We have a huge proclivity to think - to be certain - that our current perspective is correct, true & accurate. This is so, even though most of us can recall how we felt the same certainty earlier in life, but now with 20:20 hindsight, realize how immature & silly we were. Personal pride & certainty is usually misguided at best. But when pride & certainty join forces with the momentum of "group think", all hell often breaks loose - mob violence against "competing religions", cult suicides, genocides, ... world wars. If my group is right, others must be wrong AND must be corrected, if not eliminated - this is 'mob mentality'. Mercifully, (some) people can & do outgrow this adolescent, rigid, black-and-white phase, realizing that they have many, many higher levels of self-concepts & worldviews to evolve through. Sadly, fear of leaving the group, fear of being shunned, fear of leaving behind the comfortable pretense of certainty, keep many otherwise intelligent, educated people stuck in such groups - even if it means having to park their minds & hearts at the door. Aging, especially wisely, isn't for sissies. See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2012/03/aging-wisely.html
Rick Archer : “There are so many people in this world who are so sure of their position, their beliefs, whatever, and of course so many wars have been fought over that mentality – many of them in the name of religion.”
Mooji : “It’s actually because they are not sure. They’re not sure, that’s why they try to appear so sure. They’re not sure.” Rick Archer : “They’re desperately defending their doubt.” Mooji : “Yeh, if you’re sure about something, there’s a great relaxation in you, a very great openness. When you really can say that you are clear and certain about it, you reach a place of stillness. And you cannot be moving in some line of aggression towards any being. There’s a stillness in that.” Rick Archer : “And in that stillness, you’re very comfortable with paradox. You don’t take a polar position and adhere to it, you can actually embrace two contradictory concepts or positions." Mooji : “Of course, because ultimately you can only do this because you have transcended concepts. You see their limitations. You see their usefulness. And you know that what is, is not shaped by any concepts. The concept is secondary. Only one who is really moved beyond the dependency on any concept is free with all expressions and any concept.”
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 primarilyinspiring current non-dual teachers like Amoda Maa, Louise Kay, Helen Hamilton, Dorothy Hunt, Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, Henry Shukman, and many more.
The greatest roadblocks to healthy maturation / aging are rigid certainty about one's self-concept & worldview http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=certainty and nihilismhttp://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, butfirst 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 thelife-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 toawakening, 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 & equallyin 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 nothingis a miracle. The other is as though everythingis a miracle.” Albert Einstein
“The important thing is not to think much, but to lovemuch, and so to do what best awakens us to love.” Saint Teresa of Ávila
"... one works on oneselfas 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 wholenessthat weathers every condition? If we can’t, we may spend this life protecting ourselves and never risk really living.” Bonnie Myotai Treace
To see my latest blog, simply click : www.johnlovas.com To see previous blogs, scroll down from the latest blog.
My blog is NOT "monetized." I'm simply sharing what I understand to be of greatest value in life.
"Real faith means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life and which cannot be comprised in any formula. Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery.”Martin Buber
When You Are Old W.B. Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
“If you want a barometer for progress in practice, look at how skillful you are at holding ‘not sure’. It’s very different from what most spiritual disciplines teach. Exercise the skill of being mindfully ‘not sure’, apply it and try it out. Remember this is not just another technique or position we grasp in our search for security. Really try it out in your formal practice and in daily life. Start to experiment with the result of restraining the mind’s tendency to grasp at wanting to be sure.”Ajahn Munindo
"The middle way says don't fall into an extreme. Extremes are dead ends. There everything is crystallized and solid, it creates it's own opposition, nothing can move. I want to give you an example of a person who's gone through some rigors in life, and here is how he sees things now: 'I've come to see: • we have an instinct for right and wrong, and push it aside when it's inconvenient; • that the more deeply we're motivated by emotion, the more insistently we pass it off as reason; • that denial is a force to be reckoned with, and our principle obstacle; • that ethical codes are as likely to produce hypocrisy as goodness; • that belief is precarious, especially when it demands certainty; • that no religious, scientific or academic faith can be trusted that can't laugh at itself; • that the only way to respect truth, is to take it with a pinch of salt; and • that life leads nowhere, until we consciously take the direction it provides.'Stephen Schettini" Ken McLeod "There is no enemy: A toolkit for change" Buddhist Geeks Conference 2011 http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2012/09/there-is-no-enemy/
Everything depends on my love in every moment. Other names for this essential ingredient include heart, wisdom, or life force- 'may the force be with you.' Everything? Absolutely! Abandonment, neglect & other major abuses, by those on whom infants totally depend for love, shelter, protection & nurturing, often cause catastrophic physical, mental, emotional, psycho-social-spiritual chaos, for generations! This has been thoroughly documented in "adverse childhood experiences (ACE)" studies, since the late 1990's. Lack of love is severely traumatic, devastating lives like a raging forest fire. Most people who commit violent crimes, suffer addictions & incarceration came from unstable, dysfunctional homes.
