Being is Whole

“For the benefit of young students we have established the Temenos Academy Young Scholars scheme, a special free membership of the Academy for young people. Applicants are asked to submit a paper that emulates the first five of the ‘Ten Basic Principles that inspire the work of Temenos’, which are:

Acknowledgement of Divinity
Love of Wisdom, as the essential basis of civilization
Spiritual vision as the life-breath of civilization
Maintenance of the revered traditions of mankind
Understanding of tradition as continual renewal
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The Vision of Unity And its Retrieval
By Dylan Esler
(Dylan was a young person when this was written. He is now a scholar and translator of Tibetan Buddhist texts.)

It has become commonly accepted as fact that science and religion are divided by what seems to be an unbridgeable gulf, the one dealing with matter and the other with the invisible world
of the spirit.

However, this assumption rests on a conception which is a fundamentally distorted view of reality. For reality is not to be split into distinct entities, which can be neatly separated from
each other, as the Cartesian worldview would have us believe. What we call ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are by no means discreet entities, but different facets of one whole, or, in other words,
different levels of vibrations in the endless energetic fluctuations of Being.

‘Being’ is a whole. Any attempt to divide this whole is a more or less conscious violation of truth (truth as the correct, namely holistic, perception of reality), which stems from the
inability to accept reality as it is. From this results existential insecurity, which manifests in frantic attempts to construct conceptual models. Through these we try to capture glimpses of an essentially dynamic process into rigid positions that we can analyse according to our prejudices.

It is not, however, that these models are necessarily wrong. The problem lies in mistaking these models for truth itself, when in reality they only provide us with a particular glimpse of truth. Thus we become enslaved by what should be but useful tools. As the Buddhist parable goes, after crossing the river we carry the raft which took us to the other shore on our shoulders. We end up being burdened by what might have originally been a useful asset! In this way we begin to worship the models which we created to understand reality, thereby becoming idolaters, instead of using them as windows open onto reality…

In this state of affairs, it may be asked, where does religion stand? Does it still have any relevance in the modern world? …

Religion, in its essence, is that aspect of human endeavour that seeks to relate man back to his sacred origin. And what is this sacred origin? It is essentially a unity, what we have hinted to
above by speaking of ‘Being’, which is the ground and source for all more limited expressions of being. In other words, any being exists solely by virtue of Being, which at once embraces all while transcending the finiteness of particular beings. And every being takes part in and expresses on the individual plane the unlimited and transcendent qualities of Being, or Being-as-such…

What has here been termed Being, or Being-as-such, has received, as the history of religion tells us, numerous names. It has been termed the Godhead, God, Allah, Yahweh, the
Brahman, the Atman, the non-Atman, the Dao, the Buddha-nature, and there are many, many more such names. The reason the term Being has here been chosen, is that it is neutral as regards religious doctrine and does not oblige us to incorporate into our discussion exotic terms or religiously loaded concepts. Moreover, the word Being itself expresses a very fundamental truth, namely that the world’s and man’s nature is to be before it is to have and to do…

Now, it may be objected, especially by those who are familiar with the Study of Religions, that the equation of the above terms, taken from very different religious contexts, with what I here have named Being, is questionable and indeed presumptuous. Who am I to say that what the Christians mean by God, the Hindus by Brahman, the Buddhists by the Tathagatagarbha and the Daoists by the Dao, is one and the same Reality? How can this be upheld when we know from history how many of these various groups slaughtered each other brutally, or at least debated violently, each with the hope of establishing its God or Absolute as the only and supreme?..

Each mystical path, at the same time, seeks to provide a means whereby Ultimate Reality can be approached, experienced and embodied by the practitioner, and allows for differing levels
of participation in that Reality, depending on the temperament and commitment of the individual. In providing such a means of approach, which includes linguistic descriptions of the path itself as well as (to some extent) of Ultimate Reality, no one tradition can provide a full account for the simple reason that what it seeks to describe is truly ineffable. Each religious tradition has a particular genius for approaching Reality from a particular angle, for opening a particular perspective onto Truth, while developing, on the human plane, particular traits of saintliness.

All religious traditions are bridges from the human to the transcendent. As such they incorporate features of human limitations together with aspects of transcendent infinity.
It is quite illogical to expect anything else. To expect them to each provide the same approach to Ultimate Reality would be to want a relative phenomenon to take on an absolute character. If there were only one MAN, there would be but a single PATH. But as things are, humanity is diverse, and corresponding to these different temperaments are various religious traditions; within these, corresponding to various aptitudes and levels of commitment are differing paths,
ranging from the exoteric to the esoteric modes of approach; and these again open up to ever deeper and subtler dimensions of Reality.

At the same time, the transcendent dimension on which each mystical tradition opens is also present at the outset and becomes manifest in the mystical vision of Ultimate Reality at the path’s culmination, as well as in the ever unfolding embodiment of holiness in the practitioner’s life. Here, we arrive at our second objection, namely that the view that each
religious tradition produces its own fantasy, apart from being illogical, also contradicts evidence. That evidence is none other than sacred art and holiness. None who has spent but a few moments of contemplation in any of the great religions’ sanctuaries, or who has heard inspired sacred music or stood before visionary art, can fail to notice that here something of the transcendent is transpiring in the world of matter.

And, for those who are privileged to so witness, there is no more moving embodiment of transcendence than in the saint, the human being whom spiritual practice has made holy, and whose very flesh has become translucent...

Now, such things are not wonders, nor are they coincidences, nor accidents. For such inspired art to be created, or for such saints to be alive in both past and present, there must be a cause, and that cause is none other than the recognition of Ultimate Reality; sacred art and holiness could not exist if they did not stem from Truth. If the various religious traditions were but the fantastic edifices of idle dreamers, they would never in a thousand years have been able to inspire transcendent art or saintliness. Such beauty cannot stem from a lie. And it is irrelevant to object that religious traditions have also produced and still continue to instigate much hatred and violence. “The corruption of the best is the worst.” This corruption, moreover, is accidental, not essential, that is, it stems from the limitedness of man.

This dimension of a religion is of course an important one, and in all traditional societies across the world it was incumbent on religion to regulate social interaction between human beings and to ensure that the greatest possible number of people could participate, at least passively and indirectly, in the particular religion’s hue of grace…

Every mystic is to some extent conditioned by his or her upbringing, religion, and even mystical path. In particular, although various mystics experience the same Ultimate Reality,
they speak of it according to the terms in which they have been taught to think of it. For instance, some will talk of the unification of Atman with Brahman, others of the extinguishing of the lover in the Beloved, others of the shining forth of the Buddha-nature. There will obviously be differences in their way of understanding this experience. But, it should be remembered, the mystical experience is so overwhelming that it is truly impossible to describe it fully in any terms. That experience is totally unconditioned by and beyond the limits of language.

Nonetheless, the mystic is also a human being, and it is through understanding that he reflects on the mystical experience and through language that he seeks to express it to others.
However much the mystical experience is beyond conditioning, the mystic as a person is not: his understanding of the experience in its aftermath, and the language he uses to point it out to others are conditioned, even if the mystic be unaware of it.

Therefore, the mystic’s very vocation is one that embodies paradox, because he seeks to fathom the unfathomable and express the inexpressible; and yet he knows, beyond the least trace of doubt, that what he has experienced is infinitely more real and valuable than what is known to the common man. So, in his very person the mystic unifies the conditioned with the unconditioned, the limitedness of being human with the infinity of his realization. Especially if he is an accomplished mystic, he is not content with a one-off experience which has no relation whatsoever with his ordinary life. The difference between the ordinary and the accomplished mystic is that for the latter his experience is totally integrated to his life, and his every breath is imbued with its power. He becomes an instrument leading others to the same accomplishment, or at least to benefit from the grace which naturally surrounds anyone in constant attunement to Ultimate Reality.

Having said this much about religion and mysticism, if we turn to science, we will come to realize that while for long it rejected the entire religious worldview, it is now coming to appreciate that any understanding of the world which is true must take account of the whole of reality and be holistic. Thus, surprisingly to some, many of the foremost scientists are
coming to very similar conclusions about reality that the world’s great mystics reached centuries before. It is an irony that, as pointed out by Nasr,

[The] scientistic philosophers are much more dogmatic than many scientists in denying any metaphysical significance to the discoveries of science. But the physicists themselves, or at least many of the outstanding figures among them, have often been the first to deny scientism and even the so-called scientific method.

For centuries man has endeavoured to free himself from the gravity of matter, transcending his given condition through elevation of the spirit. In relatively recent times (that is, since the Copernican revolution), we have sought to transcend that gravity not through elevating ourselves above matter, but by penetrating it to ever greater depths through understanding and
mastery of its laws. But by penetrating the atom scientists have come to realize that every atom contains the information-structures of galaxies, so that the smallest microcosm reflects
the macrocosm as a whole. The universe reflects itself endlessly like a gallery of mirrors, and we, as observers, are also mirrors interdependently linked to all other mirrors, whether animate or inanimate. And what all this reflects is Reality, in its unfathomable mystery and endlessly enchanting beauty.”

