A Wise, Potentially Transformative Interview

    While listening to a Michael Neill interview, I discovered the host of nextlevelsoul.com Alex Ferrari. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND listening to this excellent interview, and for those who get more out of reading, there is also a fine transcript: https://nextlevelsoul.com/michael-neill-true-self/ 
    Below is Ferrari's very fine introduction:

"On today’s episode, we welcome Michael Neill, a thoughtful teacher of human consciousness who explores how fear, thought, and misunderstanding keep us from recognizing the deeper intelligence already alive within us. There is a strange habit in human life of assuming that if we feel unsettled, then something somewhere must be wrong. We search the world for the broken piece, and if we cannot find it in our circumstances, we turn inward and decide that the flaw must be in us. This is one of the great tragedies of being human: not that we suffer, but that we so quickly conclude that suffering means we are defective. In this profound conversation, Michael Neill opens a gentler door, one that does not ask us to become something else, but to notice what we already are beneath the noise.

There is something almost comical about the way we chase fulfillment, as if peace were hiding behind one more success, one more achievement, one more perfect moment in which the world finally arranges itself according to our preferences. We are taught this from an early age. We are told to improve, optimize, correct, and repair ourselves until we become worthy of rest. Yet the deeper wisdom of life suggests something else entirely. It suggests that beneath all the frantic movement of the mind, there is already a quiet wholeness, untouched by our personal dramas. The tragedy is not that this wholeness is far away, but that it is so close, so ever-present, that we overlook it while searching for fireworks in the distance.

What struck me most in this conversation was the way he dismantled the illusion of brokenness with such grace and precision. He spoke about how many people spend their lives trying to fix what was never actually damaged in the first place. That lands deeply, because so much of modern life is built on convincing us that we are lacking. If we are not enough, then we can be sold the promise of becoming enough. If we are not healed, we can be sold the process. If we are not awakened, we can be sold the map. But as he so beautifully implied, the map is often mistaken for the territory, and the territory itself is already alive beneath our feet. Or as he said so simply and powerfully, “we’re obsessed with the mess, and we miss the amazing bit.”

There is also a spiritual maturity in the way he speaks of success, because he does not condemn it, nor does he worship it. He simply sees it for what it is: neutral. Success can be a beautiful expression of inner alignment, or it can be a desperate attempt to patch an invisible wound. The world often celebrates the outer result without asking what energy created it. And that is why so many people can arrive at the summit, only to discover they are still haunted by the same insecurity they had at the bottom of the mountain. If inner poverty remains, no amount of applause can make one feel rich. This is why some of the most outwardly celebrated souls remain inwardly restless. They have achieved the dream the world handed them, but not the peace their own spirit was asking for.

As the conversation deepened, we moved into the nature of spirit itself, and here the waters became beautifully clear. He described spirit not as an ideology, religion, or special category reserved for monks and mystics, but as the formless intelligence from which life itself arises. That insight alone can loosen a thousand years of misunderstanding. To say that one is spiritual is almost redundant, because one cannot be anything else. The wave may forget the ocean, but it is never separate from it. The body moves, the mind chatters, the personality performs its little dance, yet beneath all of it there remains a stillness that does not come and go. It is there in joy, there in sorrow, there in confusion, and there in clarity. The mind may scream that life is unstable, but spirit remains as it always has been—silent, spacious, and complete.

What I also loved was his refusal to deny the darker side of human experience while still insisting on a deeper truth underneath it. This is not naive spirituality dressed in pleasant language. It is not pretending that cruelty does not exist or that human beings never lose themselves in violence, greed, or fear. Rather, it is the understanding that when people are deeply lost, they act from that lostness. That does not excuse harmful behavior, but it does illuminate it. It helps us see that confusion creates suffering, and suffering passed through an unconscious mind becomes suffering inflicted on others. The wisdom here is not in becoming passive, but in recognizing that if we only fight darkness as darkness, we will remain trapped in the same dream that created it. Something far more transformative happens when one begins to see beyond the behavior, to the misunderstanding beneath it.

