Suffering, Healing, Maturation

     “Humans have a mysterious ability to deceive themselves and supply the necessary delusions. It is super-honest to recognize that our desires are not always very clear-cut, and sometimes, with the pretext of saving others, we are mainly seeking recognition and gratitude, something to bind our wounds with. A whole host of influences shape our actions and our behavior, and even the way we view the world. If I look back over the path I’ve traveled, I see many moments in which, while thinking myself completely free, I was only deluding myself. Looking more closely at my interest in the spiritual life, the main thing I discover is an immense fear of suffering. In the beginning I was a bit like a shipwreck survivor trying to get hold of a life preserver. Over the course of time, this mainly self-centered motivation has become more diffuse, and I am beginning to open myself toward others.” Alexandre Jollien
     Matthieu Ricard, Christophe Andre, Alexandre Jollien. “In Search of Wisdom. A Monk, a Philosopher, and a Psychiatrist on What Matters Most.” Sounds True, 2018.

     “The story begins with Faust, a middle-aged college professor, just becoming wise enough to know that he knows nothing. He has reached the pinnacle of success – the highest position possible for him – but finds himself alone, unrelated, his life meaningless. … When one’s ‘reality function’ – the feet-on-the-ground’ ability – is threatened, an encounter with the dark side … is the corrective.
     This is a terrible moment in the life of an intelligent human. He now sees that his level of consciousness, his perspective on life, will not support him. He has explored discipline and self-consciousness only to find them a dead end. This exploration is absolutely essential in one’s evolution, and the man who has not trodden that road is not eligible for the moment of despair that is also the moment of redemption and enlightenment. This is the midlife crisis, the mute suffering*** of existential man, the dark night of the soul. This is the experience of the intelligent man, the heroic man, the one who has reached the goal of modern consciousness. This is what happens when you reach the top of the ladder only to find that it was set up against the wrong wall. It is the very best human who suffers this Hamlet crisis. Lesser men take refuge in guilt at their inadequacy, or blame their environment, or find yet another set of windmills to vanquish – anything but face the terror of seeing that (their current) three-dimensional consciousness is not bearable, no matter how finely developed it is.
     It is a compliment of the highest order when a man finds that he cannot go farther and that his life is an irredeemable tragedy. His ego consciousness is stalemated, and this stalemate is the only medicine that will drive him out of the Hamlet tragedy and inspire him into a new consciousness.
     A fault of this magnitude cannot be repaired, but can be healed only by finding a whole new level of consciousness from which to function.
     … the ego-centered man fails; (one) who learns a center of gravity GREATER than himself, redeems that failure. If one were a genius the process would be inspirational, but for most of us it is experienced as the torture at the end of the rope. This divine/hellish point is the critical moment that can make or break the rest of a man’s life.”
     Robert A. Johnson. “Transformation. Understanding the Three Levels of Masculine Consciousness.” HarperOne, 1991.

*** “The curative solitude and the healing tears come automatically to us – for nature is aware of our suffering ... All symptoms are healing, but only if we listen to them and respond. ...
     The first task is to take the suffering inside as an interior event. As long as one blames someone outside or holds some institution responsible for the problem, there is little chance of learning or enhancing consciousness.”
     Robert A. Johnson. “The Fisher King & The Handless Maiden. Understanding the Wounded Feeling Function in Masculine and Feminine Psychology.” HarperOne, 1993.
     The old meaning of suffer was 'to allow', whereas we try desperately to exclude suffering.

     “in the Old French tarot, the Fool is blindfolded, which indicates a voluntary willingness both to forgo a dependence on the outer eye and to move toward a contemplative life with an inner eye, and to trust the companionship and guidance of his dog. In this sense this figure is the Wise Old Man. (Marie-Louise) Von Franz equates the Fool with ‘a part of the personality or even of humanity which remains behind and therefore still has the original wholeness of nature.’ In this way the dog seems a natural companion to the Fool.
     Another way to look at the dog jumping up from behind, would be … as an instinctual attack from the unconscious, exposing one’s human nature … as a way of being driven onward. Von Franz writes of this instinct within the archetypal process of individuation when she writes, ‘there seems to be a tendency in man to reach a further level of reflection and consciousness, and this comes from instinct and not always from outer disturbing factors alone.’ In this view individuation is seen … as something that must be suffered, and the Fool is viewed as the wanderer, the stranger, the lonely man suffering his own fate, being driven by his instincts.”
     Eleanora M. Woloy. “The Symbol of the Dog in the Human Psyche. A Study of the Human-Dog Bond.” Chiron, 2018.
     Again, the old meaning of suffer was 'to allow', rather than exclude or resist.

