november
Jack Tworkov
“Notes on My Painting”
1973... I have the illusion of autonomy. I mean that when I am working I shut out as nearly as possible the influence of precendents. I guide myself by eye or intuition, which is perhaps the same thing. It’s not likely I would make a change in a painting just on theoretical grounds. The eye always asks, “Does it look right or does it look wrong?” It often takes some time for the eye to get used to something that was at first disturbing. What looks uncomfortable today may look alright in a day or two ...
... Above all else, I distinguish between painting and pictures ... Where I have to choose between them, I choose painting. If I have to choose between painting and ideas I choose painting; between painting and every form of theater I choose painting.
7/15/75
... The best way to work is to empty out your head, to aim at nothing, to become the medium of a process that is almost outside of one-self. I now use the (word) medium in another sense: I mean the painter is the medium - his desire his imagination lets the process take place: he unblocks the channels through which the process flows.
Yale, 1967
Of all the painters whose influence reaches deep into contemporary art, Matisse is most notable because he was, in his imagery, his color, his subject matter, the most naturally free from the parochial atmosphere of Christian art. I stress the word "naturally" because he seems to reach back to a golden pagan world, as if the Christian era had not existed for him at all. He is at the opposite end of the spectrum of a Rouault. There are no scars of renunciation or of rebellion in his work as one might find it in a poet like Baudelaire or a painter like Soutine. There is no moping about man’s fate, or about eternal mysteries. There is in Matisse a classic equanimity, a simple acceptance of the bread and wine of life without the cross, without the crown of sorrows.
from: “The Extreme of the Middle: The Writings of Jack Tworkov”
Yale University Press, © 2009
october
Tolle On True Art
...there is noise everywhere in America - loud ‘music’ in restaurants - there are some exceptions of course - some music can have a divine function as well - music that comes out of the stillness inside whoever created it or is playing or singing it - it comes out of that state of consciousness and assumes a form ...and yet the form is fresh and new - it has come out of that and the stillness still clings to it - it still emanates that, even if it is form -
and that’s the beauty of all art ...True art - it reflects still that state of consciousness out of which it came - but then there is Futile art - people trying to be clever - what could we do here that would look clever - and then you get ...they call it art but it totally lacks something ...only manipulating old forms - nothing new has come into it - and nothing that can lead you back to the formless, which is the original reason for all art - the sacred - to be a portal and access for it - so when you experience it you experience yourself - the formless reflected, shining through the form - that is what is True art - always there’s more than what you see or hear - it’s not just what you see or hear - always there’s more than that, and that shines through the form - and that is what can happen to you - what is happening to you (in this changing period we live in)-
ultimately, it’s not everybody’s purpose to create works of art - a few humans do, that is their function, partly, in this world - but but much more important is for you to become that work of art - your whole life and your very being becomes transparent ...also that the formless can shine thru - and that happens when you have access to the realm of stillness within yourself - then something emanates thru the form that is nothing to do with the form - it may emanate only as a silent emanation and not assume any form as such - and so that is sometimes the case with so-called ...(there have been very few in the past) ...holy people - in India they’ve always existed - in every generation in India there have always been a few holy men who never did anything! this is very rare for the West, who say, well, what did they create? what did they do? and they never did anything! they just sat there - and the West says, what a useless existence! come on, get a life! get a job!
and some even ...because people, when you’re trapped in form, you misperceive it completely, because all you see there is a useless form, sitting, and you say they are parasites on society! they allow themselves to be fed by other people, they bring them their food - they should work for a living! like myself! and that is when a mind, that knows nothing but form, looks at the form and would totally misperceive it - so a beauty that in India they’ve always recognized that because they haven’t completely lost touch with it - in fact they may have gone, at some point, too far in the opposite direction, so that they lost interest in form, because they went into a feeling mode - now that India’s becoming Western - we read that they’re into computers these days, and cellphones - and that’s fine too, but the question is, where is finding a balance! -I was totally lost in, like most people, completely lost in form and then a shift happened and i lost the balance - i became completely lost in the formless - we can’t really be lost in the formless, it’s just a way of putting it, because the formless is essentially who you are - from a normal perspective it looked as if i had lost it! :) because there was somebody who had a promising career and suddenly he just sits around on park benches! not doing anything anymore! - just being and connecting continuously with sweetness of being - the beauty of life -
excerpts from: “Findhorn Retreat, Eckhart Tolle”, DVD vol 2, start 20 minutes
for more on Real Art click: my art
for a description of this in my transformation click: tk personal
september
to appreciate art look inside yourself
“The man who has honesty, integrity, the love of inquiry, the desire to see beyond, is ready to appreciate good art. He needs no one to give him an art education; he is already qualified. He needs but to see pictures with his active mind, look into them for the things that belong to him, and he will find soon enough in himself an art connoisseur and an art lover of the first order.”
— anil sahufrom comments on maira kalman's delightful blog:
http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/i-lift-my-lamp-beside-the-golden-door/?hp
additionally
this is an excellent start but i would add that ideally one could go even farther and not use one's "active mind" but just look without mental processes, let the art quietly soak in and see what results appear - on the deepest level, art sends messages to the spirit as feelings of peace and happiness -
ted knerr 9/2009
august
attracting what you want:
See yourself living in abundance and you will attract it.
Why isn’t everybody living the life of their dreams?
Here's the problem. Most people are thinking about what they don't want, and they're wondering why it shows up over and over again.
The only reason why people do not have what they want is because they are thinking more about what they don't want than what they do want. Listen to your thoughts and ... the words you are saying. ... there are no mistakes.
An epidemic worse than any plague that humankind has ever seen has been raging for centuries. It is the "don't want" epidemic.
... It begins with you ... become a pioneer of this new thought movement by simply thinking and speaking about what you want.
Rhonda Byrne
page 12: The Secret © 2006 by TS Productions LLC
july
the importance of feeling special
Giving can be a mark of genuine freedom, the willingness to do with less so that someone else may have more. But a person who has learned to put on a mask of giving is in total slavery. To what? To the memory of what he must do to make his parents happy.
Beginning with our desire to please our mothers, we have learned to read like perfect scholars the faintest hints of acceptance and rejection in other people. As we subtly mold ourselves to this outside pattern, it becomes second nature, a kind of false self. A gap is created between true and false emotions, between what I should feel and what I actually feel. The process is subtle but treacherous. If it goes on long enough, one forgets what it is like simply to be, to let happiness and sadness come when they will, to give or keep as the moment dictates. For the false self does not really feel; it calculates.
A life lived truly is the joining of heart and mind. As feelings come, the mind approves and delights in them. It is not difficult to test if someone is leading such a life, because he will readily tell you that the best time he has ever spent is the present. This is a sure sign that the mind is not running ahead of the heart in anticipation or lagging behind in nostalgia. The Chinese poet Wu-Men counsels:
... If your mind is not clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.
If the balance between heart and mind is disturbed, especially if the subtle feeling level has been destroyed, there begins a process we call rationalization. Why am I not happy at this very moment?
"I'm too busy now. I'll be happy when I'm successful.
"Today's not a good day; I'll be happy tomorrow."
"I can't be happy with you, you're not up to my standards.""Others need me so much that I have to be responsible."
"Life is less risky if you are good and measure up to the norm."
"I'll be happy when I get what I want."
In each phrase one hears the victory of the head over the heart. Being happy is no longer immediate; it has become a distant or near prospect, an idea rather than a feeling. In meditation the yogi tries to clear a path for feeling, removing "unnecessary things" from his mind so that he can actually experience the bedrock of inner satisfaction that all the ancient scriptures declare to be our birthright. Whenever a person succeeds in joining head and heart, that is Yoga. The reward of this union is immense: every moment will become the best in the person's life.
A yogi balances the qualities of intellect and feeling, but I often think of him as a protester on behalf of the heart. Surrounded by people (even in India) who pursue achievement without gaining fulfillment, he chooses fulfillment first. He will not let the mind rob him of the subtle feelings of joy that come as freely as leaves blown by the wind and are as easily swept away.
from: Unconditional Life, © 1991, Deepak Chopra, M.D.
june
stroking and isolation
A journal article in the May 1986 issue of Pediatrics appraised the medical benefits of "tactile/kinesthetic stimulation on preterm neonates." Doctors at the University of Miami medical school divided into two groups forty premature babies -- "preterm neonates" in medical jargon who had been delivered after an average of only thirty-one weeks of pregnancy, not quite eight months.
