Tag: Eckhart Tolle

Are you a green parrot or a drop from the ocean? – a view on reincarnation and Oneness

A useful site on Hindu teachings presents two analogies.

The first is the ‘drop and the ocean’ analogy in which

The soul is compared to a drop of water and liberation to its merging into the vast ocean which represents the Supreme Soul (God).
According to the advaita schools, the soul and God are equal in every respect, and liberation entails realisation of one’s Godhood. Thus, one’s mistaken sense of individuality is dissolved, and one merges into the all-pervading Supreme.

The second is the ‘green parrot analogy in which

The individual soul is compared to a green bird that enters a green tree (God). It appears to have “merged”, but retains its separate identity.

  • The personalistic schools of thought maintain that the soul and God are eternally distinct and that any “merging” is only apparent. “Oneness” in this case refers to:

unity of purpose through loving service realisation of one’s nature as brahman (godly) but maintenance of one’s spiritual individuality.

  • Liberation involves entering God’s abode, though many schools teach that those souls who have become free from material contamination are already liberated, even before leaving the material body

The two analogies are to help explain two views’ on the process of attaining ‘moksha’ a freeing or liberation from samsara, the endless round of repeating cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth (reincarnation);

practically all schools consider it a state of unity with God, the nature of such unity is contested. The advaita traditions say that moksha entails annihilation of the soul’s false sense of individuality and realisation of its complete non-difference from God. The dualistic traditions claim that God remains ever distinct from the individual soul. Union in this case refers to a commonality of purpose and realisation of one’s spiritual nature (brahman) through surrender and service to the Supreme Brahman (God).

REINCARNATION and ARE THE TWO VIEWS RESOLVABLE?

Firstly I should say that the conventional understanding doesn’t work for me. Instead I see reincarnation as every moment in which I prompt myself to return to the ‘body of my true Self’, away from any egoistic, lower self, attachment.

Oak trees produce acorns but the don’t become again the acorn from which they grew. Life is progressive in terms of the after-life. But in this world every time we repeat the same ego-driven mistakes we ‘reincarnate’ ourselves into our lower self.

In unitive meditation we merge with the Whole, but not as a co-equal partner with the Godhead – the finite cannot claim to comprehend the Infinite. That which we become at-one with is Creation not the Creator.

On this subject listen to the 8thC Chinese poet known as Li Po;

“The birds have vanished from the sky,

and now the last clouds slip away.

We sit alone, the mountain and I,

until only the mountain remains.”

If the ego is sufficiently quietened for us to be ‘absorbed’ it is a unity with Creation not the Creator.

To the Chinese poet I would add a Baha’i perspective the holds that in the afterlife we commune with souls with whom we have associated;

13. As to the question whether the souls will recognize each other in the spiritual world:

This fact is certain; for the Kingdom is the world of vision where all the concealed realities will

become disclosed. How much more the well-known souls will become manifest. The mysteries

of which man is heedless in this earthly world, those he will discover in the heavenly world, and

here will he be informed of the secret of truth; how much more will he recognize or discover

persons with whom he hath been associated. Undoubtedly, the holy souls who find a pure eye

and are favored with insight will, in the kingdom of lights, be acquainted with all mysteries, and

will seek the bounty of witnessing the reality of every great soul. Even they will manifestly

behold the Beauty of God in that world. Likewise will they find all the friends of God, both those

of the former and recent times, present in the heavenly assemblage.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Bahá’í World Faith, p. 367 –
This Baha’i extract is from Dr Bill Huitt’s excellent compilation HERE

IN CONCLUSION

The two views illustrated by ‘the green parrot’ and ‘the drop-ocean’ analogies are resolvable via this perspective. In so far as we mirror the higher Self and quieten the ‘chattering monkey’ of the lower self we attain Moksha, Nirvana, Heaven. This is a moment by moment switching until we are enabled to maintain a more constant connection with the higher Self. Experiences of unity are sublime, ineffable, bliss-full but we are not then at-one with the Godhead, just sufficiently ego-less to feel at-one with the rest of Creation! We get close to God in this limited sense through living a life that obeys the Covenant of eternal verities found in the mystical heart of all great faiths.

From Zen we learn

The great Master Dogen said,

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self,

to study the self is to forget the self, and

to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.”

To be enlightened by the ten thousand things is to recognize the unity of the self and the ten thousand things.

A limited at-one-ness – through seeking the True Self within – and enjoying endless dualities of this world are the two wings through which we fly spiritually (including spirituality as intellectuallity).

It is certainly true that ‘all is God’ but our reality and our powers are devolved not co-equal.

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Go HERE
to visit the ISKCON site from which I took inspiration for this article.

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Interspirituality, the 21stC version of perennial wisdom, celebrates the Oneness behind the jostling exclusivist-ic world-views!

Is everything energy? – GuruStu says so!

Is non-duality good and duality bad?

Thanks for the discussion and your question about non-duality and teachers of non-duality.

From a quick listen to Rupert Spira so far it seems to be high quality teaching. The design of his site is exquisite! See HERE

As with other luminaries e.g Tolle and Wilber I would make the following comment;

In brief non-duality & duality are both gifts of life (God if you prefer or the Whole) – both are essential, both are ongoing. We need to work both wings in complementary harmony. The goal of life is not to eliminate duality, but to have strong, complementary synergistic experiences of duality and non-duality! Harmony requires diversity and vv.

The separate self is good – hallelujah! The small self is good – without it we would have no mastery of self. Without it no comedians would lift our spirits. Without it no artist would create.

As the great Zen Master Dogen said,

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self,

to study the self is to forget the self, and

to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.”

To be enlightened by the ten thousand things is to recognize the unity of the self and the ten thousand things.

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This is an enormous field – see the work by Jerry Katz HERE (1000+ very long pages!) and HERE

I tried to build some of these ideas into the 60 Seconds Meditation (for galloping frenetically-busy people) – HERE

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Or as Stuart GuruStu Rosen HERE put it
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Exquisitely beautiful Baha'i chant in English

THE SCRIPTURAL TEXT

“Create in me a pure heart, O my God, and renew a tranquil conscience within me, O my Hope! Through the spirit of power confirm Thou me in Thy Cause, O my Best-Beloved, and by the light of Thy glory reveal unto me Thy path, O Thou the Goal of my desire! Through the power of Thy transcendent might lift me up unto the heaven of Thy holiness, O Source of my being, and by the breezes of Thine eternity gladden me, O Thou Who art my God! Let Thine everlasting melodies breathe tranquillity on me, O my Companion, and let the riches of Thine ancient countenance deliver me from all except Thee, O my Master, and let the tidings of the revelation of Thine incorruptible Essence bring me joy, O Thou Who art the most manifest of the manifest and the most hidden of the hidden!” – Bahá’u’lláh

(From album entitled – Luke Slott “Create in Me a Pure Heart”)
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Would you like to start a One Garden Interspirituality group in your area?

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The ‘One Garden’ – A General Introduction for newcomers to the One Garden Groups

GENERAL INFORMATION

Game, set & match! – If you have realized the Oneness behind the diversity you are already a ‘member’ of the ‘One Garden’ – welcome home!

AIM & PURPOSE OF THE ‘ONE GARDEN’ COMMUNITY – to celebrate, experience, explore & practice oneness/Oneness – from within the enlightenment teachings of great spiritual teachers – in a frame work of perennial wisdom or Perennial Philosophy (see below) context .

In our meetings we use mainly contemplative dialogue but start and end with short silent meditations. On a daily basis group members practice according to what they choose – some may still be happily within mainstream faith communities, some might be refugees from painful experience in mainstream religions, some have simply realized that behind the myriad world-views there is Oneness.