     "In times of trial as in times of joy, one must continually ask oneself, ‘What is my existence calling me to, here and now?’ … Here there is no promotion in rank to be won – it’s just a matter of going forward and loving ever more deeply, without clinging to any fixed reference point. Someone who confines himself to a particular identity will never know an end to suffering." Christophe Andre
     Matthieu Ricard, Christophe Andre, Alexandre Jollien. “In Search of Wisdom. A Monk, a Philosopher, and a Psychiatrist on What Matters Most.” Sounds True, 2018.

 

“Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist.
To make living itself an art, that is the goal.”  

Henry Miller

"To heal means to meet ourselves in a new way –
in the newness of each moment
where all is possible and
nothing is limited to the old.”

 

Stephen Levine

 

Old French Tarot card "The Fool"

 

Never Forget Our True Nature

     “Many people have intimations of their true nature in childhood – the sense of a benevolent presence guiding their life, a radiance that shines forth from all things, or a current of love that unites us all. …
     But we lose touch with this luminosity as we age … we forget who we really are and succumb to the way others see us..."
      Stephan Bodian. “Wake Up Now. A Guide to the Journey of Spiritual Awakening.” McGraw-Hill, 2008.

     By adulthood we've more or less forgotten who we truly are, and have passively absorbed the current cultural fad of being frozen in the armor of materialism, meaninglessness & cynicism. Not surprisingly, something in all of us "continues to weep over the barrenness of modern life."

The Way It Is
William Stafford

"There's a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread."

     “The life I chose when I promised my six-year-old self never to forget being a child, never to grow frightened and dishonest like the grownups I saw, nodding politely to each other without affection, and decided to put my true self in a time capsule for later use.” Aurora Levins Morales

      “Love is subversive, undermining the propaganda of narrow self-interest. Love emphasizes connection, responsibility and the joy we take in each other. Therefore love (as opposed to unthinking devotion) is a danger to the status quo and we have been taught to find it embarrassing.” Aurora Levins Morales 

     “Love … is seeing the unity under the imaginary diversity.” Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

     “By religious attitude I am not referring to following a path toward redemption or salvation or even necessarily to being a member of a religious institution. A religious attitude relates to the cultivation of soul – an openness to wonder, awe, fear, and reverence with respect to the ‘other,’ those numinous forces that exist outside our conscious control. These powers have been called at various times fate, destiny, the hand of God, or, to use Robert’s term, slender threads.” Jerry M. Ruhl

     “I have learned to trust the slender threads for the big decisions in my life while using my ego to take care of the small details.
     Humankind has struggled with the dilemma of how to balance fate versus free will since time began. There have been many rules of thumb for how to achieve such a balance. My personal approach is that the big events in my life follow a slender thread while the details are my business. Nobody but me will balance my checkbook or shave me or keep my house tidy. Those are the appropriate tasks for the ego. The little decisions belong to us, while the great things are like the weather sweeping us along. Yet most modern people spend a majority of their waking hours worrying about larger issues that the ego cannot really control. The small and limited ego is not the proper human faculty for such issues. The ego does not belong in the driver’s seat. In fact, the ego often gets in the way of being attentive to the slender threads. We must learn to humble and quiet our egos so that we may follow the slender threads.
     … I feel that the ego is properly used as the organ of awareness, not the organ of decision. … The ego is useful for collecting information about ticket fares and accommodation and things to see and do when you arrive. But the ego does not determine the experience you will have on your trip. People get so preoccupied with trying to control things that are not in the ego’s province that they neglect what is the ego’s business – heightened awareness. The ego should be collecting data and watching. The ego serves as the eyes and ears of God. It gathers the facts, but it does not make the ultimate decisions. The decisions come from the Self, Dr. Jung’s term for a center of intelligence that is not limited to the ego but contains all of the faculties – conscious and unconscious – of the personality. Obviously, this is but a new attempt to describe the old concept of a personal relationship with God.” Robert A. Johnson
     Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