Despite far-from-ideal childhoods, some children still grow up to be functional, loving adults. Most, perhaps all such resilient children, had at least one loving, nurturing adult to inspire & energize them to survive, and maybe even thrive.
Many of us, at least subconsciously crave to be loved unconditionally, without judgment or expectation, just for who / what we are. Our deepest desire is to receive love like this forever.
“A single force, love, links and
gives life to infinite worlds.” Jordano Bruno
How to wisely keep open our heart energy center is exceptionally-well dealt with in: Michael A. Singer. “The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself.” New Harbinger, 2007.
"Experiencers" - those who've had near death experiences (NDEs), and the many others who have, by various other means, glimpsed beyond the narrow perspective ('veil') of this physical dimension, consistently agree on the absolute primacy of love. The highlight of their strikingly vivid, overwhelming spiritually-transformative experience is the certainty of being loved unconditionally. Nothing compares to this, the most important message which they all share. To the best of their ability, they resolve to be the source of unconditional love for the rest of their lives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwkOnahGlsc
Thispivotal spiritual shift from craving for to being the source oflove, arises from the remembered capacity to recognize in oneself the exact same perfect source of love, as is present in all other people, animals, plants & things - as expressed in the greeting 'Namaste.'
“If you don’t find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further.” Gandhi
The only relief available for the worst possible pain - that of losing one's child - is the meaning derived from being able to provide wise loving support to others going through this same terrible pain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suhc428VJLc
Withevery person we meet, the task is to recognize their perfect loving ('divine') true nature, which helps them recognize their own perfect true nature. It's about creating a nurturing, harmonious resonance of authentic beings. We are being asked to radically accept & get beyond our differences, and that's not easy. To finally recognize each & every one of us, including ourselves, as fully divine AND AT THE SAME TIME having a fully human experience, in ALL circumstances - joy, boredom & agony!
"There’s only one happiness and it’s who you are. There’s only one place to find lasting happiness, and that is to know who you are and to be who you are.” Francis Lucille
"It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men." Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merelytoseek and find all the barriers within yourself
One might wonder why a hyper-rational perspective so dominates industrialized societies these days. By hyper-rational I mean unbalanced, very narrow & machine-like, as if human beings were isolated machines, manipulating completely separate, unrelated external mechanical objects, in a totally random, dead, meaningless universe. Seriously?? This is physicalism - the current orthodoxy under which we unknowingly live. But like other dogmatic belief systems, it cries out for open examination & wise correction!
“Materialist or Reductionist Science … has concluded that we are the only sentient beings in an inanimate universe that is without life, meaning, purpose, direction or intelligence. This bleak ‘philosophy’has taken on the power & absolutism of an ideology.” Anne Baring – Awakening to a New Story – The Evolutionary Imperative of Our Time” : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hITMBPOwyDY
“Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric minda sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.” Bob Samples. “The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness.” Jalmar, 1976.
"Our understanding of knowing is multifaceted and education emphasizes memory, reasoning, learning style, language, intelligence, & on & on. Acknowledging the vast array of distinctions, I want to cut beneath these to claim that with respect to education, consciousness, & culture today, there are two ways of knowing. That is, there are twofundamental ways that the mind works to know the world. There are myriad variations to be sure and certainly plenty of other ways to slice this rhetorically, but the most salient concern today comes down to this. One way we will call categorical. This knows the world through abstraction, through separating it from us, through taking apart to understand. In a sense everything is reduced to parts, to lowest units that are differentiated, named, catalogued. It reaches its apex in metaphor of computer zeroes & ones. Categorical awareness narrows in to focus on detail and seeks precision, objectivity, & presupposes certainty. It simplifies & represents, proceeds linearly & sequentially, and generalizes. Our schooling emphasizes this way of knowing, and for the most part, only this. The other knowing is through contact (experiential) instead of category. Its style is direct, relational, embodied, and recognizes wholes & connections. Awareness through contact enables a broader view, one connected with the world & the body, scanning for changes in the environment. This knowing seeks novelty, picks up implicit meaning & metaphor, is able to read faces & other cues of individualsinstead of simplified, predetermined, and generalized categories. Knowledge through contact is evolving, implicit, & indeterminate since it always exists in relationship to something else and is not ever fully graspable. Iain McGilchrist, drawing from a vast body of neuroscientific and phenomenological data, makes a compelling case that these ways of knowing have neurological substrates corresponding to the anatomically distinct hemispheres of the brain.” Tobin Hart. “The Integrative Mind: Transformative education for a world on fire.” Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
"Iain McGilchrist, author of, 'The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,' says that we are dominated by this left-hemisphere analytical view, which of course you see going straight into artificial intelligence. And we’ve neglected the right-hemisphere creative, intuitive, holistic side of ourselves. For him, the master hemisphere, in terms of his book’s title, is the right hemisphere, not the left hemisphere, because
• FIRST the right hemispheregives us an idea of the whole, then
• SECONDinformation is sent to the left hemisphere for analytical elaboration, finally
• THIRD it should be sent back to the right hemisphere for a higher level of integration.