Again and again, the conversation returned to trust. Not lazy trust, not wishful thinking, but a living trust in the intelligence of life itself. We have become so accustomed to strategizing our way through existence that we mistake anxiety for wisdom. We assume that if we worry enough, calculate enough, and control enough, we will finally become safe. But life has never offered that bargain. The river does not ask us to control its currents. It asks us to learn how to float. That is why one of the deepest revelations in this episode is the reminder that fear and awareness are not the same thing. Awareness is clean, direct, present. Fear is the mind trying to outmaneuver life before life has even happened. And from that misunderstanding, entire identities are built.

Perhaps that is why conversations like this feel so necessary now. So much of the old world is trembling. Institutions, identities, and assumptions that once seemed immovable are cracking before our eyes. And while the mind interprets this as catastrophe, spirit often uses collapse as invitation. When the false begins to fall away, the real has a chance to be seen. What remains after the noise is not emptiness, but presence. Not despair, but a deeper kind of sanity. And maybe that is the hidden grace in all of this: that when we finally tire of trying to fix the movie, we may at last turn and notice the light behind it.

SPIRITUAL TAKEAWAYS

• Much of human suffering comes from the mistaken belief that we are fundamentally broken
• True spirituality is not something to attain, but something we already are
• Peace begins when we trust life more than the anxious strategies of the mind

So in the end, what lingers is not merely a set of ideas, but a softer way of meeting life. A way that does not demand perfection before peace, or certainty before surrender. It reminds us that beneath all striving, beneath all self-judgment, beneath all the endless noise of becoming, there is already a presence quietly waiting to be noticed. And once it is noticed, even for a moment, life begins to feel less like a battle and more like a sacred unfolding.

Please enjoy my conversation with Michael Neill." "Connecting To Your True Self" https://nextlevelsoul.com/michael-neill-true-self/  

 

Spiritual Intelligence

"There is a brokenness 
out of which comes 
the unbroken, 
a shatteredness 
out of which blooms 
the unshatterable. 
There is a sorrow 
beyond all grief 
which leads to joy 
and a fragility 
out of whose depths 
emerges strength. 
There is a hollow space 
too vast for words 
through which we pass with each loss, 
out of whose darkness 
we are sanctioned into being. 
There is a cry deeper than all sound 
whose serrated edges cut the heart 
as we break open to the place inside 
which is unbreakable and whole, 
while learning to sing." 
Rashani Rea

    We may be so familiar with feeling fragile, sad or worse, that a dark mood may almost feel like home, the "story of me," who we (assume we) are, our (assumed) identity, our 'normal.' We may also assume that our quality of life is chained to & rigidly determined by life circumstances, which we see as bleak.

    UNTIL somehow, even if just for a brief moment, we clearly see how this entire mess is ONLY a story. Eckhart Tolle's spontaneous awakening from severe depression is a dramatic example of this. Many dramatic awakenings are being reported with psychedelic-assisted therapy - exceptionally moving stories of Navy Seals suffering from combat PTSD are beautifully documented in the 2025 documentary "In Waves and War" https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/82047468. But most awakenings are gradual progressive life-long processes, during which spiritual practices help to uncover our innate spiritual intelligence.

    THEN we might notice that we are ACTUALLY this awareness, this witness to the "story" - NOT the story itself. Initially, this is a subtle felt sense of a shift, almost like remembering an old memory, impossible to put into words. A silent, peaceful, wise, loving intelligence that is our Self, our True Nature, who we truly, actually are. 

    WE CAN, with the help of spiritual practices - like meditation and self-inquiry - start to embody this, our real identity, for slightly longer stretches of time, very gradually connecting these stretches that are marked by peace & joy and are remarkably, wonderfully independent of life circumstances.