One group was given normal treatment in the hospital's intensive care unit for neonates. The other was scheduled for fifteen minutes of special attention, in which someone reached in through the portholes of their sealed cribs to stroke them and gently wiggle their arms and legs -- this was their "tactile/kinesthetic stimulation," which was repeated three times a day.
The results of such a simple addition to the usual hospital routine were striking. Although fed on demand with the same formula, the stroked babies gained 47 percent more weight every day than the control group; they were more alert and started to act like normally delivered babies sooner. Finally, they left the hospital a week ahead of schedule, allowing the authors of the study to note a savings of $3,000 per infant in the final bill.
Here, the contrast between life and antilife seems almost too obvious to point out. Scientific medicine has reached the stage where it is not respectable to call stroking by its right name -- much less love and affection. Stroking has to go by the Orwellian "tactile/kinesthetic stimulation." It is even more Orwellian to perform controlled experiments to see if babies need loving attention, meted out in doses like cough syrup or iodine.
My deepest emotions, however, are aroused by the group of babies who were not stroked. When I think of them lying alone in their closed Lucite cribs (called "isolettes"), stranded in the weird ICU environment that numbs adult patients and frequently induces psychotic breaks, my heart cries out in protest. Not just premature babies but everyone suffers when our belief in truth falters. We lose the words for basic values, and then the possibility arises that we may lose the values themselves.
from: Unconditional Life, © 1991, Deepak Chopra, M.D.
may
Presence in art
Using the mind to 'look for' something of value in art is a mistake that's unfortunately very common. The mind is always ready to come up with false reasons to justify seeing what it already 'knows' about art, not what new spiritual content is embedded. Therefore nothing truly enlightening is noticed. But the real purpose of art, and what makes it uniquely valuable, is the enlightenment it provides to anyone (artist or viewer) who can let go of all their previous assumptions and allow the presence to shine through.
This opening up need not be a conscious effort. Presence may suddenly be felt in an ‘Aha!’ moment. A moment of unexpected bliss and delight. This is why any of the arts can enlighten even those who are usually in the grip of their egoic mind and believe their false sense of reality is universally true. Even a momentary breakthrough into enlightenment may begin a gradual movement that can be reinforced by further experiences. So art is indispensable to the renewal of the community soul in our materialistic age.
The essential element in every type of art is not its category or history. What's relevant is the presence achieved in each individual work. The lack of this presence is what is truly boring. But the eyes of the ego are incapable of sensing authentic presence (a matter of the soul) so the ego finds it boring and moves on to something more 'interesting'. So the communal ego of the art scene is what's wrong with it and why it deals mostly in irrelevancies. Authentic art is what stands the test of time, although much that's inauthentic hangs around too. It keeps the less enlightened interested. Although this is annoying, I realize it is a necessary part of the growth process to struggle to overcome the ego and I wish us all, including myself, well in the struggle.
© 2009, Ted Knerr
april
Jefferson on the Alien and Sedition Acts
which made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government:
"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, & as necessary in the political world as storm in the physical."
To James Madison, Paris, January 30, 1787
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now & then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere"
To Abigail Adams, Paris, February 22, 1787
"God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all, & always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independent for 11 years. There has been one rebellion [Shays's Rebellion]. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve its liberties, if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure."
To William Stephens Smith, Paris, November 13, 1787
"For my own part I consider the (Acts) as merely an experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear an avowed violation of the constitution."
To Stevens Thomson Mason, Monticello, October 11, 1798
"I discharged every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition law, because I considered & now consider that law to be a nullity as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image; and that it was as much my duty to arrest its execution in every stage, as it would have been to have rescued from the fiery furnace those who should have been cast into it for refusing to worship their image."
To Abigail Adams, Washington, July 22, 1804
John P. Kaminski, The Quotable Jefferson, © 2006 by the Princeton University Press
excerpt from delanceyplace.com 3/3/09
march
fear of dying
I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Rumi, Persian poet and mystic
excerpt from wordsmith.com 2/18/09
february
Human Nature
... an interesting paradox: it is the most psychologically and spiritually mature among us who are the least likely to grow old mentally. Conversely, much (not all - there are biological factors involved) of what we call senility is a fatal end-stage form of psychological and spiritual immaturity. We have a common expression for the senile: they have entered their "second childhood." They become whiny and demanding and manipulative and self-centered. But usually this is not because they have entered their second childhood; usually it is because they have never left their first. It is just that the veneer of adulthood has worn thin.
So it is that psychotherapists, who are in the business of "adult-making," know that many people who look like adults are really emotional children in adult clothing. That is not because their patients are necessarily more immature than the average person. To the contrary, those who genuinely assume the humble but honorable role of patient do so precisely because they are the ones who are being called out of immaturity, who are no longer willing to tolerate being stuck, even though they may not yet see the way out, who are called to transformation.
A mentor of mine, an Irish Jesuit, once said to me in his marvelous brogue, "Ah, Scotty, an adult is a marvelous thing!" He meant, of course, that an adult is a creation to marvel at; there are so relatively few of them. This relative paucity of adults, however, is not a cause for despair. Evidence points to the fact that the number of those who are being called into adulthood has been rapidly increasing over the past two generations. In any case, true adults are those of us who have learned to continually develop and exercise their capacity for transformation. Because of this exercise, progress along the journey of growth often becomes faster and faster the further we proceed on it. For the more we grow, the greater becomes our capacity to be empty - to empty ourselves of the old so that the new may enter and we may thereby be transformed.
So it is our capacity for transformation that makes us, in part, such different people. Lacking a fixed, set nature, possessing the freedom to do the new, the different, the unnatural, it is inevitable that we humans should be molded into or choose multiple paths. What most characterizes the human species, therefore, is its variability. By virtue of different genes, different childhoods, different cultures, and different life experiences (and, perhaps above all, by different choices), we have become transformed or have transformed ourselves in different ways. And it is these profound differences of temperament, character, and culture that make it so difficult for us to live together harmoniously. Yet by exercising this same capacity for transformation, it is possible for us to transcend our own childhoods, our cultures, and our past experience, and hence, without obliterating them, to transcend our differences. Thus what was originally the cause of war can eventually become its cure.
excerpt from The Different Drum © 1987, by M. Scott Peck, M.D., P.C.
january 09
Thoughts on Creating Reality
YOKO ONO: ... People think of fantasy as different from reality, but fantasy is almost like the reality that will come. Everyone creates the fantasies, so everyone creates the reality. If you look at it that way, then George Orwell will create 1984. That's creating the general trend of the male species, I think that kind of fantasy. Like H. G. Wells. People say, "Incredible! What he said is happening!" But actually it is not a prophecy but a form of prayer making it happen.
JOHN LENNON: I agree with that. That's what she's been telling me for years, since we met. What do they call it? Wish fulfillment. The other day I saw an article. [To Yoko] Remember? I showed you. This guy had predicted the Third World War and what world events would lead to it. Now they're all saying, "Oh, look, it's happening just like he said!" Our game, or whatever it is, has always been the same. While that kind of article is actually a commercial for war, eventually creating war, we were doing commercials for peace.
When we did the bed-ins, we told the reporters that and they responded, "Uh-huh, yeah, sure. . . . " But it didn't matter what the reporters said, because our commercial went out nonetheless. It was just like another TV commercial. Everybody puts them down but everybody knows them, listens to them, buys the products. We're doing the same thing. We're putting the word "peace" on the front page of the paper next to all the words about war.
PLAYBOY: With hopes that wishful thinking will create a new reality?
LENNON: That's it. You got it.
PLAYBOY: Which explains Yoko's song "Hard Times Are Over. " I had a hard time understanding it. Hard times are far from over. But say that hard times are over and they will be?
LENNON: Exactly.