So he never says we only need one hemisphere. He says we must create a culture in which these hemispheres are working together and we therefore re-establish our balance." David Lorimerhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn00MFFVyIo
"To cut a long story short, it struck me that it was a problem with our thinking ... about things out there that were objects, that didn’t have any kind of embodied reality for us. And that interested me in what's going on in our brains. And when I studied medicine, I was very much inspired by Oliver Sacks and his writings, principally “Awakenings,” an extraordinary book. That book shows that when something goes wrong brain, it affects their whole world. Or something goes wrong with their mind, it affects their body. These things are deeply, closely connected. So I studied medicine, and went off to neurology & psychiatry, which is the area of overlap. It was there that I started to ask myself questions. Why is the brain divided? In medical school, nobody ever said why the brain is divided in two halves. Nobody knew, and nobody even asked the question why. And later, I learned that the two hemispheres have completely different ways of looking at the world. There was a lot of nonsense talked about hemisphere difference that put serious scientists off the topic altogether. I was told, ‘Don’t even touch this topic because it’s career death. It’s pop psychology. It doesn’t have any basis.’ And yet, when one came to look at scholarly research on people who had damage to one or other hemisphere, you could see that they had completely different effects, depending on where it was - the left or the right hemisphere. And that was being overlooked & ignored. People say, ‘Ah there aren’t any really serious differences.’ But I think what they were doing wrong was they were thinking of the brain as a machine. And so they were asking the question you would ask of a machine, ‘What does it do?’ And they said first of all, well the left does reason & language, and the right does emotion & pictures. And then they found that this was completely untrue, because each hemisphere got involved in all those things. But what they didn’t seem to be asking, was the question you would ask a part of a person which is, ‘How, in what waydoes each hemisphere get involved in these things?’ And if you do that, you find that each hemisphere is involved in every single thing that makes up parts of our lives, just with a completely different take on it. That was the difference! To begin with, I couldn’t quite see how staggeringly important this was. Then I realized, the two halves of the brain were attending to the world in two different ways. And we know that when you attend differently, you see different things. There are lots of clever demonstrations, some by Darren Brown the illusionist, and so on, which show that if you’re not expecting to see something, you don’t see it; if you look with a certain kind of attention you see one thing, if you look with another kind of attention, you see something completely different. Quite apart from those clever demonstrations, in our daily life, when we look at things with a certain kind of attention, we find a different kind of world from what is apparently the same world on a different day when we’re attending to it differently. I heard a lecture by John Cutting, whom I considered the most interesting living psychiatrist. He had done what no other physician had been doing, which was looking at what happened after right hemisphere strokes. Everyone was focused on left hemisphere strokes. And they thought well nothing serious happens to somebody with a right hemisphere stroke because they can still use their right hand, and language is usually unimpaired. But actually it turns out that they’re much more seriously impaired, & harder to rehabilitate after a right hemisphere stroke than after a left hemisphere stroke, even though, after a left hemisphere stroke, it’s very probable that you won’t be able to speak or be able to use your right hand. Now that surprises people. But what John was saying is when the left hemisphere is damaged, you see these very obvious results, but when the right hemisphereis damaged, what you don’t immediately see is that their whole experience of the world has changed. And he alerted me to some things in this lecture which rang a bell. He said, the left hemisphere fails to understand implicit meaning – it doesn’t understand metaphor, jokes, irony, sense of humor. It takes things very literally, in a sort of mechanical way. It is less in touch with the body than the right hemisphere, and literally the body image, which is not just a visual image but an image in all senses in the brain of ourselves as embodied beings, is in the right hemisphere. And he was saying also that the general ideas, as it were, get collected abstractly in the left hemisphere, but unique instances, embodied concrete instances of things are better appreciated in the right hemisphere. ... it’s the left hemisphere that does the talking. It’s my left hemisphere now that is speaking to you. And it has set up a kind of language that works well for it. But it’s much harder to convey the meanings & knowledge that the right hemisphere has. And often, when you make something explicit, you utterly change its nature. You see this with sex, you see this with religion, you can see it with jokes, you can see it with poems. And when you disembody something, you utterly change its reality for us and how we relate to it. And when you abstract and generalize something, you’ve completely lost what was unique & special about it. You’re doing a rather paradoxical thing – you’re destroying the thing you’re trying to examine, in the process of examining. And very often, I