Escaping & Finding

"The Bible IS NOT a Christian book although many believe it is.

The Bible is a mystical book from which many cultural influences have been adopted and grafted in including Egyptian and Sumerian myths, writings and beliefs that far predate the supposed Hebrew influences.

The following is from my book, Escaping Christianity ~ Finding Christ:

What is it that is turning so many people away from Christianity? In large part the judgment displayed through the dogma of elitism and intolerance has contributed to making fundamentalism unpalatable.

Take it from me, I was one of them. I feel I have earned the right to be hardest on my tribe. I beat and thumped the Bible on many a head, controlled and manipulated consciousness through the use of fear-based theology.

For some, dogma is learned quite young; like me having been programmed from adolescence. Being indoctrinated at a young age one must fight for the return of their intellectual property rights.

Coming off of fundamentalism is like coming off of bad medicine; while you may think it cures your ills, it is ultimately addicting with church leaders and parishioners offering their dope of dogma to anyone who will make themselves subject to fear.

I realize these words may seem harsh for some and not harsh enough for others. That statement will most likely offend those still within the system. Some of those who have escaped fundamentalism know exactly what I am talking about. My goal is not to offend but to bring light on this "system" that claims it has the only pass into heaven.

No, the Bible is not a Christian book and never was. Jesus did not come to start the Christian religion (and never did!!!). Christian churches are built on Pagan sites and have adopted Pagan rituals from altars to robes and yet Christianity claims that Pagans are evil.

It seems to me that the finger that points toward others in judgment now has to give an account for itself. They are not defenders of the faith because their faith is not identifiable with its namesake.

Take a good hard look—Christian fundamentalism is a mess. This system of belief has become too small, too restrictive for today’s blossoming consciousness. It is in need of the new wineskin that Jesus spoke of."

-- Barbara Symons

Naturalness

"Recognise the naturalness that you are - pure, all pervasive, space like, ever-expressing, spontaneous presence-awareness, with no reference point (self nature) with any substance or independent existence. Failing to recognise naturalness (the unity of appearance and emptiness, space and its content), delusion happens and there is a grasping of or fixation on appearance - me and the other, a seeming duality.

Without that fixation there is freedom as naturalness, delusion dissolves and evenness (non-duality) remains - the natural state, simply this, nothing else. Naturally remaining as naturalness (equanimity) is the natural (effortless) meditation of no one to meditate and nothing to meditate on. No trying to get or trying to avoid, just effortless being which is always already so. Recognise this again and again."

- Sailor Bob Adamson

Live exclusively for others

"A ‘mara naai’ as they call it in Tamil or teddy cat (an animal which generally climbs on trees and destroys the fruits during nights) somehow got into a room in the house and thrust its head into a small copper pot containing jaggery. The animal was not able to pull out its head and was running here and there in the room all through the right with its head stuck in the pot.

People in the house and neighbours were aroused by the noise and thought that some thief was at his job. But, the incessant noise continued even till morning hours, and incessant noise continued even till morning houses, and some bravados armed with sticks opened the door of the room and found the greedy animal. It was then roped and tied to a pillar. Some experienced men were brought and after being engaged in a tug-of-war, they ultimately succeeded in removing the vessel from the head of the animal. The animal was struggling for life. It was at last taken to some spot and set free, I presume. The first experience of my life was this dreadful demonstration born of greed causing all out neighbours to spend an anxious and sleepless night...

In attempting to judge the objective world with this rod of selfishness and superficiality of mine which has rightly earned for me the reputation of being a clever Swami, I am prone to come to the conclusion that there lives none without predominantly selfish motives.

But with years rolling on, an impression, that too a superficial one true to my nature, is dawning upon me that there breathe on this globe some souls firmly rooted in morals and ethics who live exclusively for others voluntarily forsaking not only their material gains and comforts but also their own sadhana towards their spiritual improvements..."

-- His Holiness Jagadguru
Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswathi Mahaswamigal
Sri Sankaracharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham

Free

Do you want to know what my secret is?
You see, I don’t mind what happens.
- J. Krisnamurti

"To stand alone is to be uncorrupted, innocent, free of all tradition, of dogma, of opinion, of what another says, and so on. Such a mind does not seek because there is nothing to seek; being free, such a mind is completely still without a want, without movement. But this state is not to be achieved; it isn’t a thing that you buy through discipline; it doesn’t come into being by giving up sex, or practicing a certain yoga. It comes into being only when there is understanding of the ways of the self, the ‘me’, which shows itself through the conscious mind in everyday activity, and also in the unconscious. What matters is to understand for oneself, not through the direction of others, the total content of consciousness, which is conditioned, which is the result of society, of religion, of various impacts, impressions, memories—to understand all that conditioning and be free of it. But there is no “how” to be free. If you ask how to be free, you are not listening."

-- Krishnamurti

Heaven's Gate

I give you a golden string Only wind it into a ball It will lead you in at Heaven's Gate built in Jerusalem's wall. ~ William Blake

“Many Christians and Christian sects, which ought logically to cherish this world as the approved work of God and thus as a good gift and a privilege, regard it instead as a trap or prison from which the soul must escape by repudiating its earthly life and accepting a formula for “salvation.” This sort of spirituality is little more than materialism’s second face, for it abandons the world and our economic life in it to the materialists. This curious alliance is opposed, and perhaps is opposable only, by the vision of the completeness of reality that is said to underlie the traditional cultures and religions of the world.

This vision—attested by scholars and authorities far more learned than I am, though certainly confirmed by my own experience and reading—sees the “outer” world as continuous with and dependent upon “inner” realities such as love, reverence, goodness, and beauty. These realities, though they have belonged always to the actual lives of most people, the materialists dismiss as intangible and therefore unreal. The religious dualists see them perhaps as real enough, while, like the materialists, seeing them also as irrelevant to the natural life and human economy of this world.

The consequent estrangement of body and soul, Heaven and Earth, time and eternity, leading to the further estrangements of utility and beauty, work and pleasure, and all the rest of the divisions and divorces of our mechanical civilization, is owing to the loss of the ancient unifying vision by which we have been enabled to see in the world the eternal light that everywhere informs it. This vision, this immemorial knowledge and way of knowing, survives only marginally in the modern world. Inherently opposed as it is to the radical simplifications of the materialist explainers and devisers, it is assuredly the losing (though never the lost) side. And yet its diminishment or depreciation is just as assuredly consequential in the lives of people and the world.”

~ Kathleen Jessie Raine (1908 –2003) was a British poet, critic and scholar, writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founding member of the Temenos Academy.

Turner of Mind & Clay

“When objective experience – including any conventional religious or spiritual practices that involve directing attention towards some more or less subtle object, such as an external god, a teacher, a mantra or the breath – has been exhausted as a possible means by which peace and happiness may be obtained, only one possibility remains: to turn the mind around upon itself and investigate its essential nature.”

~ Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware
"Rupert Spira (born 1960) is an international teacher of the Advaita Vedanta direct path method of spiritual self enquiry, and an English studio potter. He first studied pottery with Henry Hammond and later with Michael Cardew at Wenford Bridge Pottery from 1980 to 1982.

Spira's early pottery work was reminiscent of these early influences being in a very traditional Bernard Leach style. This work is mostly practical in nature taking the form of teapots, functional vases and other culinary ware.

He later moved to set up his own pottery in Shropshire where his style changed from a functional to a more minimalistic style. While he continues to make and sell functional pottery he is now known for his more recent studio pottery. His best and most recognizable work contains poems, both self written and by Kathleen Raine the celebrated British poet. The poems are either scratched into the glaze in the sgraffito style or written as embossed letters either in a square block or in a single line across the surface of the vessel. These works vary in size from prayer bowls only a few centimetres across through to huge open bowls 50 cm or more in diameter. He is also known for his cylinders which are often made as part of a series and while beautiful in their own right were made to be exhibited as a group. These also vary in scale from a few centimetres in height through to the largest being a meter or more high. He works mainly in simple white, off white and black minimalistic colors but he does also occasionally make deep redly glazed bowls and very distinguishable yellow tea sets.

His work can be found in many galleries throughout Britain including the V&A and Sainsbury collection as well as in many private collections worldwide.

Spira is also a spiritual teacher and writer in the branch of nonduality (Advaita, in Sanskrit), exploring the nature of experience in his essays and texts. He has published several books (see below), and a few DVDs with interviews. He holds regular meetings and retreats in the UK, Europe and the US.