ONO: But also notice I'm saying, "Hard times are over for a while." I could simply say, "Hard times are over." But it's a very delicate thing. It's like weaving, which goes in and out slowly. You must do it slowly. Saying "Hard times are over for a while" is sort of a delicate way of wishing. It's not like saying, "I want to live forever. Make sure I live forever. " It's not that sort of arrogance. It might happen, but there is a strong repercussion. So I want to be more delicate, to ride the wave which is yin/yang, breathing in and out. It's not like I'm wishing for something arrogant. It is fair and it can happen.
LENNON: It's the same idea we had for "Give Peace a Chance." It wasn't like "You have to have peace!" Just give it a chance. We ain't giving any gospel here just saying how about this version for a change? We think the future is made in your mind.
ONO: I think it's not so much we, if you meant the two of us, but all of us are part of the future. The future is already within us. I think that the world is going around and is alive because some people really know that whatever they think really happens. It isn't on an esoteric, intellectual level, but I really believe that whatever you think will happen. So we're sort of responsible for our thoughts, even. We all have very negative thoughts and all that, too, and I'm not saying we should repress them, but somehow transform them into something positive.
[smiling and shaking her head]: I don't know why people always project things negative, though you shouldn't be afraid of projecting something negative as long as there is the other side, too. We all do have some garbage in us and we shouldn't be afraid of bringing it out, as long as we end with a positive period. We have some songs on the album that can be considered negatlve but at the same time the fact that we can honestly state those feelings is very positive, and we get a certain atonement through that. There is a negative side, so let it out, sing it, and dispense with it. Singing a negative song does not mean we are setting up a negative fantasy. Instead, we are using the negative to get to the positive.
ONO: ... children who stay without the knowledge of writing for a long time become more psychic...
LENNON: Remain more psychic...
ONO: Oh, right, remain. Remain more psychic. Exactly. So from that point of view the fact that women are not verbal, or this way or that way or whatever women are not that men are, I think our way of thinking and our way of feeling is really helping the world.
LENNON: How about saving the world?
ONO: Saving the world. Right. So it's a pity to change that.
LENNON: But once the change gets out of the crawling stage, there will be a dialogue. The result will be [that] men's intuition or psychicness or whatever word you want to use, which we lost, will be redeveloped. Women's other potentials will be developed, and we will share the burden equally according to each individual's -- what's the word?
ONO: Ability.
LENNON: Right. And each individual leading instead of always delegating that a black person does this and a child does that....
PLAYBOY: John, does it take actually reversing roles with women to really understand?
LENNON: It did for this man. I can't talk for men per se, although I can generalize about it. For me, it took a commitment to make the change.
PLAYBOY: Inspired by books like The First Sex?
LENNON: Yes, through reading. And through living with the Ono here. She doesn't let anything slip by. But deciding to make the change was like deciding "I am going to be a musician" or something. I was always musical, but there was a point when I said, "I am going to learn this instrument. I really want to get into this through this door." So the opportunity was presented to me not just through Yoko but through having a child and through being in the specific situation I was in when I started this, which was after years of fighting with immigration and lawsuits and all these things until there was almost no alternative but to go through this door-and going through the door changed me permanently. So that's what it was. There are many, many reasons why things happen, but there are a couple of good ones right there.
PLAYBOY: How have things gone for you since you made that decision?
LENNON: There are ups and downs like with anyone, but we know what is most important: being together. As she says, "Where two are gathered together . . ."
ONO: When two are gathered together there is nothing you can't do. As a power it is very strong.
PLAYBOY: It's very inspiring, but what about the people without that kind of love and companionship -- all the lonely people?
LENNON [seriously]: Go and get it.
ONO: Yes.
PLAYBOY: It's as simple as that?
LENNON: "Go and get it" is a flip way of saying that if you will be open to the possibility, you --
ONO: -- will receive it.
PLAYBOY: Do you agree that having it makes all the difference in the world?
LENNON: Absolutely. It's the difference between life and death.
ONO: And on a practical level, the power of two people praying, wishing, whatever, is strong.
LENNON: The consciousness is, "Let's see what we shall pray for together. Let's make it stronger by picturing the same image, projecting the same image.” And that is the secret. That is the secret. Because you can be together but projecting different things.
ONO: Double fantasies.
LENNON: Double fantasies at the same time. And you get whoever's fantasy is strongest at the time or you get nothing but mishmash. You're defeated both ways.
ONO: Of course he has different dreams and I have different dreams, too. And that's a weakness. In other words, when you say two people want the same thing, that doesn't happen all the time. So when it happens, it's really powerful. Sometimes two people might be praying but at the same time one could be thinking about something else. Then it doesn't happen. That sort of unified wishing or praying doesn't happen that simply. We go many ways but finally come together and wish that everything is going to be all right.excerpts from The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono, © 1981 by Playboy
Taped in NYC during 3 weeks in September 1980. John died December 8, 1980.
december 08
Delancey Place.com, 11.25.08
In today's excerpt--Reinhold Niebuhr, Missouri-born theologian and cassandric commentator on American culture in the mid-twentieth century, is invoked by a twenty-first century cassandra, Andrew Bacevich, in his commentary The Limits of Power:
"As pastor, teacher, activist, theologian, and prolific author, Niebuhr was a towering presence in American intellectual life from the 1930s through the 1960s. Even today, he deserves recognition as the most clear-eyed of American prophets. Niebuhr speaks to us from the past, offering truths of enormous relevance to the present. As prophet, he warned that what he called 'our dreams of managing history' ... posed a potentially mortal threat to the United States.' ...
"Niebuhr wrote after World War II [that] ... a position of apparent preeminence placed the United States 'under the most grievous temptations to self-adulation.' ...
"Niebuhr once wrote disapprovingly of Americans, their 'culture soft and vulgar, equating joy with happiness and happiness with comfort.' ... In Niebuhr's words, they will cling to 'a culture which makes 'living standards' the final norm of the good life and which regards the perfection of techniques as the guarantor of every cultural as well as every social-moral value.' ...
"Niebuhr [also] wrote, "One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.' ...
" 'The trustful acceptance of false solutions for our perplexing problems,' he wrote a half century ago, 'adds a touch of pathos to the tragedy of our age.' ... For all nations, Niebuhr once observed, 'The desire to gain an immediate selfish advantage always imperils their ultimate interests. If they recognize this fact, they usually realize it too late.' "
Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power, Metropolitan, Copyright 2008 by Andrew J. Bacevich, pp. 8-12, 182.
november 08
Unskillful Parenting is at the root of many of the world's problems -
No one is born a murderer--or a socially conscious citizen. This chapter gives shocking information on how loving, well-meaning, but unskillful parents can be inadvertently responsible for damaging the lives of their children-- and the quality of life for all of us on Earth.
.... fear, guilt, and shame can burn up the spirit of a child before it is three years old. (Some parents)... claim that the child's... self-confidence must be broken, and replaced by strict obedience... If the parent is clever and uses a velvet tone of voice most of the time, children will bear this brutal attack on their true-self "for their own good." In their first years, they will accept the pain needed to develop a false-self. And they will usually even feel love for such a parent who will go to so much trouble to help them grow up "right".
When the true-self is split, the resources of the child's unconscious mind will be focused on avoiding pain. It may choose to appear to conform... or to rebel and stand the hell. No longer can their spirit unfold in joyful, happy, fun-filled, and eventually, socially constructive ways. Their unconscious mind will be distracted from fulfilling its primary functions of creating fun and energy and supporting the immune system.When the child's "will" is broken, the "adult-child" may focus on avoiding "mistakes" that trigger the dreaded fear, guilt, and shame. Resistance to authority is to be avoided--or deviously done in a passive-aggressive way. Instead of engaging their creative resources to look for new solutions to problems, they mainly want to know what the "authorities" say.
Deep within their unconscious mind, there is a continually festering wound... Their energy may be depleted by constantly keeping a lid on the... repressed unconscious resentment, anger, hatred, and violence that were not safe to express in childhood. The result will be pent-up anxiety, depression, illness, and occasionally violence... when their emotional time bombs are triggered by life events.