     “We are made to trust our destination. We are not lost.” Aurora Levins Morales 

 

 

Words about "the nameless"

     Most of us were born into a religion and traumatized by it, and/or were traumatized by others' religions. So it's very common & understandable to be stuck in cynicism, aversion, anger, hatred etc towards religions. Nevertheless, it's vitally important to FREE ourselves from the prison that our afflictive emotions create: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.com/2020/12/natural-evolution-of-understanding.html

 

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching

 

     Below are two deeply insightful mystics, the late Robert A. Johnson, and Cynthia Bourgeault, who happen to use Christian terminology - just ONE of MANY - for "the nameless" - that which cannot be named. 

     “Apparently, one must separate from God so that there is an objective standpoint from which we can observe. In my own homespun theology, I believe that perhaps God wanted human eyes in order to be able to see the splendor of the Golden World. If so, then it’s our business to be the eyes and ears, to see and hear the splendor or God, but it requires that we stand apart from God. To be a discrete observer necessitates that one is separated from what one is observing. That is the alienation of a human life. One is reminded of the Zen comment on the intermediate stage of development when ‘rivers were no longer rivers and mountains were no longer mountains.’
     That sense of being separated is the ego. In arriving at adulthood we all have built an ego structure, a separate sense of ‘I,’ but it is precisely that distance from all else that makes us feel so lonely and alienated. One then must find a way to restore the unity with God, to worship. This is the Zen stage when ‘rivers are again rivers and mountains are again mountains.’
     It is our human duty to witness the splendor of God, which is my sense of worship. What makes all of this so difficult is that our duties are in conflict. These principal duties are to separate from oneness (the childhood paradise), develop an ego, and live a cultural life; and then to reunite with the oneness of God. Generally the early part of one’s life is taken up with the necessary distancing from God: learning about the cultural requirements of the society in which one lives, leaving the house of the parents, developing one’s independence and sense of personal self. There is a constant pull back to the sense of unity from which we came, and in Jungian psychology that it called the mother complex. There is a regressive pull in each of us to quit this business of winning independence, to escape the painful human process of becoming a distinct, separate personality. Physical suicide is the ultimate expression of the mother complex, but it takes many other forms, such as the use of drugs and alcohol or mindless consumption of food or other material goods. When people come to my consulting room with a drug problem, I tell them that they are addressing the right problem but in the wrong way. They are trying to go back to a paradise when they need to go forward to a paradise.
     We must separate from God before we can reunite with God. We must create a useful life, learning the customs of the society in which we live. You cannot put back together again that which has never been adequately differentiated. Consciousness must separate before it can reunite. Many of the spiritual communes, monasteries, and spiritual practices in this country are nothing but institutionalized mother complexes, with selfishness and ego regression running rampant in the name of spirituality.
     It is a legitimate question to ask just how far one really needs to push this differentiation before one can legitimately seek to reunite. That is an individual matter. A very simple person may not be differentiated to any great degree, and I have seen this among the traditional peasants who live in the small villages of India; they have the right to put things back together again without a great deal of differentiation. But educated Westerners go much further in developing their consciousness, becoming so split that it is difficult to become whole again. The cultural laws of Western society encourage us to get as separate, as specialized, as unique as we can get. To get a good job today you must have a college education, and a professional degree or a Ph.D. is better still. We are trained to become more and more specialized. Then on Sunday at church we are advised to merge ourselves with God. It’s no wonder we’ve become a neurotic society; the wonder is that we are not all schizophrenic!
     Once we have built a strong ego, we must then link it back to the matrix from which it has grown. Differentiation of consciousness is only one-half of our life journey. But to say, ‘I want an experience of God’ is a total oxymoron; if there is an ‘I’ seeking an experience, that is precisely the problem, since an ‘I’ that sees itself as separate from God is the cause of the suffering in one’s life. There’s a Christian proverb that says he who searches for God insults God, because a search implies that God is separate. Zen Buddhism also is very articulate about this, stating that the very motivation for satori or enlightenment is suspect. You find the kingdom, not by seeking, but only by grace. Seeking after the splendor of God is a highly egocentric and fragmenting thing to do. I now understand that the most profound religious life is found by being in the world yet in each moment doing our best to align ourselves with heaven, with the will of God.”
     Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998.