    Repeatedly practicing Loving-Kindness meditation toward ourselves & others can, over the years, melt the armor we no longer need, resulting in periodic ‘heart openings’ – feeling of warmth radiating forward from the heart area, occasionally accompanied by ‘uncaused joy’ – spontaneous, prolonged blissful peace & happiness for days, weeks or longer, without any change in our external circumstances.

    We're fully aware of all the usual challenges of life, however, we're experiencing life from a peaceful, wise, remarkably objective perspective, that is radically different from feeling helplessly trapped in a bad drama. 

    This is the process awakening, a mystical experience, the flowering of spiritual intelligence, etc. Wise people throughout history have considered awakening to be the very purpose of life. Our own culture desperately needs to be reminded of the importance of spiritual intelligence.

    Mark Vernon, former Church of England priest, now psychotherapist & author, introduces his book "Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps": 

    “Spiritual intelligence is a type of perception, although unlike types of empirical perception that see, hear, touch, taste or smell, it works by spotting what is alive & implicit. It delivers the felt sense, often first glimpsed out of the corner of the mind’s eye, that our experience of things is connected to a wider vitality, that what we grasp is only a fraction of what might be understood, that there is more underpinning existence to become alert to this presence is like becoming aware of light, which is not itself directly visible though simultaneously shines from all the objects it illuminates. 
    Spiritual intelligence is a kind of intelligence to with humble awareness, rather than slick analysis. And when someone has spiritual intelligence, you will think they are inspiring more than clever. It is a wonderful capacity and a source of delight, comprehension & purpose. It is also basic to being human. 
    But my fear is that it has become so overlooked and so sidelined in the modern world that people are inclined to be sniffy about it and deny that it exists altogether. 
    The word 'spiritual' is of course contentious. People can spend years trying to define it. For others it’s straightforwardly a turn off as it evokes superstition or woo. I’ve resorted to it partly because it is useful in signaling my conviction that there are more things in the world than can be accounted for by a materialist philosophy. 
    Also, if spiritual seems slippery, that is only in the way that defining what is good or beautiful or true seems slippery, though we know these things the instant we are in their presence. The realization lies in the recognition, not any definition which will inevitably be too tight. 

    My book – “Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps” – is in part a product of my involvement in a research group organized by the International Society for Science and Religion that is looking into these things. I feel it has become crucial to get a felt handle on the notion of spiritual intelligence, in contrast to other kinds, and in particular, artificial intelligence. The immediate concern is that AIs are already so pervasive that we are at risk of forgetting what it is to operate without their slick planning cunning manipulation and tremendous capacity for problem solving. The challenge is to ensure AIs benefit us more than threaten us, which requires us to understand more fully what it means to be human. If we can be brightly aware of the capacities we have, which no machine does, even as the technology continues to improve, we might have a chance of staying human in the age of the machine. 
    Emotional intelligence isn’t enough I’ve concluded, partly because it looks as if AIs will be increasingly able to mimic the qualities that Daniel Goleman originally highlighted as proficiencies of emotional intelligence. 
    The first two competencies he lists: social skills and empathy, machines can already be programmed to fake. 
    The next two, motivation and self-regulation, machines simply don’t need as it is in their nature to keep going without hesitancy or deviation. 
    Goleman’s fifth characteristic, self-awareness has so far eluded computers, and my guess it always will, though the danger is that it can be imitated so as to confuse humans, and it’s already doing so. 
    I put it like this, if artificial intelligence is mostly about solving problems by spotting patterns, and emotional intelligence is mostly about relating to feelings by understanding them as opposed to being swept along by them, spiritual intelligence turns to the steady presence that runs through, above & under it all. 
    This awareness is transformative, not because it is successful at what it does like an AI, nor because it fosters flourishing like emotional intelligence, though it might, spiritual intelligence enables the individual & groups of individuals to become increasingly aligned with the deeper pulses of reality. It takes us to the shoreline of knowledge where learning becomes a type of listening, consideration a type of resonance, and personal change a type of expansion. 
    With spiritual intelligence education becomes an activity that seeks to draw out and recollect, rather than pour in and test. The truly deadly thing is to fail to notice you are experiencing, because you have become lost in the experience. It is this self-forgetfulness and alienation that the pervasiveness of machines can bring about, not because they have woken up, but because their impressive presence has made us fall asleep. The risk is that we become like them, not that they’ve become like us.