John Bradshaw in Homecoming helps us understand how dysfunctional parents damage their children:
Any child from a dysfunctional family system will feel emotional deprivation and abandonment. The natural response... is a deep-seated toxic shame that engenders both primal rage and a deep-seated sense of hurt. There is no way you could grieve this in infancy. You had no ally who could be there for you and validate your pain, no one to hold you while you cried your eyes out or raged at the injustice of it all. In order to survive, your primary ego defenses kicked in and your emotional energy was left frozen and unresolved. Your unmet needs have been clamoring to be filled ever since your infancy.We're All Wounded
The old style of parenting that most of us had to survive was ignorant of the life-damaging, false-self programming going into our unconscious mind. All of us have a wounded child inside us. Unless we reclaim the missing parts of our true-self, we cannot become the alive, creative, life-affirming, kind, generous, warm, and loving person that is our true-self birthright. When we murder parts of the souls of our children, they have no choice but to pass on to their children the same abusive ways they painfully experienced as a child. Without retraining how could they parent differently? And "they" are us!
We live today in a dangerous society that is increasing in violence, mass destruction, and ruthlessness. We are rapidly ruining the quality of life for our descendants. Theft, white collar crime, arson, political scandals, and personal violence are increasing. We are plagued with enormous, escalating violence connected with illegal drugs.
Our ancient styles of parenting create a continuous turmoil between our two brains. This book has been written in the hope that it will awaken us to the Armageddon (nuclear war and environmental deterioration) we may face in the 21st century. When we begin to skillfully parent both the conscious and unconscious minds of our children, we can turn our "civilization" around. We will begin to pass on to future generations their true-self birthright of understanding, compassion, and love-instead of the increasing violence, fear, guilt, and shame that blight our lives today.
In the next chapter, we will discuss what our species must quickly do to give our children a future on Planet Earth.
excerpts from: Your Road Map to Lifelong Happiness, © 1995 by Ken Keyes, Jr.
note: since this was written in 1995 there has been some progress in parenting thanks in part to people like ken keyes - tk
october 08
Disfunctional Ego
... you may need to protect yourself or someone else from being harmed by another, but beware of making it your mission to “eradicate evil,” as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are fighting against. Fighting unconsciousness will draw you into unconsciousness yourself. Unconsciousness, dysfunctional egoic behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it. Even if you defeat your opponent, the unconsciousness will simply have moved into you, or the opponent reappears in a new disguise. Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.
These days you frequently hear the expression "the war against" this or that, and whenever I hear it, I know that it is condemned to failure. There is the war against drugs, the war against crime, the war against terrorism, the war against cancer, the war against poverty, and so on. For example, despite the war against crime and drugs, there has been a dramatic increase in crime and drug-related offenses in the past twenty-five years. The prison population of the United States has gone up from just under 300,000 in 1980 to a staggering 2.1 million in 2004. The war against disease has given us, amongst other things, antibiotics. At first, they were spectacularly successful, seemingly enabling us to win the war against infectious diseases. Now, many experts agree that the widespread and indiscriminate use of antibiotics has created a time bomb and that antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, so-called super bugs, will in all likelihood bring about a reemergence of those diseases and possibly epidemics. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, medical treatment is the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in the United States.
Homeopathy, and Chinese medicine are two examples of possible alternative approaches to disease that do not treat the illness as an enemy and therefore do not create new diseases.War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated. There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of consciousness and external reality. When you are in the grip of a mind-set such as "war," your perceptions become extremely selective as well as distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and then misinterpret it. You can imagine what kind of action comes out of such a delusional system. Or instead of imagining it, watch the news on TV tonight.
Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, you no longer misperceive it as somebody's identity. Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don't take it personally anymore. There is no complaining, blaming, accusing, or making wrong. Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that's all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. You do not fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its fuel? Reactivity. The ego thrives on it.
from: A new Earth, © by Eckhart Tolle
september 08
Sokrates on Love
... Sokrates said that truth could not be served as a slave serves a master, who gives no reason for his commands; we should seek her rather, he said, as a true lover seeks knowledge of the beloved, to learn entirely what he is and what he needs, not like base lovers seeking only to know what they can turn to gain. And so, from this, he began to speak of love.
Love, he said, is not a god, for a god cannot want anything; but one of those great spirits who are messengers between gods and men. He does not visit fools, who are content with their low condition, but those who aware of their own need desire, by embracing the beautiful and good, to beget goodness and beauty; for creation is man's immortality and brings him nearest to the gods. All creatures, he said, cherish the children of their flesh; yet the noblest progeny of love are wisdom and glorious deeds, for mortal children die, but these live forever; and these are begotten not of the body but the soul. Mortal passion sinks us in mortal pleasure, so that the wings of the soul grow weak; and such lovers may rise to the good indeed, but not to the very best. But the winged soul rises from love to love, from the beautiful that is born and dies, to beauty in itself eternal; the life itself, of which mortal beauty is only a moving shadow flung upon a wall.
excerpt page 94, The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault, Modern Library © 1956
august 08
Thomas Merton - a chapter from New seeds of contemplation, 1962
THE GENERAL DANCE
The Lord made His world not in order to judge it, not in order merely to dominate it, to make it obey the dictates of an inscrutable and all-powerful will, not in order to find pleasure or displeasure in the way it worked: such was not the reason for creation either of the world or of man.
The Lord made the world and made man in order that He Himself might descend into the world, that He Himself might become Man. When He regarded the world He was about to make He saw His wisdom, as a man-child, "playing in the world, playing before Him at all times." And He reflected, "my delights are to be with the children of men."
The world was not made as a prison for fallen spirits who were rejected by God: this is the gnostic error. The world was made as a temple, a paradise, into which God Himself would descend to dwell familiarly with the spirits He had placed there to tend it for Him.
The early chapters of Genesis (far from being a pseudoscientific account of the way the world was supposed to have come into being) are precisely a poetic and symbolic revelation, a completely true, though not literal, revelation of God's view of the universe and of His intentions for man. The point of these beautiful chapters is that God made the world as a garden in which He himself took delight. He made man and gave to man the task of sharing in His own divine care for created things. He made man in His own image and likeness, as an artist, a worker, homofaber, as the gardener of paradise. He let man decide for himself how created things were to be interpreted, understood and used: for Adam gave the animals their names (God gave them no names at all) and what names Adam gave them, that they were. Thus in his intelligence man, by the act of knowing, imitated something of the creative love of God for creatures. While the love of God, looking upon things, brought them into being, the love of man, looking upon things, reproduced the divine idea, the divine truth, in man's own spirit.
As God creates things by seeing them in His own Logos, man brings truth to life in his mind by the marriage of the divine light, in the being of the object, with the divine light in his own reason. The meeting of these two lights in one mind is truth.
But there is a higher light still, not the light by which man "gives names" and forms concepts, with the aid of the active intelligence, but the dark light in which no names are given, in which God confronts man not through the medium of things, but in His own simplicity. The union of the simple light of God with the simple light of man's spirit, in love, is contemplation. The two simplicities are one. They form, as it were, an emptiness in which there is no addition but rather the taking away of names, of forms, of content, of subject matter, of identities. In this meeting there is not so much a fusion of identities as a disappearance of identities. The Bible speaks of this very simply: "In the breeze after noon God came to walk with Adam in paradise." It is after noon, in the declining light of created day. In the free emptiness of the breeze that blows from where it pleases and goes where no one can estimate, God and man are together, not speaking in words, or syllables or forms. And that was the meaning of creation and of Paradise. But there was more.
The Word of God Himself was the "firstborn of every creature." He "in Whom all things consist" was not only to walk with man in the breeze after noon, but would also become Man, and dwell with man as a brother.
The Lord would not only love His creation as a Father, but He would enter into His creation, emptying Himself, hiding Himself, as if He were not God but a creature. Why should He do this? Because He loved His creatures, and because He could not bear that His creatures should merely adore Him as distant, remote, transcendent and all powerful. This was not the glory that He sought, for if He were merely adored as great, His creatures would in their turn make themselves great and lord it over one another. For where there is a great God, then there are also god-like men, who make themselves kings and masters. And if God were merely a great artist who took pride in His creation, then men too would build cities and palaces and exploit other men for their own glory.