 
     Cynthia Bourgeault (CB): “I became more and more intrigued and disturbed about why it was that Christianity, a religion that clearly has one of the most loving and inclusive gurus that’s ever walked the face of the planet, at its epicenter, should tend to develop itself in formats that were so rigid and exclusive and non-generous. And why didn’t people walk the talk? It became more and more of a heartbreak to me. So it was actually through reading Jacob Needleman’s 'Lost Christianity' in 1980, that the first pieces began to come together. He said at one point, ‘telling people to wake up and be conscious is like telling stones to pick themselves up, sprout wings and fly to the sea.’ There’s a missing piece, and until you can get that missing piece online, you can’t do the teachings of Jesus. ‘If one aspires to live the beatitudes or any Gospel teaching it is necessary to establish the level of consciousness from which they emerge.’ is virtually a direct quote from Symeon the New Theologian in the 11th century, who was the first one to be on to the fact that the Jesus teachings emerged from a very high level of consciousness, and that until you could basically run that program, you are going to be constantly dumbing it down to a place where it’s basically an inversion of itself. So Needleman was onto the fact that something was broken in the way that we pay attention that kept our consciousness scrambled, low, distracted, and not under our free command, and it was this that was constantly making hash out of the Gospel that Jesus was teaching."
     Rick Archer (RA): “A speaker, or anyone, can only speak from their level of consciousness; a student, or anyone, can only listen or hear from their level of consciousness, which brings in the whole ‘pearl before swine’ thing, the parable of the sower, if we want to quote Biblical references. There’s always going to be a gulf, not only contemporaneously in the life of that teacher, but then as time goes on, and the teachings get passed down like a party-game from one ear to another, over time it gets more and more distorted. I think it’s happened in every tradition.”
     CB: “Even our understanding of what ‘esoteric’ means. Nowadays, people will think esoteric means secret information that’s withheld from people, which is ridiculous. The esoteric dimension of every faith, which is very simple, is hidden in plain sight. Nobody’s hiding anything. But until you reach a certain level of receptivity, and the teacher reaches a certain level of broadcastability, you can’t see it, you can’t pick it up.
     They say that until a student has enough collective well, and is able to sort out on their own and discriminate between a billion different things out there, the thing that has their name on it, they’re not going to be able to appreciate, they’re not going to be fit for work anyway. It’s like a chicken picking its way out of the egg, you have to do that work before you’re ready to be where the teaching is going to put you.”

     RA: “How do you develop that discrimination to find the thing that’s right for you, among all the different influences out there?”
     CB: "Gurdjieff had a teaching about A and B influences. And he said most of us are out there in the world surrounded by A influences, which are all sort of competing things making a play for our attention. And it’s not until you can recognize something that’s a B influence, which has a qualitatively different taste for you, that you can follow it. You’ve got to get there yourself. How that happens? – A little luck, a little management. I certainly think that meditation is a really good starting point, because it allows you to filter out a lot of the garbage that’s obviously just playing at superficial parts of you, and to listen to something qualitatively deeper.
     I think actually we have the direction wrong of the journey all along. We start from the impression that we are here, and God’s over there, and that we have to go towards God. And if you can make enough noise and jump up & down loud enough, you’ll attract God’s attention. But I think rather it is always the opposite - we’re flowing out from the divine at any given moment, as a particular path, as a kind of instantiation of divinity in form. We’re always guided, and the path is always specific to ourself. What we have to learn is simply to stay in alignment with it. That’s what learning B influences is all about. It’s easier to stay in alignment once you get the hang of it, than not to stay in alignment with it and try on a billion different paths because they seem interesting. I venture to say that God is your heart of hearts."
      Cynthia Bourgeault - Oct 23, 2017 Batgap interview:  https://batgap.com/cynthia-bourgeault/

Greater Than We Commonly Know

    If in our childhood, we sometimes sensed the presence of a powerful invisible guide, and perhaps were occasionally surprised by feeling exuberantly wonderful - despite challenging, far-from-ideal circumstances - then this mystery of the "greater than" will likely re-emerge in adulthood.