think, what we as a society have been tending to do in the last 150 years, is increasingly to denature the world by our way of talking about it abstractly, mechanically, reductively. And we have not attended to, because it’s harder to see, what is lost and, what, as it were, the part of us that understands the implicit, knows. Now the implicit is enormous compared with the explicit. The bit that we actually see explicitly, in the center of the focus of our consciousness is minute. It’s conservatively estimated to be much less than 5% of all the stuff that we’re knowing & experiencing, and probably it’s very, very much less than that. So the unconscious mind, which includes the whole of our bodies as well as the other parts of the brain and so forth, is taking in, dealing with, assessing & responding to the world – knowing things as it were, that in our explicit, conscious mind we’ve ruled out, we don’t talk about, and we say we don’t believe in them. So that actually skews the picture of what the world is, who we are, and how we relate." Matter is a Relative Matter with Iain McGilchrist:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kAlwrnpHIs
"There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousnesshas a quality impossible to describe." Teilhard de Chardin
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince”
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince”
Insights from a present-day, 84-year old mystic & long-time meditator, John Butler: “The more I appreciate the wonder of the world around me, the more I realize my own ignorance & incapacity to understand. And I love the verse from scriptures that says, ‘My ways are higher than your ways, my thoughts than your thoughts,' says the Lord. And also another one that says, ‘The wisdom of man is foolishness to God.’ I suppose that’s why, as we grow in spiritual awareness, what we call knowledge – the answer to questions, also goes through as it were a process of evolution. Nowfaith is really higher knowledge. Lower knowledge is concerned with facts & answers. So we study, we read books, we ask questions, search the internet. Why do these things happen? We try to analyze the different parts. As you stand more at the top of the mountain, somehow these questions rather fall away, and you acquire a deeper understanding – an understanding of wholeness. It’s not so concerned with the bits & pieces of separation. You see the wholeness of things. If you lie on your back and look at the sky, you don’t normally say, ‘Why is this bit of cloud like that? Why isn’t the other bit shaped in the same way? Why are some dark & shadowy? Why are other bits light?’ We’re used to looking at the sky as a whole, aren’t we? And we can see the comings & goings of things, within a greater unity, within a greater harmony. And so, a part of spiritual development is that partial knowledge ie knowledge of different parts, bits of this & bits of that, what you could refer to as ‘name & form,’gets replaced by a higher knowledge, which is called, faith. Now faith is the evidence of things not seen. You don’t see with the eye of flesh. You see with the eye of heart. We’re to understand what can never be explained in terms of ordinary encyclopedic knowledge. Begin to understand the meaning oflove, and of peace, and of freedom. No one can explain what these things are. Yet we all know instinctively what they are. We talk about them every day, like we talk about God. Who really knows what we’re talking about? We may have a sort of inkling, but... Yet there is faith, isn’t there? Faith is a sort of knowing, but a fractured, partial knowing. It’s a knowing that enables one to have faith or trust. And these statements, ‘All things happen for the best, to those that love God.’ It’s really a statement of faith, of higher knowledge, that knows it perhaps instinctively, better than in analytic knowledge. I mean who can ever say, what’s best and what’s worse?” John Butler : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3R_2jOcqSU
"William James more than 100 years ago, speaking of mystical experience said that one of it's characteristics, besides ego dissolution & transcendence of space and time, is its 'noetic quality.' And this was the quality that what you learned, the insights you had, were not merely opinions but were revealed truths. And they have a stickiness & a power that is central to the experience, and it is what allows people to change." Michael Pollan interviewed by Katherine May, "The Future of Hope 4":https://onbeing.org/programs/michael-pollan-and-katherine-may-the-future-of-hope-4/
“When you consider all the saints and prophets as legitimate and no longer differentiate between religions, you have arrived at the stage of truth.” OstadElahi (1895-1974)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oo_QhUQToA
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” R. Buckminster Fuller
Reality is more complex than we would like. If we insist upon it making sense, we will find ourselves despairing. Reality cannot be neatly packaged ... Reality is all that is, and this is often at odds with what we imagine it should be. Rabbi Yannai, an early Jewish sage
“Always keep an open mind about whatever you experience. Try not to jump to conclusions. Simply keep observing & investigating your experience thoroughly & continuously. Jumping to conclusionswill prevent your understanding from deepening.” Ashin Tejaniya “Don’t Look Down on the Defilements – They Will Laugh at You." http://sayadawutejaniya.org/teachings/
In medicine, a well-recognized source of diagnostic error is "premature
closure" - when physicians failto listen to patients long enough to hear the full history, wrongly assuming they already "know" because they've "heard it all before."