This is the meaning of the myth of Babel, and of the tower builders who would be "as Gods" with their hanging gardens, and with the heads of their enemies hanging in the gardens. For they would point to God and say: "He too is a great builder, and has destroyed all His enemies."
(God said: I do not laugh at my enemies, because I wish to make it impossible for anyone to be my enemy. Therefore I identify myself with my enemy's own secret self.)
So God became man. He took on the weakness and ordinariness of man, and He hid Himself, becoming an anonymous and unimportant man in a very unimportant place. And He refused at any time to Lord it over men, or to be a King, or to be a Leader, or to be a Reformer, or to be in any way Superior to His own creatures. He would be nothing else but their brother, and their counsellor, and their servant, and their friend. He was in no accepted human sense an important person, though since that time we have made Him The Most Important Person. That is another matter: for though it is quite true that He is the King and Lord of all, the conqueror of death, the judge of the living and of the dead, the Pantokrator, yet He is also still the Son of Man, the hidden one, unknown, unremarkable, vulnerable. He can be killed. And when the Son of Man was put to death, He rose again from the dead, and was again with us, for He said: "Kill me, it does not matter."
Having died, He dies no more in His own Person. But because He became man and united man's nature to Himself, and died for man, and rose as man from the dead, He brought it about that the sufferings of all men became His own sufferings; their weakness and defenselessness became His weakness and defenselessness; their insignificance became His. But at the same time His own power, immortality, glory and happiness were given to them and could become theirs. So if the God-Man is still great, it is rather for our sakes than for His own that He wishes to be great and strong. For to Him, strength and weakness, life and death are dualities with which He is not concerned, being above them in His transcendent unity. Yet He would raise us also above these dualities by making us one with Him. For though evil and death can touch the evanescent, outer self in which we dwell estranged from Him, in which we are alienated and exiled in unreality, it can never touch the real inner self in which we have been made one with Him. For in becoming man, God became not only Jesus Christ but also potentially every man and woman that ever existed. In Christ, God became not only "this" man, but also, in a broader and more mystical sense, yet no less truly, "every man."
The presence of God in His world as its Creator depends on no one but Him. His presence in the world as Man depends, in some measure, upon men. Not that we can do anything to change the mystery of the Incarnation in itself. but we are able to decide whether we ourselves, and that portion of the world which is ours, shall become aware of His presence, consecrated by it, and transfigured in its light.
We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real and which lives by a shadowy autonomy for the brief moment of earthly existence, and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. It is this inner self that is taken up into the mystery of Christ, by His love, by the Holy Spirit, so that in secret we live "in Christ."
Yet we must not deal in too negative a fashion even with the "external self." This self is not by nature evil, and the fact that it is unsubstantial is not to be imputed to it as some kind of crime. It is afflicted with metaphysical poverty: but all that is poor deserves mercy. So too our outward self, as long as it does not isolate itself in a lie, it is blessed by the mercy and the love of Christ. Appearances are to be accepted for what they are. The accidents of a poor and transient existence have, nevertheless, an ineffable value. They can be transparent media in which we apprehend the presence of God in the world. It is possible to speak of the exterior self as a mask: to do so is not necessarily to reprove it. The mask that each man wears may well be a disguise not only for that man's inner self but for God, wandering as a pilgrim and exile in His own creation.
And indeed, if Christ became Man, it is because He wanted to be any man and every man. If we believe in the Incarnation of the Son of God, there should be no one on earth in whom we are not prepared to see, in mystery, the presence of Christ.
What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as "play" is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove ofjunipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.
from Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master, The Essential Writings, edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham, Paulist Press, © 1992
Thomas Merton (31 January 1915 – 10 December 1968) was one of the most influential Catholic writers of the 20th century. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, in the state of Kentucky, Merton was the author of numerous acclaimed works of spirituality, a prolific poet, social activist and student of comparative religion. He wrote more than 60 books, scores of essays and reviews, and is the subject of several biographies. Merton was a keen proponent of inter-religious understanding, engaging in spiritual dialogues with the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh and D.T. Suzuki. His life and career were suddenly cut short at the age of 53, when he was electrocuted stepping out of his bath.
july 08
Delancey Place.com, 7.8.08
In today's excerpt - evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers (b. 1943) argues that, consciously or subconsciously, we keep our rationales for our actions and beliefs carefully arrayed near the surface-ready as necessary for our defense:
"The reason the generic human arguing style feels so effortless is that, by the time the arguing starts, the work has already been done. Robert Trivers has written about the periodic disputes ... that are often part of a close relationship, whether a friendship or a marriage. The argument, he notes, 'may appear to burst forth spontaneously, with little or no preview, yet as it rolls along, two whole landscapes of information appear to lie already organized, waiting only for the lightning of anger to show themselves.'
"The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that its owner is in the right--and thus a machine for convincing its owner of the same thing. The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than virtue.
"Long before Trivers wrote about the selfish uses of self-deception, social scientists had gathered supporting data. In one experiment, people with strongly held positions on a social issue were exposed to four arguments, two pro and two con. On each side of the issue, the arguments were of two sorts: (a) quite plausible, and (b) implausible to the point of absurdity. People tended to remember the plausible arguments that supported their views and the implausible arguments that didn't, the net effect being to drive home the correctness of their position and the silliness of the alternative.
"One might think that, being rational creatures, we would eventually grow suspicious of our uncannily long string of rectitude, our unerring knack for being on the right side of any dispute over credit, or money, or manners, or anything else. Nope. Time and again--whether arguing over a place in line, a promotion we never got, or which car hit which--we are shocked at the blindness of people who dare suggest that our outrage isn't warranted."
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, Vintage, Copyright 1994 by Robert Wright, pp. 280- 281.
june 08
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul
And nothing, not God is greater to one than one's self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral dressed in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe,
And any man or woman shall stand cool and supercilious before a million universes.And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come, forever and ever.
april 08
authentic art
what makes a work of art authentic? enabling it to possess our deepest feelings - even though at first, and maybe for a long time, we were only curious about it and unable to make a true connection - perhaps caught up in our conditioned, busy thoughts about it and how it fit into the art scene and what it meant - but at some point we may have caught sight of it as a presence and our experience changed radically - from interest on a mental level to being gripped by its mysterious power - the power to connect us to the center of our being, our consciousness, to a universal communion with our fellow beings and the world -
it's impossible to translate the source of this presence into words - what components of the artwork combine to create it? does the artist have to be a genius, with a huge talent, intellect, schooling, a master of the medium? too often the artist may have all these qualities and be considered a genius by the public but is unable to produce works of presence - in fact if the artist becomes proud of being a genius the mysterious connection that allows presence to enter the art may be lost - it requires a grateful spirit of humility and a commitment to service to attain this connection - in these moments of enlightenment the artist is a channel for forces that create on a higher level than otherwise possible - and this enlightenment shines out of the work as presence or quality - producing in us a state of enlightenment, if only for a moment, and freeing our obsessive identification with the story in our heads we believe is reality - this is why authentic art is of such value to the world - not because of aesthetics or history or being radically different, but because of its power to transform us -
inauthentic art has the opposite effect - re-enforcing our identification with our false ideas of who we are - all the thoughts that our ego thrives on - that swell our self-importance and celebrate our specialness and separation from others - this pseudo-art prides itself on how clever it is - how 'cutting edge' -and on its 'brand name' that provides an identity-enhancer for those who buy it - to do this it must be expensive so others can't afford it, and therefore is 'exclusive' - a product of our materialistic age and our new academy of the shallow - that have dictated that presence and quality are now unacceptable words for contemporary art - this is because authentic art exposes pseudo-art as a pretentious sham - enlightenment dissolves the false self like water did the wicked witch -
to achieve authenticity the creative process must be conducted within the realm of spirit and without recourse to control - when 'in the zone' the artist (in any field, including sports, etc) must avoid distractions or attempts to force the result toward any desired result - the artist must avoid making judgments and accept unconditionally what is produced - even after the work is finished the artist must remain a humble 'bystander' seeking to understand what has been produced - this understanding may take a long time and requires continuance of humility until a breakthrough arrives - impatience results in the artist becoming judgmental, interfering with the creation and degrading it - authentic creations may be so 'far out', even to their creator, that patience is necessary - for the creator as well as the viewer - avoid consideration of how the work fits into one's previous output - authentic art has no marketing strategy involved in its creation -
ted knerr
april 2008
march
Courtesy
George Washington knew the importance of showing courtesy. This helped him unite and lead a raw country that had little in the way of good manners.