One of his talks about nonduality is included in the video game The Witness."
~ Wikipedia

Addicted to Cleverness

“You’re probably too clever to ‘repose in God’, or to pick up some dusty book where the poetry creaks with loathing for women, or gays or someone. Maybe if quantum physics could come up with some force, or web, or string or something that tethers the mystery to something solid, something measurable, you’d think again but until then there’s nothing but an empty grave and a blank tombstone, chisel poised. So no one’s going to blame you if you perch on a carousel of destructive relationships and unfulfilling work, whirling round, never still, never truly looking within, never really going home…

The 12 Step program, which has saved my life, will change the life of anyone who embraces it. I have seen it work many times with people with addiction issues of every hue: drugs, sex, relationships, food, work, smoking, alcohol, technology, pornography, hoarding, gambling, everything. Because the instinct that drives the compulsion is universal. It is an attempt to solve the problem of disconnection, alienation and tepid despair, because the problem is ultimately ‘being human’ in an environment that is curiously ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that entails. We are all on the addiction scale.

Those of us born with clear-cut and blatant substance addiction are in many ways the lucky ones. We alcoholics and junkies have minimized our mystery to tiny cycles of craving and fulfilment. Our pattern is easier to observe and therefore, with commitment and help, easier to resolve. If your personal pattern happens to be the addiction equivalent of the ‘long form con-trick’, as opposed to a ‘short grift’, it can take ages to know just what your problem is. If you’re addicted to bad relationships, bad food, abusive bosses, conflict or pornography, it can take a lifetime to spot the problem, and apparently a lifetime is all we have…

What makes me qualified for such a task? A task which, in a different lexicon, might be called achieving peace, mindfulness, personal fulfilment, or yet more grandly ‘enlightenment’, ‘nirvana’ or ‘Christ-consciousness’? Certainly not some personal, ethical high ground. My authority comes not from a steep and certain mountain top of po-faced righteousness. This manual for Self-Realization comes not from the mountain but from the mud. Being human is a ‘me too’ business. We are all in the mud together. My qualification is that I am more addicted, more narcissistic, more driven by lust and the need for power and recognition. Every single pleasure-giving thing that’s come my way from the cradle in Grays to the Hollywood chaise longue has been grabbed and guzzled and fondled and f**ked and smoked and sucked and for what? Ashes…

I now believe addiction to be a calling. A blessing. I now hear a rhythm behind the beat, behind the scratching discordant sound of my constant thinking. A true pulse behind the bombastic thud of the ego drum. There, in the silence, the offbeat presence of another thing. What could it be, this other consciousness? Just the sublime accompaniment to my growing nails, pumping heart and rushing blood? These physical and discernible bodily phenomena, do they have a counterpart in a world less obvious? Are we addicts like the animals that evidently pre-emptively fled the oncoming tsunami, sensing some foreboding? Are we attuned to prickling signals that demand anaesthesia? What is the pain? What is it? What does it want?...

Well actually you already are a religious nut, if you take ‘religious nut’ to mean that you live your life adhering to a set of beliefs and principles and observances concerning conduct. Most people in the West belong to a popular cult of individualism and materialism where the pursuit of our trivial, petty desires is a daily ritual. If you’re reading this specifically because you have addiction issues, whether to substances or behaviors, you are in an advanced sect with highly particular and devotional practices, sometimes so ingrained they don’t even have to be explicitly ‘thought’, they are intensely and unthinkingly believed. ‘If I find Miss Right, all will be well.’ ‘If I can get my rocks off, or yawn down a pint of ice cream, I’ll be okay.’ What this program asks us to consider is the possibility of hope. Hope that a different perspective is possible. Hope that there is a different way.

To undertake this process, the pursuit of happiness, or contentment or presence or freedom, we have to believe that such a thing is obtainable. Through this, the rather grim and at times, let’s face it, bloody glamorous research of my life I’ve inadvertently happened upon some incredible people and ideas that, one day at a time, sometimes one moment at a time, lift me out of the glistening filth and into the presence of something ancient and timeless which I believe, no matter what your problem, will give you access to The Solution…

12 Steps says the word God as freely and as frequently as an ecclesiastical Tourette’s sufferer. I sat in chilly rooms in the British countryside all chastened and desperate, looking at these bleak edicts on the wall, thinking, ‘maybe for you, but not for me’. Curiously, later examination of these principles revealed that self-centred, egotistical thinking is the defining attribute of the addictive condition. Self-centredness is a tricky thing; it encompasses more than just vanity. It’s not just Fonzie, looking at himself in self-satisfied wonder and flexing his little tush, no.

Here is a more opaque example of self-centredness. If your partner is a bit wayward, you know selfish or difficult and you cast yourself as the downtrodden carer, pacing behind them going, ‘I don’t know what they’d do without me’, that is another form of self-centredness. You are making yourself and your feelings about the situation the ontological (steady!) centre of the world. Is there a different way that you could be you? Especially as we all know, don’t we, the you being you and me being me is the absolute alpha and omega of the world today, flick on a TV, glance at your feed, it’s all about me, me, me, the perfect product, holiday, hair tonic, telephone provider for my unique self. Well that’s just fine and dandy, but I don’t really know what ‘me’ is or what ‘me’ wants and now I’m beginning to question if thinking about ‘me’ all day is doing ‘me’ any good.

The first time I saw the Steps, I thought, ‘Hmm, a bit religious, a bit pious, a bit ambitious’. There was the ‘Christiany’ feel. Look at the third step, ‘turn our will and our lives over to the care of God’ – steady on old boy, that just sounds like a cosy version of ISIS. But now I know that you could be a devout Muslim with a sugar problem, an atheist Jew who watches too much porn, a Hindu who can’t stay faithful, or a humanist who shops more than they can afford to and this program will effortlessly form around your flaws and attributes, placing you on the path you were always intended to walk, making you, quite simply, the best version of yourself it is possible to be. In my case, as you will see, this includes a good many flaws, some odd thoughts and occasional behavioral outbursts…”

~ "Russell Brand has been a junkie, an alcoholic, a bulimic and an attention addict (admittedly, that one hasn’t exactly been stamped out) — it’s quite the feat that he’s still here. Right now Mr. Brand is promoting his latest book, “Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions,” a thought-provoking explication of the 12-step program run through the Mixmaster of Mr. Brand’s verbal pyrotechnics. He believes the 12 steps have saved him. He wants them to save you too.

Mr. Brand’s thinking about addiction goes something like this: At the root of all addiction is narcissism, a constant thrumming attention to self. If you are self-absorbed you are suffering, and if you suffer you seek ways to stop it — through drugs, alcohol, sex, maybe Facebook “likes.”

“We are trying to solve inner problems externally — whatever it is in our lives that is missing,” he said. “Eckhart Tolle said it perfectly: ‘Addiction starts with pain and ends with pain.’ Here’s the point. Drugs, booze, sex … It’s not the particular addiction that matters as much as the fact that your life is out of control because of it." ~ NY Times

Nothing but an Open Heart

“The more mature and open we become, the more we naturally want to see every possible illusion within our system, and this gives us humility. We recognize that we are not an “awakened person,” and that we are not “special.” We basically get to see that we are essentially nothing! One of Amma’s most well-known quotes is, “When we become a zero, then we can become a hero.” Feel free to interpret this for yourself. I have never heard of Amma calling herself enlightened; and I have also never seen her call anyone else enlightened!

From her perspective, there is no-one who is enlightened; there is only the one true reality that is everywhere and always. As we mature, we recognize that the spiritual process is about our systems being opened. And the degree that we are opened is relative to our willingness to be absolutely nobody. It’s another safety mechanism within the design of evolution…

There is a beautiful, organic process that takes place when we continue choose, to know what's True, before anything else. Of course, by choosing to know what is True, we are allowing a new perspective to take place in our being. And even though this is what we are looking for, maybe even hoping for, there is another deeper, unseen event taking place each time we choose.

When we choose Truth, our heart-our spiritual hearts-which is our true nature in our body, is opened. Each time we allow ourselves to choose what is True, we are in essence choosing our own heart. And this is vital. Our hearts need to open, to get really large to absorb the habits and tendencies of our old perceptions.

And when we completely fall in Love with what is True, we are, again, falling in Love with our own heart. It may not feel like it ~ in fact, we may at first deny our own heart's divinity, yet, as our heart is opened it begins to reveal itself. And each time we fall in Love with Truth, our own heart responds, by opening.
Some of you may know what I am speaking of. Maybe you have experienced some rather large heart openings. It can be quite wonderful, and powerful. What is happening, each time the heart is opened up, again and again, is one of the most essential parts of our unfoldment.

Because it is this opened heart, that brings the mind back home.

We all know how tenacious and distracted the mind can be. And also how full of ideas, projections, judgements and fears it harbors. That's a lot of stuff.

