Awareness & Acceptance, then Love

     "How few understand what love really is, and how it arises in the human heart. It is so frequently equated with good feelings toward others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service. But these things in themselves are not love. Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now, and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection that you can truly love them, otherwise it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire not as he or she is in themselves.
      The first act of love is to see this person or this object, this reality as it truly is. And this involves the enormous discipline of dropping your desires, your prejudices, your memories, your projections, your selective way of looking ... a discipline so great that most people would rather plunge headlong into good actions and service than submit to the burning fire of this asceticism. When you set out to serve someone whom you have not taken the trouble to see, are you meeting that person's need or your own?"                      Father Anthony de Mello

                                       www.wisdomatwork.com

 

jcolemang   www.dpreview.com

Evolving Consciousness

     "... human consciousness (is) a work in progress. For luminaries such as Hegel, Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser, and Ken Wilber, human consciousness and religious consciousness have evolved. Fortunately we can focus on the narrower yet still extremely complex area of religious consciousness, and since Ken Wilber has synthesized the ideas of so many thinkers, we can draw especially on his ideas.
     Wilber draws a crucial distinction between the 'average mode' of religious consciousness and the 'leading edge.' Leading-edge pioneers break through into new states of consciousness and then leave descriptions and instructions whereby others can follow them.
     Wilber's division of spiritual states into four broad classes of gross, subtle, causal, and nondual is helpful. He suggests that just as these tend to emerge sequentially in today's contemplatives, so too did they emerge in history, and a survey of historical religious texts supports him.
     Humankind's first gross and subtle spiritual experiences are long lost in the dawn of prehistory. Reliable signs of the causal appeared in the first few centuries before the Common Era and are associated with, for example, the Upanishads, the Buddha, early Taoists, and later with Jesus. Such was the extraordinary impact of this breakthrough and the sages who made it, that this era is known as the Axial age. Signs of the nondual appear a few centuries into the Common Era and are associated with, for example, the appearance of tantra and with names such as Plotinus in Rome, Bodhidharma in China, and Padmasambhava in Tibet.
     ... the evolution of religious consciousness is intimately tied to the evolution of the technology of transcendence. There has been an enormous development of transformational techniques ... early sages refined shamanic technology, added their own yogic, contemplative, and tantric techniques, and thereby created technologies that unveiled causal and nondual realizations. Subsequently, religions, philosophies, and psychologies arose to express and analyze these realizations, and their cumulative impact on human culture and consciousness is inestimable."

       Roger Walsh. “The World of Shamanism. New Views of an Ancient Tradition.” Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, Minnesota, 2007, p259-60.

buzzif   www.dpreview.com

Our Relationship to the Supreme

     "... in Chinese thought 'the notion of a Supreme Being, so essential to Western religions, is replaced by that of a Supreme State of Being, an impersonal perfection from which all beings, including man, are separated only by delusion.'"

       John Blofeld. "Taoism: Road to Immortality." Shambhala Publications Inc, 1985.
       quoted in: Solala Towler. "Chung Tzu - The Inner Chapters. The Classic Taoist Text. A New Translation of the Chuang Tzu with Commentary." Watkins Publishing, London, 2010. pxiv

Awaking from Conventional Slumber

     “At some point the hero’s conventional slumber is challenged by a crisis, an existential confrontation that calls previous beliefs and ways of life into question. The call can come from within or without. Outer physical crises may take the form of sickness, as with come shamans; a confrontation with sickness in others, as with the Buddha; or suddenly staring death in the face. 
     An inner call may take the form of a powerful dream or vision, as with some shamans, or of a deep heartfelt response to a new teacher or teaching. It may also emerge more subtly as ‘divine discontent’: a growing dissatisfaction with the pleasures of the world or a gnawing question about the meaning of life. No matter how this challenge arises, it reveals the limits of conventional thinking and living, and urges the hero beyond them. In our culture, this may appear as an existential or midlife crisis. Tragically, the deeper causes and questions of the crisis are rarely recognized, its potentials rarely fulfilled, and one of life’s great opportunities is then missed. 
     As Jesus said, ‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’ Indeed, few choose to even recognize the call. And no wonder! For those who hear the call now face a terrible dilemma. They must choose whether to answer the call and venture into the unknown realms of life to which it beckons, or deny the call and retreat into their familiar cocoon. If the call is denied then there is little choice but to repress the message and its far-reaching implications. Only by such repression can non-heroes fall again into the seductive, anesthetic comforts of conventional unawareness, suppress the sublime and sink into what the philosopher Kierkegaard so aptly called ‘tranquilization by the trivial.’ The result is a life of unconsciousness and conformity, which existentialists call inauthentic living and alienation.”

        Roger Walsh. “The World of Shamanism. New Views of an Ancient Tradition.” Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, Minnesota, 2007.

"Wherever you go, There you are"

     "... get me out of here. I would like to be - where? In some place of perfect impersonality, in a business-class lounge at Heathrow, in a Sheraton Hotel room in Malaysia - in one of those places where you feel pleasantly deracinated, and where you think with warm simplicity of ... home. Yet just now home is a place full of things that only remind me of my own insubstantiality."
 
       Richard Todd. "The Thing Itself. On the Search for Authenticity." Riverhead Books, NY, 2008.

Reifying the Ephemeral Self

     "Some important part of consumption is really about and for oneself. It represents our desire to enlarge, to complete, to reify ourselves. With our purchases, we try to become more acceptable not fundamentally to others but to ourselves."

       Richard Todd. "The Thing Itself. On the Search for Authenticity." Riverhead Books, NY, 2008.

Absolutely Everything Changes

     An author recounts buying an exorbitantly expensive briefcase - "a true 'attache case'" - as a young man, and how he now, in his 60s, feels about his once-prized status symbol:

     "When I see it at all, when it emerges from the shadows of familiarity, I look at it with a fond melancholy, a sadness for the young fellow who thought he needed this emblem to sustain his identity in the world."

       Richard Todd. "The Thing Itself. On the Search for Authenticity." Riverhead Books, NY, 2008.