    What I am proposing as spiritual intelligence is related but different to the ways it has been defined so far by the writers who have attended to it. It has been thought of as a skill that can handle values or as an ability to discern purpose or as a concern for ultimate issues like life and death. Experts have turned to it as a complement to emotional intelligence, rather than as the capacity that is onto the realm in which the imminent meets the transcendent, as I am suggesting. 
    There are two problems with these older approaches. One is that they commit the flaw of much modern psychology by trying to remain metaphysically agnostic, instead of concluding on the basis of experience & evidence, coupled to intuition & desire, that there is a ground wellspring & sustaining presence within our existence. 

    Psychologists typically attempt to hover above reality and comment on behaviors or observations, but this is not metaphysically agnostic. It is adopting the materialist assumptions of the physicist, which might work well when studying the objective world, but fragment when studying the subjective, because unlike the Cosmos, the psyche cannot be inspected in a detached manner. The so-called replication crisis is a result. 
    Second, spiritual intelligence is not a kind of know how, but more basic. It is know that – know that our plane of existence has qualities of being and consciousness and constancy and peace. That awareness will undoubtably help with our emotional intelligence, as I explore in the book, but spiritual intelligence as I see it is not a proficiency, because it is not something to be achieved. It is a perception, which you could say is born of a knack or a grace or a crisis, though it only appears to elude us in retrospect, because it is closer to us than we are to ourselves. It invites us to turn back to our ground of our being, and re-build from there. 
    My sense is that now is a good moment to become aware of its awareness for another reason. Many thinkers, including my colleagues at the research Network Perspectiva, believe that we live in a time of crisis, that is actually a meta-crisis. They mean that the challenges of the 21st century, from environmental collapse to social alienation, are not problems prevailing systems can fix, for all the specific policies and decisions may be able to impede pandemics and put out some of the fires, rather the problems have in large part been caused by the prevailing systems themselves. So while systems will have to be redesigned, and more basic tasks must be attended to, remembering what it is to be human.

    My seven steps are a set of reflective reorientations that turn the attention towards spiritual intelligence, deepen the understanding of it, and thereby locate it more consciously in life. 

    The first step is to retell the origin story of human beings. This is important because stories are like filters and the current crop of big history accounts of homo sapiens treat the spiritual element as if it were a delusion, which whilst once useful, can be filtered out now. I present the case, emerging from research in human evolution, that what I’m calling spiritual intelligence, developed in significant ways with the emergence of homo sapiens, and played the fundamental role in the development of culture and technology. We are homo spiritualis, and need to recall that now. 
    Second step, or perceptual shift continues this story into the annals of history, and explores how individuality and individual freedom emerged. The basic freedom is again often forgotten now. It is not freedom of choice, which is freedom from hindrance; or freedom of expression, the freedom to speak or do; but the more basic type of freedom, to recognize what freedom is for, which in a nutshell is to know ourselves in all our depth. Freedom grows as spiritual intelligence becomes established. 
    Step three is a type of discursive meditation on what it’s like to tune into spiritual intelligence. The upshot is a growing perception that reality is simple, not in a naïve sense of not complex, which is clearly not the case, but in the deeper sense that the myriad things arise from a spiritual commons, which spiritual intelligence can know. 
    Step four considers how spiritual intelligence relates to the inner life of the individual or the soul. It explores the ways in which developmental psychology and psychotherapy have charted this interiority that argues that without the metaphysical ground that spiritual intelligence brings, these methods of easing suffering and promoting development have no goal, and so can leave people journeying and journaling almost indefinitely. 
    A fifth step follows because when the soul settles into the being that sustains it, the tricky but transformative reality of death can be approached anew. Mortality reveals itself with spiritual intelligence to be a kind of natality, an insight that can be found in any wisdom tradition of merit with the advice to learn to die before you die. 
    Step six argues that spiritual intelligence precipitates a radical shift in our perception of ethics. It must move on from being understood as about morality – which tends to foster guilt & shame, and is readily weaponized, and so unwittingly weds us to alienation. Instead, the older tradition of virtue commends itself – which focuses on the qualities & characteristics that not only incline us to what’s good, but enable us to embrace more & more of life, especially when hard. 
    Spiritual intelligence offers a radically different way of being in the world, which is the focus of the final step seven. We might come to love realization instead of being wedded to growth & progress. We might value notions like awakening and conversion, alongside management and development, not least when thinking about education & ecology. In particular, the experience of time can be transformed. These capacities are essential now and will be increasingly essential in the future, so I commend the book to you.”