We see the overall spiritualizing process as 2 ‘wings’ that together enable spirituality.

i) All spiritually alive people use the first wing to stay connected to the Whole i.e.

– it requires that the ‘ego & mind’ be quietened, (this is our heart-centre & right-brain).

ii) The second wing with which we fly spiritually is dialogue (left-brain, head-centred).

We achieve a sense of connection with the Whole, (it ebbs and flows, unless you are one of the great masters), via mindfulness – or more correctly mind-less-ness!

The two wings need to be in harmony – if one wing is overdeveloped we flap and go round in circles and never fly upwards at all!

OUR MAP-MAKERS: As map-makers of the ‘territory’ we have Eckhart Tolle, Aldous Huxley, Wayne Teasdale & Ken Wilber – and for a popular historical perspective – Karen Armstrong.

Other great teachers: Thich Nhat Hanh, Christian Contemplatives, Shaikh Kabir Helminski, Abdu’l-Baha,, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Quaker Universalism, Deng Ming-Dao, Albert Einstein, Prof John Miller (great champion of Holistic Education) – and ‘wonder-full’ poets & philosophers!

All are ‘gate-keepers’, or pointers as Buddhist teachers say, to realizing ourselves in the ‘One Garden’!

If you like reading see suggested reading list below

WEEKLY – BUT NO NEED TO ATTEND EVERY WEEK – each session is ‘stand alone’. You don’t have to buy books or read lots – materials provided.

WHO IS IT FOR?: For all on a path to realizing their true self .

HOW’S IT WORK? – each week we have a topic/question: One way we work is simply to put ‘spiritual jewels’ next to each other e.g. by juxtaposing these two pieces by Rumi & Abraham Joshua Heschel;

1 Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing – by Rumi

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.

AND

2 Concepts & Amazement – a quote by A J Heschel

“Concepts are delicious snacks with which

we try to alleviate our amazement.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel – Who is Man p.88

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EXAMPLE TOPIC: Being at-one

EXAMPLE QUESTION: Where & how and through what are we one?

DEVISING THE AGENDA: One way we use is following a short period of silence and a short introduction including quotations the group, we work in pairs, and consult to generate the questions that will make up the agenda for the main group dialogue. Sometimes we have free-flowing dialogue or ‘rounds’.

THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY

“Most of the great wisdom traditions agree on an age-old model which says about both the Cosmos and about our human nature:

1. Spirit, by whatever name, exists.

2. Spirit, although existing “out there,” is found “in here,” or revealed within to the open heart and mind.

3. Most of us don’t realize this Spirit within, however, because we are living in a world of sin, separation, or duality-that is, we are living in a fallen, illusory, or fragmented state.

4. There is a way out of this fallen state (of sin or illusion or disharmony or non-integration), there is a Path to our liberation.

5. If we follow this Path to its conclusion, the result is a Rebirth or Enlightenment, a direct experience of Spirit within and without, a Supreme Liberation, which

6. marks the end of sin and suffering, and

7. manifests in social action of mercy and compassion on behalf of all sentient beings.”

The above is KW’s model of The Perennial Philosophy.

RP’s shortest model = ‘Awaken: Detach: Serve’

Namaste & all good wishes – Roger

NB We contribute a minimum of £3.00 where a room is hired – OR just £1.00 toward running expenses handouts, MeetUp fees, travel etc. – thanks.

More ‘One Garden’ quotes HERE –http://universalistspirit.wordpress.com/quotes/nonduality-flavoured-quotes/

The Perennial Philosophy model

a) Shortest version (RP) = Awakening:Detachment:Service

b) A Christian-Buddhist comparison (Very short version)

  1. There is something bigger than us – the Mysterious Whole

  2. We either are (West), or seem to be (East), separated from it (Victims?)

  3. Through various means we can become reunited with it (or realize that we already are).

  4. Once the separation is overcome, we will lead larger, richer, fuller lives.

In Christian terms, the four steps are:

  1. God

  2. Sin

  3. Faith (or works)

  4. Salvation

In Buddhist terms:

  1. Nirvana (the state of the Absolute)

  2. Illusion or Ignorance

  3. Practice (devotion or meditation)

  4. Enlightenment

TO COME AND ENJOY THE DISCUSSION IN THE ‘ONE GARDEN’ GROUPS YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ – I PROVIDE ALL THAT IS NEEDED AS A HANDOUT

If you prefer videos check out the stunning range on YouTube by Tolle, Teasdale, Wilber, Thich Nhat Hanh, Karen Armstrong & especially the dialogue between Wayne Teasdale and Ken Wilber

BUT IF YOU LIKE READING:-

On my personal journey I wanted a heart connection with those who both described the territory of the One Garden and those who lived it as well as taught it. Below are those who became my ‘gatekeepers’ to the One Garden – the map-makers and the teachers.

a) THE MAP-MAKERS OF THE TERRITORY OF THE ONE GARDEN

First I strongly recommend you read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now – that is enough!

Want more – then read The Mystic Heart by Wayne Teasdale or Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy

Then Ken Wilber and Karen Armstrong

b) THE ‘GATEKEEPERS’ WHO POINT TO THE ‘ONE GARDEN’, AND THEIR SUGGESTED KEY BOOKS

COMMUNITY TEACHER BOOK TO START WITH

Taoism Deng Ming-Dao 365 Tao

Hinduism Ved Vyasa The Bhagavad Gita

Buddhism Thich Nhat Hanh Happiness

Judaism Abraham Joshua Heschel Who is Man

Christianity Wayne Teasdale The Mystic Heart

Sufism (Islam) Shaikh Kabir Helminski Living Presence

Baha’i Abdu’l-Baha Paris Talks (I will put together a compilation)

HUMANISTS – see HERE

Aldous Huxley The Perennial Philosophy

Albert Einstein (A compilation – see online)

All seem to me to point to the One Garden, and the books listed provide a gateway into the One Garden.

You might like to start with the tradition with which you are most familiar.

As a first step in reading, if you want, I suggest you reread The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

I know there are more teachers – but the above is all I can handle – along with some extracts from from poets and philosophers!

IF YOU WANT TO PRACTICE: Listen to Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh: “ Smile, Breathe, Go mindfully.”

His teachings on practices from over 60 years are gathered into one book ‘Happiness: essential mindfulness practices.’

Eckhart Tolle’s book on practice is called Practicing the Power of Now

There is also a summary of practices taught by ET – see HERE

If you a) practice – Smile, Breathe, Go mindfully” – and b) read and the bell hasn’t rung – practice some more – or worst case scenario – take up fishing!

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OUR THREE WEB-SITES

1) ”One Garden’ – dedicated site for the, ‘One Garden’ groups – is HERE

2) Soul Needs: peace through realizing oneness = celebrating the human spirit via;

i) THE ARTS – especially (street) photography,

ii) PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT & human-centred studies,

iii) SOCIAL JUSTICE ACTIVISM,

iv) INTERFAITH inter-spirituality & Perennial Wisdom, including the ‘One Garden’ project.

v) WHOLE-PERSON LEARNING, radical renewal of child education + healing for adults – (via a) to d)!) – –

vi) THE NEW PROJECT – ‘HEALTH MATTERS’ – surviving IPF as long as possible!

NB Usually posts for all ‘6 Projects’ start or end up on the ‘Soul Needs’ site – RP

3) The ‘Quotations Treasury’ – just quotations – http://quotationstreasury.wordpress.com/

Delightful short video between Eckhart Tolle & Oprah Winfrey

Transcript: is HERE – http://www.eckharttolle.com/article/Eckhart-Tolle-Oprah-Winfrey-O-Magazine-Interview

Eckhart Tolle – Cumulated Emotional Pain (Pain Body)

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ECKHART TOLLE – THE PAIN BODY – A TRANSCRIPTION FROM HERE –
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It goes deeper than that and we are not running away from the fact that in you there lives a field of residue of past Human pain.