But what if the heart were able to accommodate the mind and all its luggage. What if there is, within the open heart, an innate capacity to bring the mind home. Like a wild dog on a leash. And when the dog-mind gets too tired, the leash shortens a bit. And then, one day, the dog-mind recognizes that the leash is the security that it’s been looking for, and starts to return home to the heart with just a little tug on the leash. And then there comes a point, when there might not need to be a tug, or a leash, because the mind has found its true abode.”

~ Joi Sharp is a disciple of Amma, or Mata Amritanandamayi. With Amma's blessing, She began teaching in 2006. Joi encourages people to begin to recognize the key role that our Nervous System plays in the actual embodiment of Consciousness. She loves to use every little human experience to open up the Nervous System, in order that our transformation goes beyond needing a certain perception or experience. She emphasizes our capacity to receive the Infinite Reality deeply into our bodies, so that our bodies no longer experience themselves as separate. Rather our entire beings become informed by the flow of Life, thus feeling supported by life. We live and act for the benefit of all.

Adya & Fr. Keating

So thrilled to see Adyashanti and Father Thomas Keating sitting down together!

Religious Crisis

"I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church—in fact, of our church—and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous. The word “safety” brings us to the real meaning of the word “religious” as we use it. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.

What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen; nothing had changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances.

Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too. My friends began to drink and smoke, and embarked—at first avid, then groaning—on their sexual careers. Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices. Like the strangers on the Avenue, they became, in the twinkling of an eye, unutterably different and fantastically present.

Owing to the way I had been raised, the abrupt discomfort that all this aroused in me and the fact that I had no idea what my voice or my mind or my body was likely to do next caused me to consider myself one of the most depraved people on earth. Matters were not helped by the fact that these holy girls seemed rather to enjoy my terrified lapses, our grim, guilty, tormented experiments, which were at once as chill and joyless as the Russian steppes and hotter, by far, than all the fires of Hell...

As I look back, everything I did seems curiously deliberate, though it certainly did not seem deliberate then. For example, I did not join the church of which my father was a member and in which he preached. My best friend in school, who attended a different church, had already “surrendered his life to the Lord,” and he was very anxious about my soul’s salvation. (I wasn’t, but any human attention was better than none.)

One Saturday afternoon, he took me to his church. There were no services that day, and the church was empty, except for some women cleaning and some other women praying. My friend took me into the back room to meet his pastor—a woman. There she sat, in her robes, smiling, an extremely proud and handsome woman, with Africa, Europe, and the America of the American Indian blended in her face. She was perhaps forty-five or fifty at this time, and in our world she was a very celebrated woman.

My friend was about to introduce me when she looked at me and smiled and said, “Whose little boy are you? “ Now this, unbelievably, was precisely the phrase used by pimps and racketeers on the Avenue when they suggested, both humorously and intensely, that I “hang out” with them. Perhaps part of the terror they had caused me to feel came from the fact that I unquestionably wanted to be somebody’s little boy. I was so frightened, and at the mercy of so many conundrums, that inevitably, that summer, someone would have taken me over; one doesn’t, in Harlem, long remain standing on any auction block. It was my good luck—perhaps—that I found myself in the church racket instead of some other, and surrendered to a spiritual seduction long before I came to any carnal knowledge. For when the pastor asked me, with that marvellous smile, “Whose little boy are you?” my heart replied at once, “Why, yours.”

The summer wore on, and things got worse. I became more guilty and more frightened, and kept all this bottled up inside me, and naturally, inescapably, one night, when this woman had finished preaching, everything came roaring, screaming, crying out, and I fell to the ground before the altar. It was the strangest sensation I have ever had in my life—up to that time, or since. I had not known that it was going to happen, or that it could happen. One moment I was on my feet, singing and clapping and, at the same time, working out in my head the plot of a play I was working on then; the next moment, with no transition, no sensation of falling, I was on my back, with the lights beating down into my face and all the vertical saints above me.

I did not know what I was doing down so low, or how I had got there. And the anguish that filled me cannot be described. It moved in me like one of those floods that devastate counties, tearing everything down, tearing children from their parents and lovers from each other, and making everything an unrecognizable waste. All I really remember is the pain, the unspeakable pain; it was as though I were yelling up to Heaven and Heaven would not hear me. And if Heaven would not hear me, if love could not descend from Heaven—to wash me, to make me clean—then utter disaster was my portion. Yes, it does indeed mean something—something unspeakable—to be born, in a white country, an Anglo-Teutonic, antisexual country, black. You very soon, without knowing it, give up all hope of communion.

Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away. And the universe is simply a sounding drum; there is no way, no way whatever, so it seemed then and has sometimes seemed since, to get through a life, to love your wife and children, or your friends, or your mother and father, or to be loved. The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs—as who has not?—of human love, God’s love alone is left.

But God—and I felt this even then, so long ago, on that tremendous floor, unwillingly—is white. And if His love was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were we, the blacks, cast down so far? Why? In spite of all I said thereafter, I found no answer on the floor—not that answer, anyway—and I was on the floor all night. Over me, to bring me “through,” the saints sang and rejoiced and prayed. And in the morning, when they raised me, they told me that I was “saved...”

When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful.

And when I sat at Elijah’s table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God’s—or Allah’s—vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then? I could also see that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance inevitable—a vengeance that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that we recognize when we say, “Whatever goes up must come down.” And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: _God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!"

-- James Baldwin, Letter From A Region Of My Mind

Nobody Knows

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers. - James Baldwin

"Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace."

"One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found - and it is found in terrible places. … For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock.

Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."
-- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Bhakta Or Jnani

"Once Ramakrishna Paramhansa called Swami Vivekananda and told him, ‘What do you think you fancy yourself as an intellectual? No, you are actually a bhakta. Outside you have the veneer of a jnani but you are actually a bhakta.’ He said, ‘Actually I am the reverse. People think I am a bhakta but I am a jnani.’

So try to be both, if you can’t be both – be one. Be a bhakta more than anything else because through bhakti all jnana will dawn. Here was a person, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, who could barely sign his name and when touched ‘that’ people from all around came to sit around him and partake of it. That is very, very important."

-- Sri M

Come Later Lad

Let us find out who I am? Which means where do I stand? What is the position that I start?
- Sri M

"All of a sudden, a middle aged man who was supposedly normal and was sitting beside us, stood up and started behaving strangely. He swung his body in a circular motion and began to utter ‘huum huum’just like the people on the other side. Then he stopped, turned to me and said mockingly, “You! You! You found me out, you tried to burn me but I won’t go.”Jumping to the front, he ran towards the door of the enclosure where the tomb was. There he hit his head on the door step and shrieked, “Okay, I will go. That boy found me. Bibi, I will go. Don’t burn me. I am burning.”With that, he again let out a hideous howl and fainted.

For the first time, I was filled with fear and loathing. It was too much for my grandmother. “Saabjaan,”she whispered to her brother, “Let’s get out of here now.”We walked out of the place with my grandmother holding my hand tightly as if she was afraid something might snatch me away. Coming out, we saw another strange sight.

A naked old man with grey hair and a black scrawny beard, was racing through the sands and approaching the place where we stood. He was smiling to himself, sometimes breaking into peals of laughter and gesticulating at the sky with his hands. His head kept turning up and down in a jerky motion and his body was covered in sand. White sand on a dark body!

Anyone would have mistaken him for one of the possessed but for the fact that a number of people both men and women were walking behind him respectfully with folded hands, trying to keep pace with him. He went past us, stopped abruptly, came back to where we were and halted right in front of me. For a minute, his face turned serious, almost grave. Blood shot eyes searched my face. Then he laughed again as if I looked funny and said in Tamil, “Seri seri po po apparaon wa da”(okay, go now, come later lad) and was off again. I was not frightened this time for some reason. Of course, I took him to be a mad man. I did not know then that the line between madness and religious ecstasy was extremely thin.

My mother’s uncle told me later that he was called Kaladi Mastan and was a man of great powers. He was inebriated by the love of God and was not fully conscious of the outside world. “Some holy men are like that,”he said, as if that explained everything, but I understood nothing. “But why is he naked?”I asked. “I don’t know,”said my uncle. “Every now and then someone wraps a new dhoti around his waist and within minutes he gives it away to some poor beggar and is naked once more.”

That I understood. I hated wearing clothes especially in summer and would have loved to give away my clothes to a poor beggar and walk around free and naked. But I knew I could not do that for I was expected to be civilized and proper. The words he had uttered, “Okay, come later lad,”came true years later."