    Mark Vernon https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps

 

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

 

What Now?

“A new challenge awaits us 
at the beginning of the twenty-first century:
to go beyond fragmentation, 
to be open to total living and total revolution …
In this era, to become a spiritual inquirer without social consciousness is a luxury that we can ill afford, 
and to be a social activist without a scientific understanding
of the inner workings of the mind is the worst folly. 
Neither approach in isolation has had any significant success …. 

The challenge awaiting us is to go much deeper as human beings, 

to abandon superficial prejudices & preferences, 

to expand understanding to a global scale, integrating the totality of living, 
and to become aware of the wholeness 
of which we are a manifestation.”

Vimala Thakar

 

 

 "God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh." 

 

Voltaire

 

 

“The universe is a single living creature that encompasses all living creatures within it.”  

 

Plato

 

 
"... we are all  

different shards of God, 

all experiencing life so that God could experience everything, 

in every single different way, 

because God wants to experience life as you, and life as me, and life as him, and life as her, so that 

God is having all of his experiences through us.” 

Abby Wynne


"The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.” 

 

St. Teresa of Avila


“Nature is God giving birth to itself."

 

Friedrich Schelling

 

 

 

“To the mystic, every moment is Sacred

 and

 every step is taken on Holy Ground.”  

 

Mirabai Starr

 

 

 

SO 

May I remain curious & keep asking myself:

 HOW is EVERY – person / activity / moment – in front of me Sacred?  

HOW can I perceive the Sacred even in people & events that appear so Dark?

 

 

“When I change the level of my awareness,
I start attracting a different reality.”

Santon Saint Pierre, French philosopher

 

 

 

What Can We Do?

    “I’m often asked, ‘So this is all very fascinating about hemispheres and your analysis of how we got to be where we are. But it’s pretty important isn’t it? What are we going to do about it?’
    I think people can easily become overwhelmed by the thought of the scale of, for example, the ecological crisis that threatens, but almost the most helpful thing of all is that you can begin in the inner temple, which is you. You can begin with the one thing you do have control over, which is what you do, how you think, what you value. And that can be done here & now, and doesn’t involve persuading other people necessarily.
    If we start to ensure that we are at least aligning our own lives, with the things that are deep and important, then a lot of things will follow instinctively, and they won’t need to be formulated in the way that people want to formulate. ‘Well, I think what we should do is change the curriculum, and we should …’
    Those things are important, but once you begin to see the world differently, you begin to act differently, to prioritize things differently, and different things follow effortlessly because it is a stream. A stream that is currently blocked in us, and it’s a stream that can become unblocked.”
    Iain McGilchrist — Aligning with the Creative Impulse of the Universe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCtPDS5AVSo

Carefully listening to this 66-minute Iain McGilchrist interview in its entirety is imho time very well spent.