    "Greater than" is a subtle yet powerful sensation that can strike us with awe & wonder. Joanna Macy's quote points to this:
    “If this world is to be healed through human efforts,
    I am convinced it will be by ordinary people
    whose love for life is even greater than their fear."

    Fear is a universal defense mechanism to preserve one's own life & safety. When fear dominates ("egocentric / noisy ego," "left-brain dominance," "fight, flight, freeze reaction") the world is a dangerous place & all one's attention & energy is focused only on survival. This otherwise healthy brief reaction to transient danger is grossly distorted by severe past & ongoing trauma, as well as by conditions like narcissistic personality disorder. When lost in fear, we see a dangerous, chaotic, uncaring, perhaps even malicious world / god. To cope, many override fear with anger / disgust, bulldozing their way through life - at a cost: http://www.johnlovas.com/2022/04/very-different-now.html
    Today, even those who've not experienced severe trauma, tend to be spiritually illiterate - not having the knowledge nor even the language to consider or express what is most meaningful to them. By default they assume that science knows all, and that anything beyond science - religion / spirituality is "old-fashioned superstition," leaving them boxed-in, hopeless, cynical & paradoxically angry at a cartoon-like image of a "God" they don't believe in.
    Psychotherapy (with or without entheogens) and meditation / contemplative practices can be powerfully beneficial.

    Many years ago, I saw a patient in his 30s for severe chronic pain in his mouth. He was extremely angry & frustrated because severe chronic back pain, & more recently mouth pain prevented him from doing the work he loved. He wasn't even able to lift up his small children to play with them. He must surely have been terrified of being unable to support, or be of any practical use to his young family. I told him that his anger (due to fear, sadness & frustration) is perfectly justified & understandable, HOWEVER it's preventing him from healing. I advised him to learn to let go of his anger so he could heal & regain his life, & prescribed an ointment for him to apply to his mouth. A few weeks later he returned with marked reduction of the pain in his mouth AND his back. The clinician from his pain clinic phoned and asked me for the prescription I had given him because "it" had such a profound beneficial effect on his back, while months of potent narcotics had not reduced his back pain at all. Of course the topical agent for his mouth had nothing whatsoever to do with the remarkable pain reduction in his back. His letting go of anger was key, allowing him to face, deal with & come to terms with his underlying great fear & sadness directly, and then he was freed to live his life.

    When / if fear subsides, then our far more evolved true nature can surface ("allocentric/ecocentric," "quiet ego," "right-brain dominance," "tend & befriend instinct") and our concern & energies SHIFT to nurturing others & everything around us, creativity & joy. Our true nature sees profound interconnection between everything ("oneness"), and that "all shall be well." This perspective is totally incomprehensible to the fear-driven left-brain and therefore, to many people today - including psychologists, physicians & other health-care practitioners.

    "contemplative practices allow the egoic mind to drop of its own accord, and for you to experience something greater – that direct experience of the vastness of which we are a part." Rami Shapiro 2021 interview: https://batgap.com/rabbi-rami-shapiro/

    “There’s a great hue and cry now about ‘What is the meaning of life?’ And I think the Golden World is the meaning of life – that which supersedes one’s egocentric view of life - to find something that’s greater than I am; something that I can work for, outside my own egocentric structure. And I must safeguard my egocentric structure, in order to have a platform for that too. That’s the either and or that’s so difficult for the modern person.” Robert A. Johnson. “The Golden World. The Search for Meaning, Fulfillment, and Divine Beauty.” Sounds True, Audiobook, 2018.