It takes effort & humility to patiently, intentionally retain an open, beginner's mind, especially for 'experts' burdened by dogma.
One definition of an expert is one who's incapable of further learning. This patronizing, colonializing hubriskeeps governments, religions, professions & other large institutions fossilized decades, if not centuries behind progressive ideas.
“While religion at its best calls us to a community of the curious and a unity beyond dogma & tribalism; religion at its worst calls us to worship the very things that divide us and to pit people against one another in the name of one fantasy or other.” Rami Shapiro. “Holy Rascals. Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries.” Sounds True, 2017.
Dogmaticsecularscientism & dogmaticreligions are equally captivating, both promisingcertainty. For both, it's an open & shut case, all other worldviews are fiercely denounced, now adherents can get back to being busy doing stuff, end of discussion, thank you & good night!
Reality is far too complex, paradoxical, and takes way too much effort for the vast majority to spend a lifetime exploring with an open mind / heart!
“The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching…” Joseph Campbell
Increasingly, people arebecoming"spiritual revolutionaries,spiritually independent" or "mystics" - no longer followers, and find marching lock-step with any crowd spiritually confining, even suffocating. Their individual ego (small self) is sufficiently secure, so they do not depend on a group ego, a charismatic guru, or an all-powerful separate "other." Nor do they "other" the Divine, but instead experienceOneness with Source. This felt sense is often referred to as "Self" by mystics, Jung, Internal Family Systems, etc. Some of them resonate with the mystical level of some spiritual traditions, which may or may not be one in which we were raised.
We ALL have firm opinions about people & things, based on minimal or wrong information. AND, we ALL consider others with such baseless opinions, to be bigots, red necks, etc. So, in the spirit of open-mindedness, I invite you to watch this 68 minute documentary about a couple who spent a very productive lifetime actually being open-minded enough to learn a great deal of valuable, worthwhile information about shamanism - about which our materialist culture only has disparaging innuendo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNloOTQoRzA
“There is widespread agreement that seven kinds of practices are central & essential for anyone who would live a life to the fullest. These seven practices are: 1) Living ethically, 2) Transforming emotions, 3) Redirecting motivation, 4) Training attention, 5) Refining awareness, 6) Cultivating wisdom, 7) Serving others. These are the seven practices that sages the world over emphasize as central & essential for a full spiritual life. Together they constitute a ‘technology of transcendence’ for awakening our potentials and living life to the fullest. Shamans were the first to develop this art …
Shamanism can be defined as a family of traditions whose practitioners focus on voluntarily entering altered states of consciousness in which they experience themselves or their spirit(s) interacting with other entities, often by traveling to other realms, in order to serve their community.” Roger Walsh MD, PhD. “The World of Shamanism. New Views of an Ancient Tradition.” Llewellyn Publications, 2007.
“The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell, don’t go back to sleep! You have to ask for what you really want, don’t go back to sleep! You know, there are those who go back and forth over the threshold where the two worlds meet, and the door, it’s always open, and it’s round, don’t go back to sleep!”
Jalal al-Din Rumi
“Spiritual practices are methods that can begin to soften our stance toward our self, toward life in general, and to open us to what transcends the habitual. They are invitations to become intimate with the wisdom of silence & stillness.” Dorothy Hunt. “Ending the Search. From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness.” Sounds True, 2018.
“Silence
is the basis and the background of everything. We are an expression of
this primordial silence & stillness. But the habits of our mind
overlay this simple truth & keep us from experiencing ourselves as a
full-spectrum human being." Sharon Landrith