 

 

OVERVIEW

     The purpose of my blogs has been, and continues to be, sharing with you the experiences of people whom I consider to be sincere, wise seekers of Truth. You will find quoted, a very wide range of exemplars & thought leaders, living & dead, from Shamanic, Aboriginal, Advaita, Buddhist, Greek & Roman philosophical, Jewish & Christian Mystical, Sufi, and other traditions, but primarily inspiring current non-dual teachers like Amoda Maa, Louise Kay, Helen Hamilton, Dorothy Hunt, Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, Henry Shukman, and many more.

      Most human beings have the capacity to mature emotionally / psychologically / spiritually well beyond "the average" : http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=stages+of+faith .
    Some factors accelerate, while others moderate, slow, (temporarily) stop, or even reverse our maturation process : http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=maturation . 

    The greatest roadblocks to healthy maturation / aging are rigid certainty about one's self-concept & worldview http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=certainty and nihilism http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=nihilism . When people cling with a death-grip to their (usually inherited & unexamined) self-concept & worldview, any alternative perspective tends to feel life-threatening, and it is, but only to the ego.

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

    For thousands of years, the few who've taken the search for Truth as their life's central purpose, all seem to reach a common set of conclusions, summarized in the 'perennial philosophy' http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=perennial .

    You'll find many quotations from books, interviews & presentations of mostly people whom I (among many others) consider spiritually-mature & on the life-long path of 'awakening' : http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=awakening . All these quotes are "pointers towards the Moon" - metaphors, humor, poems, stories, practices, to help you experience directly the peace, silence, stillness & joy that is well-beyond words & concepts ("surpasses all understanding") - your true Self : http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=true+self .

    You'll also find quotations about topics closely related to awakening, such as psychology / psychotherapy eg Trauma theory, Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems (IFS), Iain McGilchrist's Hemispheric theory, etc. This blog has almost 1,400 posts which are quickly & easily searchable - see top left of page.

    “Maturity is the ability to live fully & equally in multiple contexts.” David Whyte, poet & philosopher

    “True adulthood … is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard-won glory, which commercial forces & cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.” Toni Morrison

        “There are only two ways to live your life.
         One is as though nothing is a miracle.
         The other is as though
         everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein

    “The important thing is not to think much, but to love much, and so to do what best awakens us to love.” Saint Teresa of Ávila

    "... one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn't create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.” Ram Dass

    We are called “to serve not our limitations but what’s whole & unbreakable, our true self. It’s easy to identify with all the places we’ve been hurt & abandoned, but can we identify with the timeless wholeness that weathers every condition? If we can’t, we may spend this life protecting ourselves and never risk really living.” Bonnie Myotai Treace

 

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    My blog is NOT "monetized."
    I'm simply sharing what I understand to be of greatest value in life.

 

One of Helen Hamilton's fine orienting talks:

What Do We REALLY Want?

    "One way to think about suffering is as a failure of getting what we want." Bokin Kim PhD 

    I'm often reminded of stories (like W. Somerset Maugham's wonderful book, "The Razor's Edge") about the idle, independently wealthy, who regularly migrate from one opulent getaway to another, 'because things get terribly boring.' A particularly wacky aspect of human nature is our tendency to 'double down,' doing more & more of something that obviously doesn't work, until we 'hit rock bottom,' or worse. Suffering mostly arises from wanting people, things & experiences to provide lasting satisfaction ie wanting the impossible.
    Many simply can't stop trying to control the world to make it provide permanent safety & happiness. Wanting to become a marathon runner is understandable. BUT if a fish has this desire, then even if it manages to get out of the water onto dry land, it just can't be happy. The whole idea of running a marathon simply goes against the fish's true nature.

    A major gift of old age, for some of us, is having had ample opportunity to learn that we cannot get lasting satisfaction from anything - EXCEPT love - very specifically being the SOURCE of unconditional love.
    So a wise, mature orientation will have us nurturing all those we love, so that we may thrive. And 'those we love' gradually expands to embrace everyone & everything. This way of being is probably more natural & essential to us than breathing, eating, sleeping & our heart beating. It is not something we should do in order to get something else, or go somewhere else, or become someone else. We are simply expressing our essential true nature - who we are, have always been & will be - we're just being natural.