On a personal level, pain from childhood that leaves residues, Energetic residues….different things painful things have happened to you in your childhood and of course far beyond that in time. But lets just talk from the level of your present existence in this form.

The pain that is carried over from your childhood and beyond and leaves residues …doesn’t go away completely, it leaves residues of pain, Energy fields, everything is Energy. And then those Energy Fields get together, because they feel, they vibrate at the same frequency. So emotional pain gathers into one mass of pain, contracted Energy, that is not flowing freely. An energy that I call the “Pain Body”, that humans carry inside them.

An energy field of pain.
And if you don’t recognize that, no matter how much Spiritual Practice you do and even what we are doing here if you do not see, if you do not recognize how the Pain Body operates, it will trick every time and you will lose consciousness through it.

First we realize “there is an Energy Field of pain in me”, that may manifest either as turbulence, anger, heaviness, depression, tightness, fear. Whatever way it manifests its not pleasant its painful its past pain but very much alive still.

You carry it inside. But you are not always conscious of it and I talk about it briefly in one Chapter of the book, so we go a little bit more deeply now, and now that the added Energy of Presence that we take into the Pain Body.

The Pain Body is sometimes dormant and sometimes active. It becomes active when you suddenly feel it very strongly, when it needs to feed on further experience of pain. As it always has to do regularly like, it’s a little entity almost, it needs Feeding, temporarily on the experience of further pain, and you will know this has happened when a relatively insignificant trigger produces an Incredible outburst, reaction of Pain. A minor thing goes wrong or somebody say something, or your partner says something or does something and there is suddenly a deep or even a thought come in, and suddenly it serves as a trigger for an immense, the arising of deep emotional pain.

At that moment the Pain Body this Energy Field has come up out of its dormant state, it is ready to feed on more Pain.

I haven’t put it that clearly in the First Book I will explain it in the next book (Laughter)

There are two ways in which it feeds, because that is all it can feed on .Pain Body consists of that energy of pain its needs (ET says) “please where can I get more Pain”.

It feed on your thoughts, when it’s ready to rise up, it will control your thinking, it rises into the mind and your mind, which is your thought activity, because with the Pain Body every thought you think is destructive and painful.

And the Pain Body loves it!!! It gobbles up the Energy of every thought that you think every destructive and deeply negative thought, it eats it up, so to speak, (ET makes chomping sounds while all laugh) And it’s having a Good Time! It’s feeding and, at that moment, one way of putting it is, one could say “the addictive quality of Human Pain”. Addictive because it loves it’s pain.

When the Pain Body has taken you over and has succeeded in pretending that that’s ‘Who you are‘, all your thinking is completely aligned with it. And it’s feeding on it. At that very moment the last thing you want is to be free of pain. At that moment pain IS what you want because at that moment, You are the Pain Body.

And if I came into your life at that moment and gave you this message, “that Life free from Pain IS possible” You would hit me over the Head!!! (Laughter). Because the Pain Body would be there and I would be talking to the Pain Body and the Pain Body would be talking back at me.

So the pain body needs to come in periodically and we all have experienced it with partners now the pain body will use you thinking, it will feed on you negative and destructive thinking.

How long the feeding time lasts of any particular pain body varies greatly from person to person, I could be a brief one, it could be an hour or two; some pain bodies have a feeding time of several weeks, even months. That is the extreme and in very extreme cases there are some pain bodies that have virtually no dormant stage that are continuously feeding and active.

But that’s more rare but you sometimes meet people and the pain body is looking at you through their eyes and they are waiting for an excuse to have more. They want you to give them a painful reaction. They want you to be angry with them; they want you to attack them. That’s people totally possessed by the Pain Body.

So Level One: the pain body feeds on your thinking. Level Two: The pain body feeds on the feedback of the emotional pain from other people

So it might not only use your own thinking it might even predominantly use somebody else’s reactions. So the Pain Body feeds on thinking. The Pain Body feeding on others reactions. Now I mentioned last night the “unhappy me” a mind pattern that people are identified with an unhappy sense of self. This mind pattern, when the pain is active it becomes amplified, the Energy of the Unhappy me when the Pain Body moves into that mind pattern that already is telling you “your life has not been good enough” and so on and you may not make it, “life has passed me by”, and so on.

Now the Pain Body moves into that mind pattern and its Energy gets amplified, 10 times, 20 times, 50 times, 100 times in other words the “unhappy me”; the Pain Body arises, it flows into that mind structure, the emotion flows into that mind structure, the Unhappy sense of me becomes dreadfully Unhappy and Loves it’s Unhappiness because that’s what it consists of.

Now it is not a foreign body, which lives in you. There is nothing that is not Life Energy.

Even your pain body is life Energy except it is not flowing freely. It’s got stuck somewhere.

And when Energy gets stuck and cannot flow freely pain arise like a river. If a river cannot flow the water accumulates and pressure accumulates. But really it’s beautiful Life Energy.

The water is still beautiful there is pressure accumulating, inside. That’s what the pain body is.
Now, as we bright Presence, this consciousness in o the Pain Body, it can no longer fool you into completely identifying with it.

The presence, as the pain arises, from now on, and many of you are already practicing that. The Pain body comes up and at that moment you will recognize it as the Pain Body. That is the Beginning of Freedom from it. The recognition, when it comes, slight trigger, provocation, even a thought, deep Pain arises, in whatever form, in some people it is a very active pain, active aggressive pain, in other persons it is a Passive form of Pain, “poor little me” victim pain, does not matter which, pain bodies have different qualities in different people.

It maybe turbulence or tightness or constriction, it does not matter what it is. As it arises you will know there is a witnessing presence, and you watch.

Where is the pain body and where do you feel the energy field of it?

In your body.

You can feel it in the solar plexus or stomach area, as a dreadful sense of heaviness.

Some people perceive it as a big hole, a gaping hole inside.  Or intense anger.

But whatever it is you watch it, this is why it is so helpful, you sitting here witnessing, is witnessing Presence which is part of this new state of consciousness. It gets so much strengthened by sitting in this Energy Field.

So the Watcher will be there watching the pain so the pain can not use your mind anymore it can not feed on your thinking because you are watching it directly it cannot creep into your mind and then become an “unhappy me”.

All that’s left of the pain is an energy field of turbulence, or a heavy feeling inside you.

But the pain has not become an “unhappy me” a sense of self, of who you are. That’s the beginning of the end of the pain. But our practice is allowing “what is” to be. And that also applies as long as the Pain Body it there in you allowing the Pain that is there in you Also to be. That is a very powerful practice.

So I am not saying, we are not fighting the pain we are not even trying to get rid of it. You bring the consciousness, which is a very compassionate state of allowing “what is”. It is a very powerful state it implies you are Present. As the one who is able to allow.

You are the one who is able to allow the pain to be. You know you are not creating this pain at this moment because you are practicing accepting “what is”. So it is not pain you are creating, it is old pain.
You bring the “acceptance” to the old pain.