-- Sri M, from The Autobiography of A Himalayan Yogi

Humbling Honor

In an avalanche of selfies, it is indeed heartening that there are some great beacons of LIVING LIGHT on the FACEBOOK too. These messengers of Masters are surely like the Pillar to the Sky of Social Media which might fall on us anytime & gobble us up in its whirlpool.
I want to express salutations of gratitude to the following wonderful FACEBOOK FRIENDS who are lighting up our days with their inspirational messages..
Srirama Jayam Sir
Ramaswami Subramony Sir
Ramaswami Subramony
Murali Krishna Nagisetty
Ananda Anaam
Lakshmi Menon Bhatia Akka
Siddhartha Bordoloi
Dilip Sharma
Samuel Long
Nandana T Pai
Kripa Ananda
Dirk Gysels
Shwaasa Guru
Girish Kumar
Nanak Saran Singh Sir
Manjunath Sullolli
Manjunath Sullolli Sir
Mohammad Mahamad Fakeer
C B Mohan Kumar Sir
Laxmikant Lakshmikanth Nukula
C.s. Anand Sir
Aneesh Bodh
Umashankar Goud
Mahesh T Ramadass
Niranjan Yss Srf
Jaan E Maan
Jaan Samjha Karo
Partha Mitra
Sanjeev Narayan
Prashant Parikh
Narendra Thakkar
Ajit Kaikini Buoyancee
Ajith Menon
Ravindra ananda
Koushik Jois
Mitrananda

and many more....

Beloved angels of good word.... your every posting is worth a million likes ....
Thanks a million for making this world a beautiful place....

Om Sri M Gurubhyo Namaha

Rascal

"You are innocent, but within your heart there is a spoiled rotten rascal who is totally out of control. This rascal is always causing you pain, so many forms of pain. You can’t predict the next problem it will make you face. Because of this rascal and its demands, you always have to be on your toes, anxious, struggling, tense. It bosses you around, making you work yourself to exhaustion, like a slave driver. If you don’t obey it and meet its needs, it will throw a tantrum. This may all sound like exaggeration, but when we sit with our self-importance long enough and get to know it well, we can recognize it for the rascal it is...

Once you’ve seen your own mind in this way, the next step is to put yourself in the shoes of another living being. It could be anyone you think of, from the president of the United States to an ant. The president seems all-important, and the ant seems insignificant, but from their point of view, is their essential moment-to-moment experience any different from yours? The president may be pondering whether to bomb a foreign country, while the ant is merely transporting a bread crumb, but both continually experience the basic grasping and rejection, the never-ending desire and fear that underlies the experience of all beings.

When we spend time thinking along these lines, we inevitably will conclude that we and all other living beings are equal in our desire for happiness. We and all other beings are equal in our longing to be free from suffering. Once we acknowledge this to be true, it becomes much harder to separate ourselves and our loved ones from the limitless numbers of sentient beings in the universe. What would we accomplish by focusing on such an extremely tiny group? And what would we have to lose by expanding our care to all beings? Say you are in a refugee camp and find yourself in the position of being able to help every refugee there get to a safer, more stable place. You have this chance, but instead you just run away with your immediate family. Wouldn’t that be small-minded? Wouldn’t you be failing to meet your potential?"

-- Dzigar Kongtrul, The Intelligent Heart

Social Creatures

We are social creatures endowed with instincts for compassion and kindness... Our welfare is intertwined.

"Thanks to thousands of ordinary British citizens who contributed to Save the Children, more than a thousand Tibetan children like me found a home to grow up in safely in the early 1960s, while our parents struggled to adjust as refugees in a land where they did not speak the language or know the customs. Thanks to individuals such as Dr. Valentina Stache-Rosen and Zemey Rinpoche, I found a purpose as I struggled through my very unconventional education. In my professional life, serving the Dalai Lama so closely, I have had the privilege of witnessing, from the front seat as it were, what it means for someone to live a life with complete conviction in this defining human quality we call compassion.

Today I am a husband and a father of two teenage daughters. I live in a North American city and lead a life very different from the one I was used to in a Tibetan monastery in India. On a daily basis, I struggle like most people with the typical challenges of a fast-paced modern life—balancing work, family, and relationships, paying the bills—while maintaining sanity, a sense of proportion, and basic optimism. Remarkably, it’s in the teachings of my own Tibetan Buddhist tradition that I find many of the tools that help me navigate the challenges of everyday living in the contemporary world...

Broadly defined, compassion is a sense of concern that arises when we are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to see that suffering relieved. The English word compassion, from its Latin root, literally means “to suffer with.” According to religious historian Karen Armstrong, the word for compassion in Semitic languages—rahamanut in Hebrew and rahman in Arabic—is etymologically related to the word for womb, evoking the mother’s love for her child as an archetypal expression of our compassion. At its core, compassion is a response to the inevitable reality of our human condition—our experience of pain and sorrow...

We have bought into a popular narrative that seeks to explain all our behavior through the prism of competition and self-interest. This is the story we have been telling about ourselves. The thing about a story like this is that it tends to be self-fulfilling. When our story says that we are at heart selfish and aggressive creatures, we assume that every man is for himself. In this “dog eat dog world” it is only logical, then, to see others as a source of rivalry and antagonism. And so we relate to others with apprehension, fear, and suspicion, instead of fellow feeling and a sense of connection. By contrast, if our story says that we are social creatures endowed with instincts for compassion and kindness, and that as deeply interdependent beings our welfare is intertwined, this totally changes the way we view—and behave in—the world. So the stories we tell about ourselves do matter, quite profoundly so...

The Dalai Lama’s explicit advocacy for adapting Buddhist-based mental training practices for the secular world has also played a significant part in raising awareness of the benefits of mindfulness. Today mindfulness turns up in therapy, in management and leadership training, in schools, and in competitive sports. Phrases such as “mindful parenting,” “mindful leadership,” “mindful schools,” and “mindfulness for stress management” are mainstream. And searching for “mindfulness” in book titles on Amazon calls up more than three thousand books.

The stage is now set for compassion to make the next big impact in our world. There is a growing scientific movement to redefine the place of compassion in our understanding of human nature and behavior. Therapies based on compassion training are showing promise for mental health conditions ranging from social phobia to excessive negative self-judgment, and from post-traumatic stress disorder to eating disorders. Educators are exploring ways to bring kindness and compassion into schools as part of our children’s social, emotional, and ethical development. In this context, an opportunity came to me to design a standardized program for secular compassion training known today as compassion cultivation training (CCT)."

-- Thupten Jinpa PhD.

Can I Speak To The Management Please?

"What Rupert and I both came to learn was that instead of relying on our relationship to meet all our needs for love, acceptance, and security, we could actually provide some of these feelings for ourselves. And this would mean that we had even more in our hearts to give to each other. We were both so moved by the concept of self-compassion that in our marriage ceremony later that year, each of us ended our vows by saying “Most of all, I promise to help you have compassion for yourself, so that you can thrive and be happy"...

From the Buddhist point of view, you have to care about yourself before you can really care about other people . If you are continually judging and criticizing yourself while trying to be kind to others, you are drawing artificial boundaries and distinctions that only lead to feelings of separation and isolation. This is the opposite of oneness, interconnection, and universal love— the ultimate goal of most spiritual paths, no matter which tradition...

Where is that written contract you signed before birth promising that you’d be perfect, that you’d never fail, and that your life would go absolutely the way you want it to? Uh, excuse me. There must be some error. I signed up for the “everything will go swimmingly until the day I die” plan. Can I speak to the management, please?

If you feel that you lack sufficient self-compassion, check in with yourself—are you criticizing yourself for this, too? If so, stop right there. Try to feel compassion for how difficult it is to be an imperfect human being in this extremely competitive society of ours. Our culture does not emphasize self-compassion, quite the opposite. We’re told that no matter how hard we try, our best just isn’t good enough. It’s time for something different. We can all benefit by learning to be more self-compassionate, and now is the perfect time to start."

-- Dr Kristin Neff

Context Of Caring

When we give ourselves compassion, the knot of self-judgment starts to dissolve...replaced  by a peaceful sparkling diamond.

“Friends raised with a notion of original sin often tell me that guilt has shadowed them from the time they were very young. Common thoughts include things like, I was born bad; I was born broken; there is something fundamentally wrong with me. Even if such concepts weren’t part of our religious or family backgrounds, they persist in our culture and can result in a pervasive sense of defeat: nothing I am or do will ever be good enough. For some, the sin is being born the “wrong” gender, ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation, all of which can lead to feelings of not belonging. These cultural messages not only impede our ability to love and care for ourselves but can inhibit our potential by causing us to lower our expectations and rein in our dreams. At the same time, the opportunities available to us may realistically be diminished because of society’s projections onto us. We may even become the target of outright hatred and threats to our safety.

James Baldwin, the late, brilliant, gay African American author, described his process of coming to terms with such messages in his essay “They Can’t Turn Back”: “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.” We may also be swamped by the pervasive messages of our materialistic culture, which stresses competition, status, and “success” over character and emotional intelligence. This makes it easy to fall into the lose-lose trap of comparing ourselves to others. But, as psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky points out in her book The How of Happiness, “The more social comparisons you make, the more likely you are to encounter unfavorable comparisons, and the more sensitive you are to social comparisons, the more likely you are to suffer their negative consequences … No matter how successful, wealthy, or fortunate we become, there’s always someone who can best us.”