    Tony Parsons was a wealthy home builder when, at age 65, he underwent a dramatic liberation (awakening / enlightenment) experience, after which "there was no longer a ME, only absolute love." He expresses, imho, very similar understandings to other evolved mystics I've read about & listened to. However, Tony uses much more direct, uncompromising, even provocative language, that sometimes stimulates an energetic shift in the listener, evaporating their 'me' - their noisy ego.
    Reading about Tony's perspective may cause your noisy ego angst - possibly even more : 

“Basically, all there is is this. All there is is wholeness, oneness. I like to call it ‘boundless energy.’ Boundless energy is all there is, and it arises as everything there is and everything there isn’t. So this boundless energy is immeasurable, it can’t be tamed, it’s wild, it’s chaotic and it also appears to be ordered.
    And one of the things that it appears to be is a separate energy, a contracted energy that seems to happen uniquely to human beings. Some way or another, that sense of being separate begins a clock. A clock starts ticking, and throughout the separate energies there, the ‘me’ story begins. And ‘the story’ and ‘me’ are both the same thing. ‘Me’ can’t exist without ‘the story,’ and ‘the story’ can’t exist without ‘me.’ And that all happens in a separate reality.
    For the individual, it seems as though that reality is real. The whole idea that the person has free-will and choice and that their life has a purpose, and that story also includes cause & effect, all of those things arise, and all of those things seem real to the individual. And so the individual goes into what it thinks is it’s reality, but in some way or other that reality can at times seem dissatisfying, because of course the ‘me’ is living in a separate reality. So the ‘me’ never sees a tree naturally, never sees the sky naturally, never has feelings in the natural way they are, because all of those things are experienced through separation, as though those things arise as if through a filter. So the tree is somehow always an object out there, everything else is an object because already the ‘me’ has seemingly become a something. So the ‘me’ lives as though it is a real something, and it lives in a world of real somethings – everything 'real' out there is something else that’s happening to this 'real' something here.
    And somewhere there’s a sense of dissatisfaction about that, it feels unfulfilling to somehow live in this separate world. And so some people start to try to find an answer for that sense of dissatisfaction and they go to teachers, but of course they have with them that belief of free-will and choice, and the way they can ‘learn’ how to find that fulfillment, would be through their own choice, and through their own action. And so they go to teachers who also speak within the dream story about personal enlightenment and the way that that can be attained.
    But of course what’s happening all the time is that the ‘me’ is living in a circular world, in a separate world, and those things that it experiences come and go because they are happening in a world of time only, they are just time-oriented happenings or experiences. [Called by some, 'consensual reality' or 'relative reality'] So the things that people learn from teachers, like self-inquiry or meditation, bring up experiences that come & go. They are transient experiences and they never have any permanent or constant satisfaction about them.
    So ‘the open secret’ basically is revealing the myth of ‘me’ and the myth of ‘the story,’ and it’s pointing to the possibility that all of that is an illusion; that that whole story and the me is living in an illusory world which is circular, just with experiences coming & going, coming & going. And the strange thing is, that what seems to be happening when that is revealed at meetings, is that the whole sense of ‘me,’ the whole idea that the ‘me’ is real, or the embodied sense that the ‘me’ is real, seems to crumble. And the other thing that happens in the meetings, and obviously this doesn’t have to be at meetings, this dropping away of the ‘me’ can happen anywhere and at any time, but in the meetings it seems that somehow the contracted energy of the separate ‘me’ seems to melt back into the boundless energy of what is, and there’s nothing that’s left in that. And that is what I would call liberation. It’s my term for liberation from the illusory imprisonment of being a ‘me’ in a story.”
    Tony Parsons Feb 3, 2012 interview : https://batgap.com/tony-parsons/