained to the wall forever, you are freeing that soul throughout the world, you’re freeing a part of yourself. And in freeing a part of yourself, you’re freeing a part of everybody else. It’s a strange concept… saving all sentient beings at this moment. And that’s how it works with us, and that’s what we’re doing. It’s world work when we make these heroic journeys into our own darkness, and are willing to open ourselves and expose ourselves to suffering that for most adult people, unless it’s forced on them by overwhelming trauma, they would not do it. 
     Nobody does it. We haven’t done it. We have to have a special lineage that drops us into the dungeons. And we have to do a special meditation practice, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year, we have to really go at great lengths, in order to arrive in the deepest dungeons of our being, and to be able to do the work there. 
     So I don’t want this to get too dark. I want to emphasize something you know very well also, that every time we come through it, so to speak, we’re a new person. There’s a new birth. And what we’re experiencing is a transformation in our basic existential condition. We have really, truly become a new being, on every level down to our cells. Every time we come through it, that’s what happens, and we can feel it. And we feel the lightness, we feel the openness, we feel the beauty of the world in a new way. We feel a tenderness for our brothers and sisters who are going through the same journey. We feel love, and we feel a kind of courage and capacity growing within us that we can do this work. We can do this. We can free the prisoners. And then, we sign up for our next retreat.”

 above from:

Reggie Ray - Freeing the Prisoner - January 2, 2016

India immediately before the Buddha

     "... the Upanisads presented the more mystical belief in a universal and unitary spiritual Reality, called Brahman, which is the true essence, or Atman (Self), of all things. It was believed that the personal realization of this divine essence through insight, matured in the depths of meditation, would lead one to spiritual liberation, or moksa. Liberation was understood to be release from karma (Pali: kamma) and rebirth."

       Mitchell DW. Buddhism - Introducing the Buddhist Experience. ed2, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens, Wolfville, Nova Scotia