"A set of precepts that meant much to Washington and that has drawn the attention of historians, though perhaps not enough, was one that he had copied out by hand at sixteen, 'The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and in Conversation' -- one hundred and ten in all -- which were based on a set composed by French Jesuits in 1595. ...
"The focus of the set was established in the very first rule. 'Every action done in company ought to be done with some sign of respect to those that are present.' The 'Rules of Civility' are 'virtues of humanity' -- guidelines for dealing with others, based on attending to their situations and sensibilities. ... 'When you see a crime punished, you may be inwardly pleased; but show pity to the offending sufferer' (rule #23). '... treat artificers and persons of low degree with affability and courtesy, without arrogance' (rule #36). 'When a man does all he can, though it succeed not well, blame not him that did it' (rule #44). ... Washington also bought books of politeness as an adult, and instances of his courtesy, or comments on it, are legion. ...
"[Today] we worry about our authenticity -- about whether our presentation reflects who we 'really' are. Eighteenth-century Americans attended more to the outside story and were less avid to drive putty knives between the outer and inner man. 'Character' ... was a role one played until one became it. ...
"Courtesy and reputation -- the medium and stimulus of Washington's morality -- operate on and through other people. Courtesy is how you treat them, reputation is what they think of you. ... Courtesy and reputation made it possible for Washington to say to his countrymen, we, and to command a response."
Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father, Free Press, Copyright 1996 by Richard Brookhiser, pp. 127-132, 136.
february
A spirited mind never stops within itself;
it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength;
it has impulses beyond its powers of achievement.
If it does not advance and press forward
and stand at bay and clash, it is only half alive.
Its pursuits are boundless and without form;
its food is wonder, the chase, ambiguity.
-- Montaigne
contributed by bill hollis - an old friend
visit his website
~~~
Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue...as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.
-- Viktor Frankl
january 2008
Tao Te Ching - chapter thirty-eight
The highest kind of man or woman has innate goodness,
And that is what he or she rules with.
The lesser person brags about how good they are
And isn't much good, I can tell you.
A Man or Woman of Te rules by wu-wei
Doing nothing for themself or of themself.
The lesser person acts from their ego
And what they want is gratification.
A person who rules with compassion
Acts through it - and no one even realizes.
A legal person acts judiciously
But they are still serving their own ends.
And the rigid person uses laws
And if people don't like it, force.
If the true Tao is lost
then morality takes its place.
If that fails, we have 'conscience'.
When that fades, we get 'justice'.
When that disappears, we have the status quo.
Confusion reigns.
No one knows what's going on.
Forecasts and prophecies abound -
and they are merely a gloss on the Tao,
they are the root of all twisted guidance.
So the sage only looks at what is really real.
He or she doesn't just look at the surface -
But blows away the dust and drinks the water ...
They don't just go for the flower
But also for the roots and the fruit.
Blow away the dust, now:
Come to the living water.note: converted to gender-neutral words for yin/yang balance
december 2007
I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.
Charles Dickens
Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings, all the snow in Alaska won't make it "white".Bing Crosby
A good conscience is a continual Christmas.Benjamin Franklin
Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas.Dale Evans
T'was the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.Clement Clarke Moore
november
Compassion and the Individual
Tenzin Gyatso; The Fourteenth Dalai Lama
The purpose of life
ONE GREAT QUESTION underlies our experience, whether we think about it consciously or not: What is the purpose of life? I have considered this question and would like to share my thoughts in the hope that they may be of direct, practical benefit to those who read them.
I believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. From the moment of birth, every human being wants happiness and does not want suffering. Neither social conditioning nor education nor ideology affect this. From the very core of our being, we simply desire contentment. I don’t know whether the universe, with its countless galaxies, stars and planets, has a deeper meaning or not, but at the very least, it is clear that we humans who live on this earth face the task of making a happy life for ourselves. Therefore, it is important to discover what will bring about the greatest degree of happiness.How to achieve happiness
For a start, it is possible to divide every kind of happiness and suffering into two main categories: mental and physical. Of the two, it is the mind that exerts the greatest influence on most of us. Unless we are either gravely ill or deprived of basic necessities, our physical condition plays a secondary role in life. If the body is content, we virtually ignore it. The mind, however, registers every event, no matter how small. Hence we should devote our most serious efforts to bringing about mental peace.
From my own limited experience I have found that the greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion.
The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater our own sense of well-being becomes. Cultivating a close, warm-hearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. This helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the ultimate source of success in life.
As long as we live in this world we are bound to encounter problems. If, at such times, we lose hope and become discouraged, we diminish our ability to face difficulties. If, on the other hand, we remember that it is not just ourselves but every one who has to undergo suffering, this more realistic perspective will increase our determination and capacity to overcome troubles. Indeed, with this attitude, each new obstacle can be seen as yet another valuable opportunity to improve our mind!
Thus we can strive gradually to become more compassionate, that is we can develop both genuine sympathy for others’ suffering and the will to help remove their pain. As a result, our own serenity and inner strength will increase.
Our need for love
Ultimately, the reason why love and compassion bring the greatest happiness is simply that our nature cherishes them above all else. The need for love lies at the very foundation of human existence. It results from the profound interdependence we all share with one another. However capable and skillful an individual may be, left alone, he or she will not survive. However vigorous and independent one may feel during the most prosperous periods of life, when one is sick or very young or very old, one must depend on the support of others.
Inter-dependence, of course, is a fundamental law of nature. Not only higher forms of life but also many of the smallest insects are social beings who, without any religion, law or education, survive by mutual cooperation based on an innate recognition of their interconnectedness. The most subtle level of material phenomena is also governed by interdependence. All phenomena from the planet we inhabit to the oceans, clouds, forests and flowers that surround us, arise in dependence upon subtle patterns of energy. Without their proper interaction, they dissolve and decay.
It is because our own human existence is so dependent on the help of others that our need for love lies at the very foundation of our existence. Therefore we need a genuine sense of responsibility and a sincere concern for the welfare of others.
We have to consider what we human beings really are. We are not like machine-made objects. If we are merely mechanical entities, then machines themselves could alleviate all of our sufferings and fulfill our needs.continue the message here
october
EGO: the current state of humanity
When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by it. Then a depth returns to your life and things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say, identified with. That disentanglement is what this book is about.
The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, creativity, and aliveness. They are concealed in the still gap between the perception and the interpretation. Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They have their own beauty but do we need to become imprisoned in them?
The word "I" embodies the greatest error and the deepest truth, depending on how it is used. It is the most frequently used word (and) the most misleading. "I" embodies a primordial error, an illusory sense of identity – the ego. This is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space and time but also into human nature, referred to as "an optical illusion of consciousness." That illusory self becomes the basis for all further misinterpretations of your life which becomes a reflection of the original illusion.
The good news is: If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality. In the seeing of who you are not, the reality of who you are emerges by itself. What is the nature of this illusory self?
What you usually refer to when you say "I" is not who you are. The infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of "I" in your mind.
When a child learns that a sound is his or her name, the child begins to equate a word, which in the mind becomes a thought of who he or she is. Soon they learn the magic word "I" and equate it with their name. Then other thoughts merge with the I-thought – me and mine to designate things that are somehow part of "I." This is identification with objects, which means investing things with a sense of self, thereby deriving an identity from them. When "my" toy breaks intense suffering arises. Not because of its value – the child will soon lose interest in it, and it will be replaced – but because of the thought of "mine." It became part of the child's sense of self.
And as the child grows, the original I-thought attracts other thoughts to itself. Thoughts of its gender, possessions, body, nationality, race, religion, etc. Also roles like mother, accumulated knowledge or opinions, likes and dislikes, things that happened to "me" in the past, that further define my sense of self as "me and my story"... ultimately no more than thoughts... invested with a sense of self. This mental construct is what you normally refer to when you say "I." To be more precise: usually it is not you who speaks when you think “I” but some aspect of the mental construct, the ego.