TAGS: eckhart tolle, consciousness, liberation, freedom, awakening, pain body, you are not your thoughts, healing, energy, spirit, 

New Group ‘Wisdom Questions’, St Augustine and Perennial Philosopy

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‘Wisdom Questions‘

 

“Wisdom is the faculty of making the use of knowledge, a combination of discernment, judgement, sagacity and similar powers. If knowledge is the accumulation of facts and intelligence the development of reason, wisdom is emotional and spiritual discernment. More than knowledge, it is the right application of knowledge in moral and spiritual matters, in handling dilemmas, in negotiating complex relationships. Wisdom is nine-tenths a matter of being wise in time. Most of us are often too wise after the event! It is insight into the heart of the matter.” Wise people see beyond the facts and figures. They avoid problems before they occur. Wisdom is gained through experience, patience and listening.       Definition by Evan Owens CEO of CentreSource – HERE

Some questions to ‘kick-off’

 

Does anyone want to make out a case for the wisdom of woman being different to, or the same as, the wisdom of men?

 

Is science the only method for connecting to reality?

 

Do the great wisdom traditions really teach the same about what it is to be wholly & fully human – in the world with others – in relation to the mysterious Whole?

 

Are the arts a means to reality – or just self indulgence?

 

If we base the education of our children on whole-person leaning might they contribute toward a better world?

 

Do we agree with Evan Owens in his definition (see above) ?

 

 


Are (some) children wiser than many experienced adults – if yes why & how is this?

 

Some friends and I are starting a new group – both locally in Brighton and online.  Online details below.

 

The suggested group title is a play on a) the wisdom we have (should) question – ourselves, our world and reality – AND we can have fun, enjoyment and learning in framing questions to ask of ‘our accumulated, or realized, wisdom’!

 

THE WIDER CONTEXT OF PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY

 

Here is an ancient poetic summation of the state of being human, and implicitly of The Perennial Philosophy –  from the Bhagavad Gita;

 

“Like two birds of golden plumage, inseparable companions, the

individual self and the immortal Self are perched on the branches of the

self same tree. The former tastes of the sweet and bitter fruits of the

tree; the latter, tasting of neither, calmly observes.

 

“The individual self, deluded by forgetfulness of his identity with the

divine Self, bewildered by his ego, grieves and is sad. But when he

recognizes the worshipful Lord as his own true Self, and beholds his

glory, he grieves no more.”

 

This so beautifully describes …. well what do you think?

 

Stunningly just yesterday I discovered that St Augustine wrote……….

 

“The fact, which is now called the Christian Religion,” he boldly says, with the earlier Apologists, “existed among the ancients, and was never lacking from the origin of the human race.”  –

C C Martindale SJ –  SOURCE

 

 

Those who want to dig deeper can compare the above two quotations with the contemporary re-presentation of Perennial Philosophy in Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy or Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now or Stillness Speaks – or Ken Wilber or Karen Armstrong, or Wayne Teasdale, or Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thomas Merton or Shaikh Helminski etc. – each I suugest speaks in different language and cultural clothing but teach the same message?

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This is St Augustine not me! –  Lol

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Picture source and helpful list of facts on Augustine & Aquinas by Jeffrey Hays – HERE

 

 

The ‘Wisdom Questions group ON-LINE

 

My contributions to this group’s interests will go to my general blog – https://sunwalked.wordpress.com/ – along with my other core projects

 

1 whole-person learning,
2 photographic art,
3 social justice,
4 inter-spirituality
5 transforming IPF, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis into something life-enhancing

 

i.e. https://sunwalked.wordpress.com/ is a metablog of all my blogs

 

however the dedicated site for Wisdom Questions and inter-spirituality is – http://universalistspirit.wordpress.com/ – you can comment on or add ‘gems’ to either or both!

 

 

All good wishes

 

 

Roger

 

 

 

 

 

When the mote turns in the light: A 10 STEP ‘Barthesian’ course on Street Photography

 

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When the mote turns in the light: A 10 STEP Barthesian course on Street Photography

 

Sub-title: 31 OF THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS ABOUT (STREET) PHOTOGRAPHY

DERIVED FROM ROLAND BARTHES’ BOOK CAMERA LUCIDA


inspired by the annotation by Kasia Houlihan (University of Chicago)

Roger Prentice Ph.D., MA (ACE), B. Ed. (Hons)

1st draft 4th Dec 2011

INTRODUCTION

Although my practice of photography is still at a beginning stage I want to keep up an old habit – that of theorizing my practice and practicing my theory. On the theory side as a starting point I have gone for ‘the big one’ Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida.

 

Barthes’ book Camera Lucida: reflections on photography is more like literature than an academic text.  Indeed its very purpose is to get us to function in a ‘heart-centred’ way, instead of via left-brain classification and logic-chopping.  It is even more like a Zen master’s pointings or teachings. It is profoundly intuitive and insightful about photography in relation to the inner life of being human. It is not in any conventional sense subjective – it is about the very opposite the state of transcending the ego and ironically, given its arguments, it is about living transcendentally in the now.

Camera Lucida provides answers for an enormous range of problems, not just to understanding the true nature of photography.  In particular it is staggeringly insightful about what it is to be human, in the world with others (and the memories of them) and the exquisite place the art of photography can play in deepening our realization of our true selves.

I have taken as a starting point Kasia Houlihan’s excellent summary/annotation to be found HERE   The four sections relate to the 4 paragraphs in Kasia’s original summary/annotation.  To Kasia I will be eternally grateful because it enabled me to stop wandering around in a desert of unmanageable responses to Camera Lucida  – and it saved me from the temptation to dive in to the very large pools of academic writing about Camera Lucida – where I would probably have developed unbearable head-hurt and eventually drowned. Including the 10 Step course this is a framework for further development.

The area of photography that grips me currently is Street Photography.  I discovered the truth in Camera Lucida  two ways a) by doing street photography, however modest my achievements to date and b) through all the work that went into my doctorate – see HERE .

For serious students therefore I suggest the following 10 steps;

 

1) start taking photographs and keep up the practice between every one of the other steps listed here – & get as much feedback as possible.
2) look at photographs a lot – yours, your family’s and those of great photographers,
3) read Camera Lucida, don’t worry about understanding
4) read Kasia Houlihan’s original summary/annotation to be found HERE and this piece (in development) which was inspired by it.
5) read or re-read this listing of 31 major ideas,
6) read articles about street photography – there are a range of starting points – HERE
7) read at least the summaries of my doctorate HERE or work out your own understanding of the human spirit
8) do even more photography
9) read every poem and other literature you can find about photos & photography, look at every painting & dance about light etc. Link photography to transcendent spirituality if you will – there’s a ‘course-on-a-page HERE
10) then and only then read the academic literature on Camera Lucida and Barthes!
Whatever is true here about photography is also true about street photography – in fact I would say it is especially true about street photography.  I intend to write other articles about how this incisive, manageable way into Camera Lucida relates to street photography, to art generally, to spirituality and so on.

SECTION 1

1 The book Camera Lucida sets out to determine a new way of looking at photography.

2 Camera Lucida is about a new consciousness – by way of photography.

3 Barthes seeks a new way of reading and valuing photographs – an altogether customized framework.

4 Barthes’ framework is to be distinct from all existing accounts of classifying photographs.

5 He wants to deal with photographs so as to get at the essence or noeme of photography.

6 Barthes says that he wants, ‘a History of Looking’.   (RP don’t know what is meant but 26e below might be the answer)

7a In his search Barthes attempts to account for the fundamental roles of emotion and subjectivity

7b in i) the experience of and ii) accounting for Photography.

8 Subjective experience of photography (I would say creating as well as reading) has an essential nature—or eidos

9 The essential nature of a photograph is as an index indicating, ‘that-has-been.’

SECTION 2

10 Photography is set apart from all other forms of representation.

11 Previously established ways of classification etc are ‘disordered’ (because they fail to work with the essential nature of photography.)

12 Consequently it is unclassifiable (I suppose compared to say genre classification in film).

13 We need to hold to the fact that ‘the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially’.

14 The essence is the event,

15 The event is ‘that which is never transcended for the sake of something else.’

16 In other words, the photograph is never distinguished from its referent—that which it represents;

17 ‘it simply is what it is’ (I, RP, wonder if this means, “It is what it is because it is indissolubly linked to that which it represents?)”