When we constantly hear that we should be smarter, better connected, more productive, wealthier—you name it—it takes real courage to claim the time and space to follow the currents of our talents, our aspirations, and our hearts, which may lead in a very different direction.

Have you ever wakened in the morning feeling contented and quiet, and then, within fifteen minutes of checking your phone, felt out of sorts and jealous? Longing for something more? Many of us now spend as much time immersed in images on a screen as participating in the world outside our devices. Whether subtly or blatantly, ads tell us that our bodies need making over, our clothes just won’t do, our living room is a mess, and we’re not invited to the right parties—all as a way to sell us more and more. Along the way, what might be a source of pleasure becomes infused with anxiety.

Social activist Jerry Mander hypothesizes that media is deliberately designed to induce self-hatred, negative body image, and dejection, with advertising drummed up—and sold—to offer the cure. Regardless of the source of these messages, we can become more aware of them. We can see which messages we’ve adopted as our own beliefs and learn instead to hold them more loosely; in time, we can even replace them with an inquiring mind, an open heart, an enhanced sense of vitality. We may not be able to make the messages disappear, but we can question them. The more we do so, the less intrusive and limiting they become. In turn, we become freer to connect more authentically with others, as well as to our own deepest yearnings.

I have never believed that you must completely love yourself first before you can love another. I know many people who are hard on themselves, yet love their friends and family deeply and are loved in return—though they might have difficulty in receiving that love. But it’s hard to sustain love for others over the long haul until we have a sense of inner abundance and sufficiency. When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth. Feeling incomplete inside ourselves, we search for others to complete us. But the equation doesn’t work that way: we can’t gain from others what we’re unable to give ourselves.

It’s important to recognize that self-love is an unfolding process that gains strength over time, not a goal with a fixed end point. When we start to pay attention, we see that we’re challenged daily to act lovingly on our own behalf. Simple gestures of respect—care of the body, rest for the mind, and beauty for the soul in the form of music and art or nature—are all ways of showing ourselves love. Really, all of our actions—from how we respond when we can’t fit into our favorite pair of jeans to the choice of foods we eat—can signify self-love or self-sabotage. So can the way we react when a stranger cuts us off in line, a friend does something hurtful, or we get an unwelcome medical diagnosis.

As Maya Angelou said in her book Letter to My Daughter, “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” I started meditation practice, as many do, with the need to turn around that tendency to feel reduced by life. Still, it takes a special courage to challenge the rigid confines of our accustomed story. It’s not that easy to radically alter our views about where happiness comes from, or what brings us joy. But it’s eminently possible. We truly can reconfigure how we see ourselves and reclaim the love for ourselves that we’re innately capable of. That’s why I invite students to set out on this path in the spirit of adventure, instead of feeling that real love is a pass/fail exam that they’re scared to take. Although love is often depicted as starry-eyed and sweet, love for the self is made of tougher stuff. It’s not a sappy form of denial. You might still feel rage, desire, and shame like everyone else in the world, but you can learn to hold these emotions in a context of caring.

Real love allows for failure and suffering. All of us have made mistakes, and some of those mistakes were consequential, but you can find a way to relate to them with kindness. No matter what troubles have befallen you or what difficulties you have caused yourself or others, with love for yourself you can change, grow, make amends, and learn. Real love is not about letting yourself off the hook. Real love does not encourage you to ignore your problems or deny your mistakes and imperfections. You see them clearly and still opt to love.

We begin to cultivate real love for ourselves when we treat ourselves with compassion. In a sense, self-compassion is like a muscle. The more we practice flexing it, especially when life doesn’t go exactly according to plan (a frequent scenario for most of us), the stronger and more resilient our compassion muscle becomes. Katherine says: “The hardest part of this practice for me has been listening to, feeling, and grieving the intense pain of my childhood and teen years. Avoiding this pain gradually closed down my life and awareness, but my heart has begun to warm back to life. I’m able to be present in new ways for myself, my husband, my children, and my grandchildren.”

When Katherine says her heart has warmed, it’s not just a metaphor. As psychologist Kristin Neff (Self-Compassion.org) writes in one of her blog posts, “When we soothe our painful feelings with the healing balm of self-compassion, not only are we changing our mental and emotional experience, we’re also changing our body chemistry.” She reports on research that suggests while self-criticism triggers increases in blood pressure, adrenaline, and the hormone cortisol—all results of the fight-or-flight response—self-compassion triggers the release of oxytocin, the “bonding hormone,” which increases feelings of trust, calm, safety, and generosity.”

~ Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

Photo ~ Sharon Salzberg & His Holiness Dalai Lama in the mid 1990s

Love Takes Off Masks

Love takes off masks
that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
~ JAMES BALDWIN

Silence Echoes

*** WARNING Violent tragedy WARNING ***

black and brown victims in a third world country,
no less precious than your sister or my mother...

"Mogadishu is new, yet ancient. Continuously inhabited since 200 B.C.E., it is the tenth oldest city in all of Northern Africa. Today, it is the capital of Somalia. Set in the cradle of the Indian Ocean, it is a coastal city marked by prominent minarets and large mosques that accommodate thousands of worshippers. The city is loud and bustling, filled with universities and stadiums, markets and ports. Over one million people call it home.

This past Saturday, Mogadishu was wracked with a massive truck bomb that detonated in the district of Hodan. The bomb killed more than 300 people, and injured over 500 others. That’s far more than the death toll of attacks in Boston, Fort Hood, San Bernandino, Quebec, Paris, London, Manchester, and Barcelona combined. Even now, scores remain missing. The bomb caused a hotel to collapse, demolished nearby buildings, and crushed vehicles that were parked on the street. It was followed by the sirens of ambulances, international pleas for help, and a death toll that kept on rising. It was met with several perfunctory news articles, a smattering of tweets, and a hailstorm of images that were difficult to look at.

And then, silence.

There were no hashtags. There was no filter or check in on Facebook. There were no articles written about the residents of the city. There was no national outcry, no presidential condemnation, no halting of the news cycle. There was no outrage.

Amidst this silence, there have been some expressions of frustration with the disregard. Somalis have started fundraising campaigns and have found ways to help find missing persons. But America’s overwhelming response to the horrifying tragedy in Somalia has been silence. It has been turning away and moving on. And this silence screams lack of empathy. In a global society, such lack of empathy is absolutely unjustifiable. It serves only to divide. It dehumanizes people of color who are thousands of miles away, and it dehumanizes people of color who are right next door.

Those of us who are other understand this. We know the dichotomy of tragedy exists, and we see it constantly. We see it in the outcry, the pain, the concerts, the support that is afforded to London and Paris and Barcelona. And then we see it in the cold shoulder, the curt statements, the silence that is granted to Somalia and Myanmar and Kashmir.

We see it in how the tragedy is depicted. On one hand, there is the warmth of candlelight vigils, the hurt of crying parents embracing, and the power of people coming together. And on the other is the rubble of buildings and the piling of bodies. We see the commodification and dehumanization of brown bodies in the aftermath of tragedy. The image of a child, face down in the sand, is sold for shock value as his life is forgotten. In some countries (those ones, the ones far away) violence is a fact, a truth, not something to resist, but something to shrug at and then move on. Something to mention as a passing note, if at all, and then—silence.

We see it in what the facts are. We watch as black and brown people who die at the hands of militant groups go ignored. After all, how can the Muslim be the victim when he is so obviously the attacker? We see that our media’s depiction of violence is not even true to the facts of the matter. And we watch as the media ignores the attacks that do not fit the narrative.

We see it here at home too. We watch as the victims of police brutality, who are children and women and all innocents are brutalized in life and vilified in death. And we understand that the the same fate does not befall even white men who go on shooting rampages.

And so we know that America does not value black and brown lives in the same way that it values white lives.

It is horrific that we are forced to compare tragedy. Any life lost is a life worth mourning, remembering, and fighting for. But this lack of empathy has to be acknowledged, because it has very real consequences. It distorts facts and breeds ignorance. It makes us less empathetic to those who are different, and that makes it harder for us to know one another. And so we slide farther back into our silos instead of growing emotional understanding.

Because even though the average American might not look like the average Somali, that does not mean that the average American should not care for the average Somali. And there is so much more to America than the “average American.” Whitewashing America erases millions in this country, and it erases the struggle for pluralism that American society is constantly engaged in. If we can only understand and feel and advocate for those who are like us, we are destined to remain separate from those in our classes and in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods and in our cities, who look nothing like us.

Lack of empathy drives us further and further apart, both globally and locally. To achieve change, and to achieve unity, we must achieve empathy first. Now, it is our responsibility to reject silence in favor of speaking up and reaching out. Because the silence in the wake of this attack in Somalia echoes in America. You can hear it, can’t you?"