Most people are completely identified with the incessant stream of mind, of compulsive thinking, most of it repetitive and pointless. There is no ”I” apart from their thought processes and emotions. This is the meaning of being spiritually unconscious. When told that there is a voice in their head that never stops speaking, they say, “What voice?” or angrily deny it, which of course is the voice, the unobserved mind. It could be looked upon as an entity that has possessed them.
excerpted from ‘a new earth’, pp. 26-30, ©2005 by eckhart tolle -
september
Fault-Finders and Appreciators
There are two kinds of seeing in the world, two modes of looking at everything. The first is the fault-finding mode. When we’re in this mode, all we look for are the flaws, sins and imperfections of people, situations and the world. Our eyes are tuned to the “what’s-wrong frequency.” The second is appreciation mode. In this mode we see flaws and imperfections but we’re not obsessed with them; we’re looking for something to appreciate and keeping our eyes tuned to the “what’s-good frequency.”
I’ve had friends of both persuasions and I can tell you the appreciators are a lot easier to be around than the fault-finders. Fault-finders are generally not too happy — self-satisfied, often, but seldom truly happy. And joy doesn’t exactly follow them around either.
Appreciators, on the other hand, are generally happy — they feed on appreciation, after all — and joy follows them around like the scent of lilacs.
We’ve all met both kind of seers in the world. We deal with them every day in countless different roles. Think about your experience with these two kinds of people for a minute and ask yourself this question: what kind of friend do you want to be to yourself?
We know that fault-finding is toxic to the people who do it and those to whom it’s done. We know, just as well, that appreciation is nourishing to both the people who practice it and the people it’s directed at. So if we practice either one of these within ourselves, we get a double dose of the fruit. If we choose fault-finding, we make ourselves sick by being a fault-finder and being a victim of a fault-finder.
If we choose appreciation, we heal ourselves by its practice and by virtue of being appreciated. To appreciate is simply to be aware of, to value and be thankful for. Not that difficult, really. Practicing it, however, is a choice and habit. Make the choice and follow it through and the habit will follow.
Here’s what I’ve found as I’ve tried to practice this: If I’m in a funk, depressed, angry, wallowing, it’s a red flag telling me I’ve shifted to fault-finding mode. These are always connected just as appreciation and contentment are connected. Indeed, appreciation is key to contentment, to well-being.
Deciding how we want to look at ourselves — as appreciators or fault-finders — is the same as deciding to be well or ill. We need to be a friend to ourselves, and a good friend, not one who’s constantly pointing out flaws we already know about. It’s something I’ve been striving to accomplish for years and still struggle with daily. I guess I’m making progress though, because now, instead of pointing out to myself daily that I still haven’t mastered it, I get up most days with an appreciation for my effort and tenacity, if nothing else. I’m still here and so are you. That’s worth appreciating.
© 2007 by Troy Chapman
august
Ancient Wisdom
If you want to know God, look inside your heart.
You can keep giving because there is no end to your wealth.
You act without expectation,
Succeed without taking credit,
And know that you’re equal to everyone else.
Nothing in the world
Is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
Nothing can surpass it.
The soft overcomes the hard,
The gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
But few can put it into practice.
So remain serene in the midst of sorrow,
And keep your heart always filled
With the loving kindness of God.
july
Generosity
Renouncingany religiosity,
dancing on the grave
of my sour hostility,
Questing for treasure
at the roots of the tree,
gratefully praising
the passion within me.
Is an openness to my
new serenity,
and a connection
beckoning to me
that all I truly feel at last
is generosity.
© 2007 by scott bush
june
A depolarizing view -
What I Think About Evolution
By Sam Brownback, Op-Ed contributor, New York Times 5/31/07
In our sound-bite political culture, it is unrealistic to expect that every complicated issue will be addressed with the nuance or subtlety it deserves. So I suppose I should not have been surprised earlier this month when, during the first Republican presidential debate, the candidates on stage were asked to raise their hands if they did not “believe” in evolution. As one of those who raised his hand, I think it would be helpful to discuss the issue in a bit more detail and with the seriousness it demands.
The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days. But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason.
The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.
People of faith should be rational, using the gift of reason that God has given us. At the same time, reason itself cannot answer every question. Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see more clearly, not less. Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love. Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.
The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.
There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today. Many questions raised by evolutionary theory — like whether man has a unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random mutations — go beyond empirical science and are better addressed in the realm of philosophy or theology.
The most passionate advocates of evolutionary theory offer a vision of man as a kind of historical accident. That being the case, many believers — myself included — reject arguments for evolution that dismiss the possibility of divine causality.
Ultimately, on the question of the origins of the universe, I am happy to let the facts speak for themselves. There are aspects of evolutionary biology that reveal a great deal about the nature of the world, like the small changes that take place within a species. Yet I believe, as do many biologists and people of faith, that the process of creation — and indeed life today — is sustained by the hand of God in a manner known fully only to him. It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in excluding the possibility of design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm of empirical science.
Biologists will have their debates about man’s origins, but people of faith can also bring a great deal to the table. For this reason, I oppose the exclusion of either faith or reason from the discussion. An attempt by either to seek a monopoly on these questions would be wrong-headed. As science continues to explore the details of man’s origin, faith can do its part as well. The fundamental question for me is how these theories affect our understanding of the human person.
The unique and special place of each and every person in creation is a fundamental truth that must be safeguarded. I am wary of any theory that seeks to undermine man’s essential dignity and unique and intended place in the cosmos. I firmly believe that each human person, regardless of circumstance, was willed into being and made for a purpose.
While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.
Without hesitation, I am happy to raise my hand to that.
Sam Brownback is a Republican senator from Kansas.
may
why is the world in the shape it’s in?
Of all the questions man has asked of God, this is the one asked most often. From the beginning of time man has asked it ...
If God is all-perfect and all-loving, why would God create pestilence and famine, war and disease, earthquakes and tornados and hurricanes and all manner of natural disaster, deep personal disappointment, and worldwide calamity?
The answer to this question lies in the deeper mystery of the universe and the highest meaning of life.
I do not show My goodness by creating only what you call perfection all around you. I do not demonstrate My love by not allowing you to demonstrate yours.
... you cannot demonstrate love until you can demonstrate not loving. A thing cannot exist without its opposite, except in the world of the absolute.
The world is the way it is because it could not be any other way and still exist in the gross realm of physicality. Earthquakes and hurricanes, floods and tornados, and other of what you call natural disasters are but movements of the elements from one polarity to the other. The whole birth-death cycle is part of this movement. These are the rhythms of life, and everything in gross reality is subject to them, because life itself is a rhythm. It is a wave, a vibration, a pulsation at the very heart of the All That Is.
Illness and disease are opposites of health and wellness, and are made manifest in your reality at your behest. You cannot be ill without at some level causing yourself to be, and you can be made well again in a moment by simply deciding to be. Deep personal disappointments are responses which are chosen, and worldwide calamities are the result of worldwide consciousness.
Your question infers that I choose these events, that it is My will and desire they should occur. Yet I do not will these things into being, I merely observe you doing so. And I do nothing to stop them, because to do so would be to thwart your will. That, in turn, would deprive you of the God experience, which is the experience you and I have chosen together. [We are all One.]
Do not condemn, therefore, all that you would call bad in the world. Rather, ask yourself, what about this have you judged bad, and what, if anything, you wish to do to change it.
Inquire within, rather than without, asking: “What part of my Self do I wish to experience now in the face of this calamity? What aspect of being do I choose to call forth?” For all of life exists as a tool of your own creation, and all of its events merely present themselves as opportunites for you to decide, and be, Who You Are.
This is true for every soul, and so you see there are no victims in the universe, only creators.
from pages 29, 32 Conversations with God - book 1, © 1995 by Neale Donald Walsch
On GovernmentThere are very few governments which do not deliberately mislead their people. Deception is part of government, for few people would choose to be governed the way they are governed--few would choose to be governed at all--unless government convinced them that its decisions were for their own good.