18 This is illustrated by the fact that one says ‘this is me’ when showing someone a photographic image of oneself, as opposed to ‘this is a picture of me.’

19 When we look at a photograph, it is not the actual photo that we see, for the photograph itself is rendered invisible; (presumably because we see what the photo is a referent of – or see what we are)

20 Consequently the photograph is unclassifiable,

21 Why? – because it resists language, as it is without signs or marks—it simply is. (This is comparable to Lacan’s version of the Real.)

22 Furthermore, the subject that is photographed is rendered object, dispossessed of itself.

23 Consequently it becomes ‘Death in person.’

SECTION 3

24 In his personal—subjective—examination of multiple photographs, Barthes proceeded to note a duality that was characteristic of certain photographs: a ‘co-presence of two discontinuous elements’—what he terms, the studium and the punctum.

25a The studium refers to the range of meanings available and obvious to everyone (RP because we are taught by the culture and society of which we are part).

25b The studium part of these photographs is unary and coded, – the former term implying that the image is a unified and self-contained whole

25c The unary meaning of the studium can be taken in at a glance (without effort, or ‘thinking’).

25d The latter (THE CODING) implies that the pictorial space is ordered in a universal, comprehensible way.

25e The studium speaks of the interest which we show in a photograph,

25f  the desire to study and understand what the meanings are in a photograph,

25g to explore the relationship between the meanings and our own subjectivities.

26a The punctum (a Latin word derived from the Greek word for trauma) on the other hand inspires an intensely private meaning,

26b one that is suddenly, unexpectedly recognized and consequently remembered

26c It “shoots out of [the photograph] like an arrow and pierces me”.

26d It ‘escapes’ language (like Lacan’s real); it is not easily communicable through/with language.

26e The punctum is ‘historical’ as an experience of the irrefutable indexicality of the photograph (its contingency upon a referent).

26f The punctum is a detail or “partial object” that attracts and holds the viewer’s (the Spectator’s) gaze;

26g it pricks or wounds the observer.

SECTION 4


27a The ambiguity of the book’s title lends itself to the many levels on which the text addresses media theory.

27b This ranges from the very materiality of the photographic medium itself

27c to its grander implications for human consciousness in the pursuit of truth.

28a In his efforts to divorce photography from realms of analysis that deny or obscure its essence, Barthes ultimately formulates a new science of photography

28b It is an original framework in which photography steps beyond the shackles of classification and such terms as ‘art,’ ‘technique,’ etc. and, thus,

29a It draws upon an ‘absolute subjectivity’

29b This absolute subjectivity exceeds the normal boundaries of the everyday by moving the activity of viewing from a transparent relationship of meaning and expression to a level in which meaning seems to be there without the presence of subjectivity.

29c It is as if the photograph brings out the unconscious;

29d it also represents the unconscious, while at the same time, it denies all of these relations of meaning.

29e The photograph allows for the sight of self,

29f not as a mirror but as an access point into a definition of identity—

29g but identity associated with consciousness,

29h thus housing a whole;

30a  it is in the photograph ‘where being coincides with self,’ (109)

30b  It is ‘true being, not resemblance.’

31a The photographer, (is) a mediator,

31b S/he is one who (RP potentially & for themselves) supplies the transparent soul its clear shadow,

31c S/he reveals the soul’s value and not its mere identity (110);

31d the photographer, ‘makes permanent the truth.’

MY PERSONAL CONCLUSION

Camera Lucida is more like a revelation, a spiritual text, than a piece of academic writing. I have no no doubt that it’s a work of intuitive, soul-searching genius.  It tells us nothing about the mechanics and technique of photography.  It tells us everything about the nature of being human, in which photographs are a gateway to reading our soul.
We (should) read photographs as we are asked to read the text of the self – with the whole of our consciousness and with truth, beauty, goodness and justice. 

 

As Barthes shows himself, and us, the defining characteristic of photographs (at least the personally affecting ones) is that they show us ‘that which has been’.  They are embodiments of memories. As such they elicit powerful emotions and as such they tell us who we are, which is why when that part of the brain which enables memories is damaged people no longer know who they are, or who people close to them are. In normal health however we can only have a healthy life-supporting relationship with memories, and photographs, if we live reasonably successfully in the now. Living in the now is the only way we can healthily experience ‘that which has been’.

All photographs are self-portraits. In all creating of, and viewing of, photographs we are searching.  For ourselves, for our love, for that mysterious Whole of which we each are an infinitesimally small part.  

We, and our photographs, are each the mote that the ray of light makes visible.  Through them we enter the lucidly lit room.

For me in our ‘plucking from the flow’ the photographs that come to us it is not so much the ‘collecting of souls’, as Thomas Leuthard suggests, but is the embodiment of spirit caught when the mote turns in the light.  That for me is my street, and its flow of (human) spirit, in that genre we call street photography.
 

Image

Photo: Roger Prentice

END

GLOSSARY
1 WikiPedia Indexicality
an indexical behaviour or utterance points to (or indicates) some state of affairs……..
Social indexicality in the human realm has been regarded as including any sign (clothing, speech variety, table manners) that points to, and helps create, social identity.

 

TAGS:

 

Photography, street photography, rogerprentice, roger prentice street photography, photography course, Henri Cartier-Bresson, p

ONENESS: developing our selves via the dance of oneness and duality

In development

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 Oneness is the experience of, and the concept of, all things being ultimately ‘subsets’ of One infinite energy system – matter and energy being infinitely transformable into each other within the oneness we also call the Whole.

EXPERIENCE

Experience is infinitely more important than conceptualization, as the great A J Heschel teaches us ;“Concepts are delicious snacks with which we try to alleviate our amazement.”.  Awe, wonder, amazement, experience of the ineffable are what Heschel leads us back to.  For him they are the reality of being human – concepts are delicious snacks but leave us still  longing for the ‘real thing’

Experiencing oneness is simple – it’s the experience of no-self, as described e.g. by Ken Wilber in his early book No Boundaries.

Experiencing oneness is what you get when the boundaries through which you define your ‘self’ melt away – as in this poem;

“The birds have vanished from the sky,

and now the last clouds slip away.

We sit alone, the mountain and I,

until only the mountain remains.”

(8th Century) Chinese poet Li Po

Whilst concepts are vital to our development in this dualistic world we need to be relieved frequently of the burden of self via such experiences of Oneness – to gain a yin-yang balance.

The challenge is to die before we die.  Experience of Oneness is also called the mystical.  Everyone’s account of such experience is different.  Fundamentalism is the attempt to eliminate this inevitably diversity.  To do this is rather like one of the six blind men, who experienced an elephant, say the one who got the tail, imposing his experience on everyone else.

We can’t have that kind of certainty and uniformity.  Karen Armstrong says fundamentalism is lust for certainty.  Terry Eagleton puts fundamentalism as fear of annihilation.  Tolle and others show us that it is only by identifying with something less that the Whole are we led into forms of exclusivity, the worst aspects of which lead to Sunnis murdering Shia and vice versa, Protestants murdering Catholics and vice versa.

Dieing before we die is as Tolle, and others, teach to stop identifying with forms and allow ourselves to ‘disappear’ into the formless Whole – at least until the laundry needs doing, or wood needs chopping and water carrying.  If only all Moslems knew, really knew, what Rumi and Ibn al-Arabi, for example, say about these deeper aspects of spirituality, reality and what it is to be human.  There are also Christian co-equivalents of course and of course they are largely peripheralised by the churches and the church power-mongers.