~ Shireen Younus, Havard Crimson

Where They Are Not

"The night before Leonard Bernstein died he asked that several poems from the Like This volume of Rumi’s Divan be read to him over and over. His friend Aaron Stern wrote to me about that night. The poems seemed very fresh and familiar to Bernstein. This poetry is from the thirteenth century, of course, and yet it does seem to be a new kind of love poetry. It’s been seven centuries, but maybe we are just now beginning to assimilate the essence of the friendship that Rumi and Shams brought to the mystical life of the planet. Body and soul terminology here dissolve. Even the word love may be wrong for what Rumi and Shams share. Their friendship widens to include the sun, the fields, and “anything anyone says”. It is a kind of atmosphere that they inhabit. The place they reach is where, in some way, they are not, where absence, or a vastness, is. Perhaps love isn’t the word for it. Something greater than the personal opens, burns, and rises through. It cannot be understood or described, but it can be lived."

~ Coleman Barks

"The Academy for the Love of Learning was birthed from an intense ten-year collaboration between Academy President, Aaron Stern and his mentor, Leonard Bernstein. Stern, then Dean of the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, was committed to using aesthetic experience as a pathway into the kind of self-knowing and discovery that motivates and guides the natural human desire to learn. Stern’s commitment to this approach to learning found its counterpart in Bernstein’s belief that the arts, and particularly music, could play a crucial role in cultural transformation. Their shared aspiration led them to explore how to awaken, nurture and fuel a lifelong love of learning as a means to becoming more fully human...

The mission of the Academy for the Love of Learning is to awaken, enliven, nurture and sustain the natural love of learning in people of all ages. We seek to encourage and cultivate the powers of critical thought, imagination, curiosity, innate sense of purpose, wonder and inspiration, and an ongoing awakening of the heart.

Today, Stern conducts programming in Santa Fe, consultancies and seminars throughout the United States and other parts of the world, and serves as a member of the Board and Fellow of the Mind & Life Institute, co-founded by His Holiness the Dalai Lama." ~ aloveolearning.org

Live What You've Been Reading

"Rumi is sitting by a fountain in a small square in Konya reading to students from his father’s dazzling spiritual diary, the Maarif. Shams breaks through the group and throws the invaluable text, along with other books on the pool’s edge, into the water. “Who are you and what are you doing?” asks Rumi.

“It is time for you to live what you’ve been reading,” replies Shams. Rumi turns to the books in the water. “We can retrieve them, if that’s what you want,” Shams says. “They will be perfectly dry, just as they were.” Shams lifts one out to show him. Dry.

“Let them stay,” Rumi responded."

Photo ~ A Family of Dervishes. Possibly Antoin Sevruguin (Armenian-Georgian, 1830s–1933). Iran, late 19th–early 20th century. Silver albumen photograph. Brooklyn Museum

Ordering Secret Of The Universe

"It was Ramadan. I did what the town was doing. I fasted from sunup until sundown. At about eight in the evening I’d step into a restaurant and sit with everyone waiting for the call from the minaret, when each person dips a spoon into the lentil soup.

Each night I ordered bottled water with my meal, but my Tennessee Turkish seemed to draw a crowd. People came out from the kitchen and solemnly listened to me order. It was not until I got home that I found out that what I’d been ordering with every meal was the 'secret of the universe'. Sir instead of su."

~ Coleman Barks

Right In Front Of You

"Beware of teachers who say they are self-taught. They have mythologized themselves.

Just continue to meditate on the thought: who is my teacher? — and let yourself be guided.

When I met Maezumi Roshi I lived three states away. I attended a retreat not to meet a teacher (Lord, no!) but just to get instruction in how to sit. So imagine my surprise and deep recognition when I saw him standing in front of me. Right in front of you is the only place you’ll ever find your teacher."

-- Karen Maezen Miller

Be Alert

"You must not cling to the words of the old sages either; they, too, may not be right. Even if you believe them, you should be alert so that , in the event that something superior comes along, you may follow that."

-- Dogen

Attention

What you pay attention to thrives, and what you do not pay attention to withers and dies.

What will you pay attention to today?

Taught Me Things

"Many years ago, when I thought my life had just about ended, that my heart had died, and I would never be happy again, I wandered into a little shop and garden on Virginia Street in Houston. There, I met a woman who taught me things. She taught me that flowers are spirits and that stones are medicine; that herbs are wisdom, food is fortune, and friends are gold. She showed me that books are pictures and pictures are books; that music is alive. That the lines in your palm are your map, and the symbols on a card tell your story. Her garden was a place of hope and healing. It seemed as though just about everyone in the city had passed through her gate during a dark and halting time in their life and found a reason to believe.

She had once wanted to be a nun, or so I recall, but the cloister had been too confining. Instead, she made the world her sanctuary and gave everyone in it a home. She gave me a room above her garage to practice meditation when I was just starting to do it and needed a circle of friends to keep me going. She said it would help her to have the space filled with silence once a week on Sunday mornings, and that breath was the voice of God.

She and her husband, Michael, were master gardeners. Now I know what that means. It means she bowed to the earth and revered the fruits it bore. She knew that thyme is courage, sage is immortality, and rosemary is remembrance. I asked her to arrange herbs as flowers at my wedding banquet, a kind of secret blessing just between us.

There is not one thing that I ever did that she did not applaud. She sold my books. She sang my praise. I last saw her three years ago on a visit to speak at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. She and her husband, older and more frail than before, lingered back, not wanting to take my time, she to whom I owed every day since the first day I entered her door on Virginia Street.

She has been ill. She has been quiet. She has been still and always on my mind.

She is peace."

Lucia Ferrara Bettler
September 17, 1948 – September 22, 2017

God Told Me

"God told me that if I painted that mountain enough I could have it."

-- Georgia O’Keeffe

Staring You In The Face

"The feeling that we are separate — outnumbered and under attack — is where the spiritual life begins. It’s the curb you have to step off of to get to the other side. Sensing ourselves as separate is an illusion, but it’s a crafty illusion. We’re not separate at all, but it seems that way. It seems as if all our problems are caused by someone or something else. We were kidnapped at birth and raised by strangers who never loved us. Misjudged by critics and overlooked by higher-ups. Unjustly accused and mistreated. The pawns of a system rigged against us. Ill-favored by fortune, betrayed by our friends, born too soon, born too late, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Undefended against an immutable force that’s either standing in our way or running us over.

I’d been around the block a few times. Been stupid and wised up. Had it all and tossed it out. Made one plan and then another, then another. Lost in love and trusted someone again. And yet I was sinking into the pall of a malignant conviction — that I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for, not today, not next week, maybe never.

I was sinking into the pall of a malignant conviction — that I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for, not today, not next week, maybe never. That was me out there on the curb, looking into all creation, a many-splendored world arrayed at my feet, thinking this isn’t it this isn’t it this isn’t it.

No matter what your story is, whatever your creed, you come to a spiritual practice looking for paradise. It’s a paradise you’ve never seen yet feel as if you’ve lost. The question is whether you’ll recognize it when you’re staring it in the face. You may not be able to change the way you think about yourself and the world...

You can stop believing that all your thoughts are true. Because they aren’t. There is another truth you may never have seen, and with it comes another way to live. It’s called the Way. From the curb you’ll see the gate. From the gate you’ll see the path. From the path you’ll see the ground, and overhead, the sun and moon to light your way. These signposts will bring you to paradise."

-- Karen Maezen Miller s a Zen Buddhist priest and meditation teacher at the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles. She is the author of Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood, Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life, and Paradise in Plain Sight: Lessons from a Zen Garden.

Beauty is Enough

"At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it.
It is enough."
-- Toni Morrison

Unrecognized Love

"There is a certain attitude, perhaps unavoidable, that most of us seem to adopt as we grow up. It is a kind of self-satisfied conclusion that our parents didn’t love us. Oh, they might have loved us, but they didn’t love us enough. They didn’t love us the right way. They didn’t love us just so. Have your own child and you will penetrate into the utter absurdity of that idea. You will love your child as your parents loved you and their parents loved them. With a love that is humbling and uncontrived, immense and indestructible. Parents err, of course, and badly. They can be ignorant, foolish, mean, and far worse, in ways that you can come to forgive in them and try to prevent in yourself. But this wholesale shortage of parental love at the crux of everyone’s story must be the product of shabby and self-serving recollections. Now that you are a mother, set that story aside, forgetting everything you thought you knew about love…”

~ Karen Maezen Miller

Choose Love

“We have all acted from unconsciousness and ego agendas, and we all know how difficult it is to do so. Reflecting on this can make some space for compassion to arise because we are all more alike than we are different. So, while being wise and having healthy boundaries when necessary, we can also have compassion for people that we find difficult. It all starts by deciding whether we want our life to be a manifestation of Love or of fear and resentment. If we want to manifest Love, we will need to take responsibility for the stories and judgments that close our hearts, and begin to surrender them. Make “Choose Love” your guiding principle, and the means and ways will begin to arise within you.”