This is a hard convincing, for most people plainly see the foolishness in government. So Government must lie to at least try to hold the people's loyalty. Government is the perfect portrayer of the accuracy of the axiom that if you lie big enough, long enough, the lie becomes the "truth".
People in power must never let the public know how they came to power--nor all that they've done to stay there.
Truth and politics do not and cannot mix because politics is the art of saying only what needs to said--and saying it in just the right way--in order to achieve a desired end.
Not all politics are bad, but the art of politics is a practical art. It recognizes with great candor the psychology of most people. It simply notices that most people operate out of self-interest. So politics is the way that people of power seek to convince you that their self-interest is your own.
Governments understand self-interest. That is why governments are very good at designing programs which give things to people.
from Conversations with God, book 2, © 1997 by Neale Donald Walsch
The Secret
A concise introduction. I hope you’ll get the book by Rhonda Byrne, 2006, and use this wonderful method. tk
Everything in your life, including the things you’re complaining about, you've attracted. You will hate to hear this and will deny it. It’s one of the hardest concepts to get, but once you've accepted it, it's life transforming.
The Law of Attraction says that Like attracts Like. If you think bad thoughts, you'll bring bad results into your life.
For instance: Many people have a very negative image of money. 'Money is the root of all evil', etc, and these thoughts will block money from coming to you. So think abundance rather than lack and it will begin to flow to you. And the same is true in other areas like health, relationships, success, aging, creativity, etc. There are no limits on these things except those you've created. So start now creating them the way you want them in your life. Give yourself a break. Change your ideas that are not serving you as well as you deserve.
The process begins with writing down all your wishes and getting them clear in your mind. This must be in a positive form such as: 'I am so grateful now that _________ '. And put in each of your wishes. There are no limits. e.g. I have perfect health. I have abundant wealth. I have a loving and devoted partner. etc., etc.
Step two is to Believe that it's already yours and act that way. Have unwavering faith. Then get on with your life. Allow the universe to do it for you. It's not your job to worry about how. If you think you have to do it you show doubt that the Universe will do it for you and thereby negate your faith in the process. Think, I Know it's on the way.
The final step is to Receive. Feel good about it now. Be happy. Intellectual belief is not enough, you have to Feel it. Your positive energy is an indispensable element in the process.
That's it. The Universe likes speed. Don't delay. Don't second guess. Don't doubt. When the opportunity is there, the impulse, the intuitive nudge from within is there, act. That’s your job, and that’s all you have to do.
Trust your instincts. It's the Universe inspiring you. You will attract everything you require. Pay attention to what you're attracted to. You’re a magnet. Like a car driving through the night, you need to see only the next 200 feet ahead, and the following 200 feet will unfold after that.
Gratitude - Absolutely the way to bring more into your life. Appreciate what you already have.
Joseph Campbell said, 'Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.'
What you do with The Secret is up to you. Whatever you choose is right. The power is all yours.
celebrating sensuality
I was walking to the hobby-craft building the other day. The day was bright and cold and the wind whipped through my thin coat. I had my eyes on the ground, hands in my pockets, and was just plodding along thinking of this distance between me and my destination as something to be endured.
Then, in a moment of grace, I asked myself a question: How many pine trees line this path — and why don't I know that? I've walked it too many times to count, yet when I've looked in the direction of these trees I've just looked through them. I lifted my eyes now and actually tried to see.
There are five in the front row along the road, young jack pines I guess. The last one in the row is unusual, a pine with two trunks like a maple. I've only ever seen (or noticed) single trunk pines. Actually seeing these trees was a treat and I felt more alive as I continued on.
We tend to think of sensuality entirely in sexual terms and also as something opposed to spirituality, or at least somehow in a different direction. But "sensual," in one sense, just means "of the senses," and it's very compatible with spirituality. It's about being in our bodies more fully and enjoying the connection we have with the world through our senses. This kind of sensuality awakens me and feeds me spiritually. I think of it as "luxuriating" — simply enjoying whatever my senses are feeding me as I go about my daily business. It's the simplest thing.
I'm lying on my bunk right now and the pressure of my body on the (admittedly hard) mattress is enjoyable. So is the hard plastic feel of the pen in my hand and the sight of blue words appearing on white paper. It feels good.
Yet most of the time I approach this kind of being as a guilty pleasure, as if I shouldn't be "wasting time" enjoying myself in these simple ways. After all, my life is lagging way behind what I wish it was, there's war, and at least one or two genocides going on, corporations are taking over the world, babies are dying, addicts are overdosing, evildoers are plotting... Whoa! There I am, back in my head again, busily turning life into ideas, memories, worries, and other intellectual property. I'm experiencing the same things but taking no joy in them.
This is pure puritanical pathology, but deeply ingrained in me and our whole society. The idea that sensuality and physicality are somehow mere vehicles to be endured so my intellect can live in this inhospitable environment — a sort of spacesuit for my ego. I say it again (because it feels good on my tongue but also because it's true): pure puritanical pathology. Another part of me is wiser. It likes being alive; it likes flirting; it likes eating olives (which I haven't had in years); it likes breathing, moving, and being in this body. Why should I apologize for that? Why should anyone?
We shouldn't. So this month I want to celebrate the blessings of our senses and the art of luxuriating in the bounty they present us every minute of our lives. Being for the sake of being — and enjoying it. Or at least not rejecting or intellectualizing it. Just experiencing it directly and without judgment.
by Troy Chapman
© The Lifeful Way 2007
it is in contempt that the root of racism lies
I was sickened to read about the killing of TyRon Mark Lewis by Officer James K. Knight in St. Petersburg (FL, 1998). As a Black man with relatives in Ft. Lauderdale, I want your readers to know what I am grateful to have learned from Eli Siegel, the great educator, historian, and founder of Aesthetic Realism: the cause of racism is contempt. He defined contempt as the “disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.”
Contempt is as ordinary as a family saying, “We are better than that family next door.” On a larger scale, contempt has people of one race or religion look down on people different from them.
“As soon as you have contempt,” Mr. Siegel stated, “as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fulness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.” This explains both young Lewis’s and officer Knight's actions that fall night.
In our unjust economy, young people feel they have no future and that no one cares, not even their parents who are too busy working two or three jobs. So teenagers can wrongly feel justified having contempt — such as stealing cars.
And, police officers, who want to do good, also feel they “own” a neighborhood they should be protecting.
I learned that there are two kinds of anger — one just, which makes for pride, the other unjust, which makes for shame. Anger at injustice, Aesthetic Realism teaches, opposes contempt and comes from the deepest desire in every person: to respect the world honestly. The civil rights movement arose from a just anger. I've had a proud anger at the prejudice and economic hardship which Blacks had to endure and with the murders of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy.
However, I used my anger at injustice to feel I had a right to be angry towards all people. I attended a mostly White college in upper New York State. I was angry at how I was seen and I regret that I used my anger to have contempt for White students and felt they were not good enough to befriend me. I also felt superior to Black students because I felt they were not street smart as I was. I relished my anger but, inside, I felt cold and was cruel to people. Thank God I later learned from Aesthetic Realism that it was my own contempt that made me lonely, bitter and deeply unsure of myself.
Studying Aesthetic Realism, my contempt and unjust anger are criticized and my respect for the world is encouraged. Because I see the feelings of people of all races as deep as my own, and I see that I am more like them than different, I am kinder and truly proud.
This is headline news! There will be no rest, only a hiding of volatile feelings, until contempt as the cause of racism is studied. Community leaders and police commissions can evaluate race relations until Kingdom come but, if contempt is not understood, these vicious acts will continue.
With beautiful prose, Eli Siegel stated, “It will be found that Black and White Man have the same goodnesses, the same temptations, and can be criticized in the same way. The skin may be different, but the aorta is quite the same.” When America studies this we will have safe and proud lives!
from the Miami Times, 5/5/99, by Allan Michael
see his photographs:.....click
further resources:
Martin Luther King / The King Center.....click
Anti-Prejudice Pledge / Anti-Defamation League.....click
Aesthetic Realism defeats racism..... click
Pelagus literature
more quotes ...... 2000...... 2001...... 2002...... 2003...... 2004...... 2005...... 2006
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