Awareness of that Whole stays with us as ‘presence’ via very simple practices such as those taught by the great and beloved Thich Nhat Hanh.  He, and Buddhism as a whole,  teaches mindfulness –  as simple as breath consciousness.  Happiness is mindfulness that enables concentration that engenders insights that allow us to let go negatives.  Letting go negatives is largely the same as dieing before we die.

The true mysticism at the heart of the great world wisdom traditions shows us that in spite of cultural differences the essentials are the same – many paths; one summit, many gateways; one garden.  The account of this is called perennial philosophy – a somewhat stupid name because its not philosophy per se.  It’s really the practices that enable us to a) awaken, b) disolve the illusory ego and b) learn to better serve others.  That is it’s not about conceptual snacks but primarily it’s about the awe, wonder and the ineffable.

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THE CONCEPT
Now for the concept.  Now I/we are inevitably going to stumble over words!

Whether you see One as Gaia, the Whole, God etc is a matter of choice/accident/tradition/geography/education.  For me they are all pointing to the same reality.

If you choose to see the ‘One’ as God, God doesn’t have to be some inane anthropormorphised version!  God forbid!

Buddhists don’t talk about God because there is no point in talking about that which is beyond talk, concepts, language and mind.  That’s why Zen masters ‘point’!   And talking about ‘it’ is to not talk about it – because you can’t talk about that which is non ‘it-able’.  By non-’it’able I mean you break any perception into subject and object.   You can’t thingify the Whole/Oneness/God. You can’t turn the Whole/Oneness/God into an it, an object, a thing – therefore there can be no me and it, no subject and object.  Why?  Because it is then no longer the Whole – and in any case any one person’s take is finite and subjective!

The other reason I suspect that the Buddha avoided talk about God-stuff is that ordinary people lead themselves or others into nonsense and then into imposing nonsense and then into cruelty and murder of other human beings.  Hence the insanity of man on man violence – caused by what Tolle admirably calls the ‘collective pain-body’

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The oneness we achieve is not a unification.

A unification suggests that the two bodies that become united are somehow on an equal footing.  We are finite Whole/Oneness/God is infinite, the finite can ‘know of’  Whole/Oneness/God, but not ‘know’ in the sense of completely understanding.  This is why many religionists say a Messenger or ‘Manifestation’ is necessary to act like an electrical transformer to knock down the infinite current of the Whole/Oneness/God to a level of current that we as finite forms of consciousness can take in without getting blown apart.

The ‘know of’ versus ‘know’ distinction can be approached via a sun analogy.  We feel the warmth of the sun and see by its light but could never embrace it in its entirety.  Correspondingly we can experience the warmth of God’s love and the light of God’s knowledge by reflecting them in our own being, behaviour and words.  Such teachings as this are to be found at the heart of ll true wisdom traditions – Sufism, Buddhism. It is important to find a teacher or several who is the real McCoy and will not lead us into negatives.  Tolle as far as I can tell is as sound as the perfect Buddhist bell!

Metaphors, analogies and allegories always have limitations. The best I know is the ‘drop and the Ocean’ analogy.

But the drop is simply a ‘liquid mote’ thrown off from the infinite Ocean (i.e you or me).  This mote, you or me, suffers from the illusion of separate, self-generated, independent existence – until it wakes up – to Oneness.  That is scary

As the beloved Thich Nhat Hanh says, “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” Thich Nhat Hanh SL p504.  Hence his re-presentation of  Buddhist philosophy as ‘interbeing’.  As Abdul-Baha also says, “All is one”.

Oneness is a matter of our being willing to stop asserting, for a while, that we have separate, independent identity. Our eternal existence derives from God’s existence, not from our identifying with David Beckham’s aftershave or Cheryl Whatsit’s latest bit of  twaddle – or our self-assertion that I am a ‘writer’ or a ‘teacher’ or whatever.

Our salvation and assured eternal existence derives from the particular admixture of those virtues, names and attributes of God with which we have been endowed via our parentage.  That admixture exists at birth in potential form.  It gets manifested via the degree of
excellence of the parenting and education we receive plus in adult life the effort, the will, we exert to reflect those virtues, names and attributes.  That is our eternal soul.  That is our heaven, our oneness in this life and the next.

The oneness is to let go and let be.

The being that is ‘let be’ here is God, because there is nothing other than God – the ‘Sun’, the Sun’s rays (the Holy Spirit) and the Creation that the sun’s rays illuminate (make apparently real as part of God’s learning ‘machine’ for us) is all that there is.

Creation is not separate from the Creator. We as the apex of Creation are not separate from the Creator – but along with everything else we are His emanation. The emanation of His Creativity is permanent because He is eternal.

In development

Interfaith inter-spirituality and Spiritual Federalism – a videos course on a page

Interfaith as Spiritual Federalism gateways and teachers to feeling at one with the great wisdom traditions – an interfaith inter-spiritual & Perennial Philosophy ‘course on a page’!

I came a long time ago to the understanding that there are many paths but one summit.  I wanted a deeper sense of connection with other wisdom traditions.  I wanted to feel the kind of nourishment that believers in those wisdom traditions feel.  I wanted a gateway and a teacher that would give the connection I desired.

One key idea to come out of this is Spiritual Federalism – is the next goal for interfaith work?  It’s an alternative to conversion mania.  The world may have ended by the time the Christians have converted the Jews or Muslims the Christians or the Baha’is everyone else.  Indeed conversion mania may bring the world to its end!  Spiritual Federalism is simply the idea that if you are comfortable in your current wisdom tradition so be it.  But if you have a universal heart and wish to reach out to find the oneness behind the various traditions you are like an American citizen – you belong to your State, Texas for example, but you are also, via federalism, an American.

These are the Paths, the Teachers, the Teachings and a video introduction for what I have to date;

Interspirituality, Perennial Wisdom, Universalism and Integral Studies – great teachers who show the oneness beyond the diversity (some of these teachers apply to more than one category!)

THE PATH – Inter-religious/mystic

THE TEACHER – Bro Wayne Teasdale

THE TEACHING – Book

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO

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THE PATH – Perennial Wisdom

THE TEACHER – Eckhart Tolle

THE TEACHING – Books

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO 1  VID 2

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THE PATH – Universalism

THE TEACHER – Karen Armstrong

THE TEACHING – Books

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO

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THE PATH – Integral Studies

THE TEACHER – Ken Wilber

THE TEACHING – Books

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

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8 Major wisdom traditions

1 THE PATH – Sufism

THE TEACHER – Shaikh Kabir Helminski

THE TEACHING – Books

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO

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2 THE PATH – Baha’i Faith

THE TEACHER – Abdu’l-Baha

THE TEACHING – Books  

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO

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3 THE PATH – Christianity

THE TEACHER – Brother David Stendahl-Rast

THE TEACHING – Books

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO

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4 THE PATH – Buddhism

THE TEACHER – Thich Nhat Hanh

THE TEACHING – Books  

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO

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5 THE PATH – Hinduism

THE TEACHER – Eknath Easwaran

THE TEACHING – Books

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO

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6 THE PATH – Judaism

THE TEACHER – Abraham Joshua Heschel

THE TEACHING – Books

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO

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7 THE PATH – Quaker Universalism

THE TEACHER – QUG

THE TEACHING – US articles

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO

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8 THE PATH – Taoism

THE TEACHER – Deng Ming-Dao

THE TEACHING – Books

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO

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……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Two more important figures

THE PATH – ’Science+ mysticism’

THE TEACHER – Albert Einstein  

THE TEACHING – Books

VIDEO Intros. – VIDEO

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THE PATH – Holistic Education

THE TEACHER – Prof John P ‘Jack’ Miller

THE TEACHING – Books

VIDEO Intros.  – VIDEO

CONCLUSION: Through these teachers I am an inter-faith-ist, an inter-spiritual-ist,  a Universalist, an intermystical-ist, a student of perennial wisdom, a Traditionalist i.e. someone committed to the mystical core of all true wisdom traditions.  