~ Adyashanti

"Fierce Love" Online Course

What's Not Happening

Unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them...
- Science Journal

Not About Us

"Halloween is America's greatest holiday. It is one of the few times we formally acknowledge that it is not all about us. Our ancestors are still with us in one form or another. In the Petavatthu, the Buddha explained that it was not possible for someone not to have relatives dwelling in the unfortunate abodes -- the realm of ghosts and subhuman existences collectively. This is because "relatives" is defined as going back seven generations (just as it extends for the Native Americans). What leads to rebirth on those unfortunate planes?

The anti-precepts lead there: not abstaining or discouraging killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, deceiving, or drug taking. To abandon these and encourage others to abandon them is the way to the human world and higher worlds. But here now -- where we are shamed for any "deviant," "sinful," or "wrong" impulse -- Halloween is the only appropriate holiday for acting out in all the ways that are forbidden. It is no wonder Halloween has become more popular with US adults than children.

For just one day I'll pretend I'm a s----y devil. My parents say it's crazy and they won't have it under their roof! But every other day of the year it's hypocrisy. How can pretending (and deceiving others) be preferable to play acting? Halloween is not when we are like this; Halloween is when we express how we think of being. Strangling the expression of everything unpleasant does not make it go away. It feeds it and keeps it alive with guilt, shame, and turning a blind eye. Let it see the light of day. Maybe it's not as much to be afraid of as we fear. It would be less worse to die than to live always fearing death. Whosoever would purposely turn from the truth, whatever the truth may be, is no truthseeker."

-- Wisdom Quarterly

Spinetingling Story

"It’s Halloween. The trees are ablaze in fiery reds. Excited children don colorful costumes. Mystery and fun haunt every corner! When Addy, Michael, and Karl finish trick-or-treating, the fun isn’t over yet. Their good friend Stillwater the panda has one more special surprise in store for them. A mysterious visitor is about to tell them a spinetingling story—one that will fill each and every reader with wonder.

  This beautifully illustrated book is inspired by the late John Daido Loori Roshi’s telling of the famous folktale “Senjo and Her Soul are Separated” to the Zen Kids program at Zen Mountain Monastery.

John Daido Loori, Roshi (1931-2009) was the founder of Zen Mountain Monastery and the Mountains and Rivers Order, and served as the guiding teacher there for almost 30 years. A holder of the Soto and Rinzai Zen lineages, Daido Roshi drew on his background as a scientist, artist, naturalist, parent and Zen Priest to establish a uniquely American Zen Buddhist training center."

Without Hesitation or Arrogance

"THE CHALLENGE OF WARRIORSHIP is to live fully in the world as it is and to find within this world, with all its paradoxes, the essence of nowness. If we open our eyes, if we open our minds, if we open our hearts, we will find that this world is a magical place. It is not magical because it tricks us or changes unexpectedly into something else, but it is magical because it can be so vividly, so brilliantly. However, the discovery of that magic can happen only when we transcend our embarrassment about being alive, when we have the bravery to proclaim the goodness and dignity of human life, without either hesitation or arrogance."

-- Chögyam Trungpa

Who is the Self that I can't live with?

"I was about twenty-nine, and had gone through years of depression and anxiety. I had even achieved some successes, like graduating with the highest mark at London University. Then an offer came for a Cambridge scholarship to do research. But the whole motivating power behind my academic success was fear and unhappiness.

It all changed one night when I woke up in the middle of the night. The fear, anxiety and heaviness of depression were becoming so intense, it was almost unbearable. And it is hard to describe that "state" where the world is felt to be so alien, just looking at a physical environment like a room. Everything was totally alien and almost hostile. I later saw a book written by Jean-Paul Sartre called Nausea. That was the state that I was in, nausea of the world. [Chuckle] And the thought came into my head, "I can't live with myself any longer." That thought kept repeating itself again and again.

And (then suddenly there was a "standing back" from the thought and Looking at that thought, at the structure of that thought," If I cannot live with myself, who is that self that I cannot live with? Who am I? Am I one—or two?" And I saw that I was "two." There was an "I," and (here was a self. And the self was deeply unhappy, the miserable self. And the burden of that I could not live with. At that moment, a dis-identification happened. "I" consciousness withdrew from its identification with the self, the mind-made fictitious entity, the unhappy "little me" and its story. And the fictitious entity collapsed completely in that moment, just as if a plug had been pulled out of an inflatable toy. What remained was a single sense of presence or "Beingness" which is pure consciousness prior to identification with form—the eternal I AM. I didn't know all of that at the time, of course. It just happened, and for a long time there was no understanding of what had happened.

As the self collapsed, there was still a moment of intense fear—after all, it was the death of "me." I felt like being sucked into a hole. But a voice from within said, "Resist nothing." So I let go. It was almost like I was being sucked into a void, not an external void, but a void within. And then fear disappeared and there was nothing that I remember after that except waking up in the morning in a state of total and complete "newness."

I woke up in a state of incredible inner peace, bliss in fact. With my eyes still closed, I heard the sound of a bird and realized how precious that was. And then I opened my eyes and saw the sunlight coming through the curtains and felt: There is far more to that than we realize. It felt like love coming through the curtains. And then as I walked around the old familiar objects in the room I realized I had never really seen them before. It was as if I had just been born into this world; a state of wonder. And then I went for a walk in the city. I was still in London. Everything was miraculous, deeply peaceful. Even the traffic. [Chuckle]

I knew something incredible had happened, although I didn't understand it. I even started writing down in a diary, "Something incredible has happened. I just want to write this down," I said, "in case it leaves me again or I lose it." And only later did I realize (that my thought processes after waking up that morning had been reduced by about eighty to ninety percent. So a lot of the time I was walking around in a state of inner stillness, and perceiving the world through inner stillness.

And that is the peace, the deep peace that comes when there is no longer anybody commenting on sense perceptions or anything that happens. No labeling, no need to interpret what is happening, it just is as it is and it is fine. [Laughter] There was no longer a "me" entity.

After that transformation happened, I could not have said anything about it. "Something happened. I am totally at peace. I don't know what it means." That is all I could have said. And it took years before there was some "understanding." And it took more years before it evolved into a "spiritual teaching ."That took time. The basic state is the same as then, but the external manifestation of the state as a teaching and the power of a teaching, that took time. It had to mature. So when I talk about it now to some extent, I add something to it. When I talk about the "original experience" something is added to it that I didn't know then...

The texts I came in contact with—first I picked up a copy of the New Testament almost by accident, maybe half a year, a year after it happened, and reading the words of Jesus and feeling the essence and power behind those words. And I immediately understood at a deeper level the meaning of those words. I knew intuitively with absolute certainty that certain statements attributed to Jesus were added later, because they did not "emanate" from that place, that state of consciousness, because I knew that place, I know that place. But when a statement emanates from that place, there is recognition. And when it does not, no matter how clever or intelligent it may sound it lacks that essence and it does not have that power. In other words, it does not emanate from the stillness. So that was an incredible realization, just reading and understanding "beyond mind" the deeper meaning of those words.

Then came the Bhagavad Gita, I also had an immediate, deep understanding of and an incredible love for such a divine work. The Tao Te Ching; also an immediate understanding. And often knowing, "Oh, that's not a correct translation.” I knew the translator had misunderstood, and knew what the real meaning was although I do not know any Chinese. So I immediately had access to the essence of those texts. Then I also started reading on Buddhism and immediately understood the essence of Buddhism. I saw the simplicity of the original teaching of the Buddha compared to the complexity of subsequent additions, philosophy, all the baggage that over the centuries accumulated around Buddhism, and saw the essence of the original teaching. I have a great love for the teaching of the Buddha, a teaching of such power and sublime simplicity. I even spent time in Buddhist monasteries. During my time in England there were already several Buddhist monasteries.

I met and listened to some teachers that helped me understand my own state. In the beginning there was a Buddhist monk, Achan Sumedo, abbot of two or three monasteries in England. He's a Western-born Buddhist.

And in London I spent some time with Barry Long. I also understood things more deeply, simply through listening and having some conversations with him. And there were other teachers who were just as meaningful whom I never met in person that I feel a very strong connection to. One is [J.] Krishnamurti, and another is Ramana Maharshi. I feel a deep link. And I feel actually that the work I do is a coming together of the teaching "stream," if you want to call it that, of Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi. They seem very, very dissimilar, but I feel that in my teaching the two merge into one. It is the heart of Ramana Maharshi, and Krishnamurti's ability to see the false, as such and point out how it works. So Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi, I love them deeply. I feel completely at One with them. And it is a continuation of the teaching." -- Eckhart Tolle