    "The ecstatic experience involves escaping from the ‘I-ness.’ This requires that we break the boundaries of our separateness to experience a greater realm, a realm that taxes our finest poets and artists to convey. It is the most valuable experience any person can have. The beauty of the Golden World is that one sees a vastness, something so much greater than oneself that one is left speechless with awe, admiration, delight, and rapture.
    Very few people have the intelligence to surrender with dignity to forces greater than themselves. Most of us have to be hit in the head ... and thereby forced into a realization of the Golden World.
    ... when one has stopped trying to maneuver external reality so that it will work out as the ego desires. One turns authority over to something greater than oneself; the ego is sacrificed to the Self, the earthly world serves the heavenly world, and one learns, at last, to trust the slender threads.” Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998. EXCEPTIONALLY WORTHWHILE BOOK

    Balfour Mount, the Canadian surgeon who introduced palliative care in North America, studied existential suffering, & the experience of integrity & wholeness, in persons with life-threatening illness. He identified 4 types of 'healing connections' involving a sense of bonding to Self, others, the phenomenal world, & ultimate meaning. These situated participants in a context that was greater & more enduring than the self, thus leading to enhanced meaning and quality of life. (More recently, this phenomenon is referred to as "post-traumatic growth.") Balfour M. Mount, Patricia H. Boston, S. Robin Cohen. “Healing Connections: On Moving from Suffering to a Sense of Well-Being.” Journal of Pain and Symptom Management 33; 4: 372-388, 2007.

    "Near Death Experiences (NDEs) often lead to a paradoxical decrease in devotion to any one religious tradition, despite a greater awareness of guidance by and connection to a higher power. ... Many experiencers describe adopting a form of nondenominational spirituality since their NDEs, in which all religious traditions are valued but no one religion is given precedence." Bruce Greyson. “After. A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond.” St. Martin’s, 2021.

    “The search for reason ends at the shore of the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. (ineffable means too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words)
    We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.
    Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance …” Abraham Joshua Heschel

    "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

    Perhaps the most common & saddest example of needless suffering today is seen among the elderly, especially those with progressive diseases such as Parkinson's, dementia etc, who have nothing but a materialist / physicalist worldview, and see their situation as meaningless loss of control & suffering, or perhaps worse, the victim of a cruel creator. In this unfortunate situation, Dylan Thomas' famous words, "Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light." may sound heroic, BUT there is infinitely wiser advice:
    "… in any situation in life, confronted by an outer threat or opportunity, you can notice yourself responding inwardly in one of two ways. Either you will brace, harden, & resist, or you will soften, open & yield. If you go with the former gesture, you will be catapulted immediately into your smaller self, with its animal instincts and survival responses. If you stay with the latter regardless of the outer conditions, you will remain in alignment with your innermost being, and through it, divine being can reach you. Spiritual practice at its no-frills simplest is a moment-by-moment learning not to do anything in a state of internal brace. Bracing is never worth the cost.
    This does not necessarily carry over into an outer state of surrender, or ‘rolling over & playing dead.’ On the contrary, interior surrender is often precisely what makes it possible to see a decisive action that must be taken and to do it with courage and strength. To ski down a hill or split a piece of wood, you first have to relax inwardly; only then can you exert the right force and timing. It’s exactly the same in the emotional world. Whether it’s a matter of holding your ground in a dispute with your boss, handling a rebellious teenager with tough love, or putting your life on the line for an ideal you believe in like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., action flows better when it flows from nonviolence, that is, from the place of relaxed, inner opening.
    ... surrender is an act of spiritual power because it opens the heart directly to the more subtle realms of spiritual Wisdom & energy. One hands oneself over, in the poet Dante’s beautiful image, into ‘the love that moves the stars and the sun.’ When the attitude of prompt surrender has become permanently ingrained in a person while still in bodily life, that person becomes a powerful servant of humanity – a saint, in the language of the Christian West – whose very being radiates blessing and spiritual strength." Cynthia Bourgeault. “The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming An Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart.” Jossey-Bass, 2003.

    “Most important of all, do everything you can to nurture your spiritual intelligence. It is your only genuine source of hope, direction, meaning, and comfort.” Thomas Moore

"Girl with Two Owls" by Lobsang Mendelez www.lobsangsecretart.com