I therefore am at least a  Muslim, a Baha’i, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Jew and a Taoist – light is light in whatever in shines – providing men, and its usually men, have not obscured the light with a black shade of their own making!


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UPDATED July 15th

MEDITATION: take a 60secs time-out

Take a 60  second time – out of the day’s hustle and hassle.

Light a candle – as the Chinese proverb says

“It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness”

At work or home or out and about:-

“Light is light for us all whatever the source.”

Every now and then through the day be silent and still, starting with

just a few moments.

Enjoy three conscious breaths.

By just doing the three conscious breaths you can be still and silent –

without words muddying the water of consciousness.

If words must come in say with Zen master Thich Hahn’ teaching;

Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.

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Let your breath breathe you – bringing you back home to Wholeness and anchoring you in the now.

Let whatever thoughts or feelings emerge arise to the surface.

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As you breathe see your mind as a movie-theatre.

Witness each thought or feeling that arises

entering onto your inner movie screen, left or right, up or down.

Don’t resist or chase any thought or feeling just witness them.

Say to each thought or feeling that arises

“Hello.  Welcome.  Thank-you.  Goodbye.”

Then see the thought-feeling exit left, or right, from the movie-theatre.

Smile.

Breathe the breathing.

Let the breathing Breath breathe you.

Sense the Whole to which we all belong.

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Invite the quietness.

Be still.

Smile.

Breathe into your stillness.

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Give thanks.

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Return slowly to the here-and-now.

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SHORT COMMENTARY

On returning to our world of dualities we find concepts –

“Concepts are delicious snacks with which

we try to alleviate our amazement.”

( A J Heschel)

As a whole we should fly with two wings – the nonduality of ‘oneness via unitive meditation‘ and the duality of ‘me and my concepts & things‘.

Both wings are needed.

When meditatively, we are in amazement/awe/wonderment we are at-one, nondual, ego-less or ego-quietened.  We rest as Awareness.  I = no-self Awareness.

When we return to thought as in thought-forms ‘I-me’, ‘I-IT’, ‘I-we’, ‘I-thou’.’ In thought-forms – we always have duality, subject and object, twoness.

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Neither is bad, together they are wings though which to fly spiritually.

Work only one wing and we are crippled – flapping on the ground going round and round in circles.

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Nonduality is where we let go and instead let be the Universe, the Source, the Whole, Ultimate Reality, God (choose your preferred term). We rest as Awareness.  “I = no-self Awareness.”

Duality is where we chop wood, carry water, do the laundry, feed the kids, earn a living………………….

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Hooray for our two wings of being!

We are a being with Being.

The core of all Traditions is One.

There are many paths upward but only One Summit.

“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.” – Meister Eckhart

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Updated 6/06/2017

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Dear Steven Pinker: on language, concepts and beyond.

Dear Steven Pinker

Thanks for a very enjoyable lecture.  (17mins 41 secs)

You clearly know more about language than I will ever want to know!  

My problem is with what I sense is an assumption beneath the lecture.

To me the assumption feels something like this.  Human ‘internality’ is mind. Mind is concepts.  Concepts are very closely related to items of language.  

An alternative is this – internality is conciousness and movements in consciousness.  Perhaps ‘heart-mind’, ‘xin’ in Chinese is a better label – so that we don’t pin feelings to inferiority and inferiority to particular groups. e.g. women or ‘new men’.  

Heart-mind itself can be seen much deeper than concepts or feelings – the stillness beyond the agitation of the mind as in Tolle’s  ‘Stillness Speaks‘

Perhaps then we could say that ultimately language is the means by which we (might/could/should) come to understand that human reality is beyond language?

New slant on having, knowing, being and doing

It’s always great when a new idea bursts in your mind – or simply a new slant that puts in focused place long-held but vaguer ideas.

 

This for me was such an idea;

 

‘What you do is what you you’ve got’.

 

It came from here;

 

 

 

With Eckhart Tolle however I would say that having, knowing, being and doing have more than complex interactions, they have the context of silence – from which their truths arise.

 

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True achievement, success and happiness lie in being fully and positively human –

through our caring our creativity and our criticality –

developed via service to the communities to which we belong.

All postings to this site relate to the central model in the

PhD. Summaries are HERE

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On this site there are 1000+ ideas that you can put to work straight away.

“Why not use the SEARCH, CATGORIES or INDEX to find the ideas for you?”

What’s the difference between spirituality and religion?

What's the difference between spirituality and religion?
What's the difference between spirituality and religion?

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How do you answer the question above?

Below is how far I have got with this issue.

Spirituality is how we relate to the unknown and unknowable – to Ultimate reality – and the meaning and motivation we derive therefrom.

Our worldview, as a consequence, is how we ‘read’ the world. Our worldview includes that of which are conscious, plus that which derives from enculturation.  Becoming more fully conscious of Oneness, and acting accordingly, is our purpose.

Religion is the agreed set of relationships, teachings and customs held in common with any religious group of which one has membership.

Progress in spirituality is measured by regularly bringing oneself to account – in relation to the standards of your spirituality, world-view and religious group/s (if any).

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Etymological issues:

The English word “religion” is derived from the Middle English “religioun” which came from the Old French “religion.” It may have been originally derived from the Latin word “religo” which means “good faith,” “ritual,” and other similar meanings. Or it may have come from the Latin “religãre” which means “to tie fast.”

Doing your own research:

A very good starting point is provided by the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance.  See HERE

The definitions I like best from this source are;

George Hegel: “the knowledge possessed by the finite mind of its nature as absolute mind.”

Paul Tillich: “Religious is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern”

Others are;

The Religious Tolerance group tell us that David Carpenter has collected and published a list of definitions of religion, including:

Anthony Wallace: “a set of rituals, rationalized by myth, which mobilizes supernatural powers for the purpose of achieving or preventing transformations of state in man or nature.”

Hall, Pilgrim, and Cavanagh: “Religion is the varied, symbolic expression of, and appropriate response to that which people deliberately affirm as being of unrestricted value for them.”

Karl Marx: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Don Swenson defines religion in terms of the sacred: “Religion is the individual and social experience of the sacred that is manifested in mythologies, ritual, ethos, and integrated into a collective or organization.”

Paul Connelly also defines religion in terms of the sacred and the spiritual: “Religion originates in an attempt to represent and order beliefs, feelings, imaginings and actions that arise in response to direct experience of  the sacred and the spiritual. As this attempt expands in its formulation and elaboration, it becomes a process that creates meaning for itself on a sustaining basis, in terms of both its originating experiences and its own continuing responses.”

He defines sacred as: “The sacred is a mysterious manifestation of power and presence that is experienced as both primordial & transformative, inspiring awe & rapt attention. This is usually an event that represents a break or discontinuity from the ordinary, forcing a re-establishment or recalibration of perspective on the part of the experiencer, but it may also be something seemingly ordinary, repeated exposure to which gradually produces a perception of mysteriously cumulative significance out of proportion to the significance originally invested in it.”

He further defines the spiritual as: “The spiritual is a perception of the commonality of mindfulness in the world that shifts the boundaries between self and other, producing a sense of the union of purposes of self and other in confronting the existential questions of life, and providing a mediation of the challenge-response interaction between self and other, one and many, that underlies existential questions.”

My final question – “Why are there so many religious intolerance groups?”

To read the full article by the Religious Tolerance group go HERE

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True achievement, success and happiness lie in being fully and positively human –

through our caring our creativity and our criticality –

developed via service to the communities to which we belong.

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the

PhD. Summaries are HERE

An open letter to all who recognize Oneness

goldenrule-poster

An open letter to all who recognize Oneness

 

Dear Fellow Travellers

 

1) Like your lives my life, (in a modest way), has (for the last 45 years), been dedicated to;

 

‘the advancement of education in the consideration of the basic unity of all religions, in particular by the provision of courses to provide an understanding of the relationship of man to the universe, the earth, the environment and the society he lives in, to Reality and to God.’

 

and right now the global and local opportunities, and dangers, strike me as unparalleled.

 

2) The great challenge seems to me to concern ‘the how’ of getting wider acceptance of Oneness and oneness as in Perennial Philosophy and the The Golden Rule – raised consciousness that will positively affect decision-making in all of the vital arenas of human concern.

 

3) A great shift in consciousness is taking place.

 

The great shift in consciousness is evidenced by two events.

Firstly in just the last few years what was esoteric is now open and freely available to to all.

 

Secondly millions are responding – in some way shape or form.

 

I have in mind especially the work of Ken Wilber, Karen Armstrong and most recently Eckhart Tolle.

 

Tolle’s writing is highly accessible – in the UK most Sun and Daily Mirror readers could handle it.

 

Of course functional literacy and level of consciousness and not directly correlated! But eleven million had by Week 3 tuned in to Tolle’s course run by Oprah Winfrey – see HERE

 

….. Oprah went further with Eckhart Tolle than she has ever gone with a previous author picked for her book club. She chose to present, with Tolle, a 10-week series of “webinars” – online seminars – with one chapter of the book (which she puts on the bedside table of all of her guest rooms) discussed each week. In the first webinar, transmitted on 3 March, Tolle led Winfrey and the millions of viewers who logged on in several different countries in silent meditation; viewers were then encouraged to submit questions to Tolle via Skype. By the third week, 11 million people were logging on.

 

This surely has no parallel in the whole of humankind’s spiritual history. The course is HERE

 

Not only are ‘the books open’ but there is more than Maslow’s 2% willing a new earth.

 

The question is how can their energy be harnessed and focused for the common good – or do we have to wait until the first nuclear war, simply because those who ‘know’ can’t find ways and means to influence those who actually ‘do the doing’ and make our world as it is.

 

4) We need to be thinking ‘outside of the box’. The old ways may not be sufficient. Keeping the candles of light and hope and truth is something that the precious few have done down through the ages, but now the challenge is to shift up to a larger stage.

 

For example inter-faith dialogue may well be effete (and for some cunning PR) compared to the people who really operate at the ‘hot interfaces’ – e. g. diplomats and business-people.

 

5) Absorbing and responding to this fact seems to me to be the challenge that might bring forth balm for suffering being borne by untold millions.

 

A sufficient proportion of America has said ‘Yes we can’ but even more critical than the decisions Obama will be making over the next 4 or 8 years is how can the light of Oneness be brought into the darkened hearts of religious haters and racists. That Oneness is the Tipping Point. The

‘tipping-point’ is realization of that Oneness – and it needs more than abstract assent.

 

6) My personal experience has led me to realize that individuals need something real and living and breathing through which to connect with ‘foreign’ wisdom traditions.

 

I believed in the oneness of religions long before I came across

a) Jane Clark’s article on Ibn al-Arabi – which created for me a living connection to Islam – and

b) the Bhagavad Gita Chanted in English HERE using a text of the Bhagavad Gita in English HERE

NB Try listening to the chanting whilst reading the text – wonderful! – transporting!

These gave me a living connection to Hinduism.

 

7) Starting points:

 

Perhaps looking very closely and deeply at ‘reverse fundamentalism’ is the way to generate programmes of positive action.

 

Karen Armstrong as you probably know is being given the opportunity to raise up the principle of the Golden Rule via her ‘Charter for Compassion’ campaign see HERE

 

Perhaps making celebratory programmes free to all on the internet…..

 

Perhaps Golden Rule materials free online for Heads and school…….

 

Perennial philosophy and the ‘federal’ Golden Rule – the ‘world language’ to be taught, in addition to their own religions, so that all can communicate with those of other faiths ……

 

What do you think?

 

We who have striven to keep the candles alight have to contribute to ways and means of reaching a sufficiently wider audience to get established some of the foundations for a new earth.

 

All blessings on the further development of your work.

 

Roger

Ten ways to bridge and transcend racial and religious hatred

coexist-perennial-philsoophy-inter-faith1

 

 

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The campaign Charter for Compassion are asking for contributions for the final charter.  Here is my first draft contribution;

Compassion and Peace: ten ways to bridge and transcend racial and religious hatred

 

1 See the Golden Rule as the equivalent to a language in addition to your own – “My ‘mother tongue’ is Islam/Christianity/Buddhism etc but I also speak ‘the Golden Rule’ – so that I can be a sister/brother to peoples of all religions and none.

 

2 Implore people like Barack Obama to spend money on deepening cultural understanding – say 10% of the military budget switched to Arabic/Islamic, Chinese and Russian studies. Generate an ‘open data-base’ of experience learned.

 

3 Encourage all countries to massively increase exchange programmes.  Send everyone with a ‘We’ve got these problems how are my host country dealing with them’ pack – and require a thorrough de-briefing upon return to home country – we must see that the most important problems are held in common, and that we must pool answers.

 

4 Use the knowledge as a data-base for university and school respect for other cultures courses – instead of allowing our societies to continue falsely claiming that the mad fundamentalist minority = the reality of the whole communuity.

 

5 Get celebrity goodwill ambassadors for the GR – include business people , they have more interchange with ‘foreigners’ than any other group.  Get pop groups talking and singing about it.

 

Get Barack Obama talking about it – and Nels Mandela, and Archbishop Tutu etc.

 

6 Start teaching the Golden Rule – one school at a time – everywhere.

 

7 Generate badges, widgets and bling for websites, windows, clothing that conveys messages such as – ‘I speak oneness and diversity’. ‘We support the GR’, etc (Get some adverstising agencies working on it).

 

8 Support studies of fundamentalism – focus on ways and means antidotes and prophylactics.  The best writers on fundamentalism may not be in obvious academic fields – the best I have found is 

 

9 Look for ‘out of the box’ solutions such as brilliant comedians such as Omid Djalili and Shazia Mirza.

If you don’t like strong comedy don’t go – but I suspect that Omid, and the others have ‘lanced more religious boils’ for the general population than all of the politicians and academics put put together!

 

10 Support ways and means for deeper applications of the Golden Rule – we need courses from nursery to university epecially based on the brilliant writings and work of a) Eckhart Tolle, b) Ken Wilber and c) Karen Armstrong.

Eckhart Tolle article HERE

Happiness as nowness: 31 inspirational quotations for December

 

Do photographs live in the now? If so how - where and when and with whom?
Do photographs live in the now? If so how - where and when and with whom?

My chosen favorite quotations for December and mainly about enlightenment, ‘now’ and the importance of living in the now.  They are not by Eckhart Tolle – but by an extraordinary variety of writers, even though Tolle is the outstanding teacher about now-ness.   My thanks espcially to two of the very best sources of quotations online WisdomQuotes and the Quote Garden

 

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RUMI

1 Into my heart’s night / Along a narrow way / I groped; and lo! the light,……. – Rubaiyat of Rumi

 

ANON

2 Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. – Anon (?)

 

VIKTOR FRANKL

3 “The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” — Victor Frankl

 

W.B. YEATS

4 “Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it.” – W.B. Yeats

 

MARK TWAIN

5 ‘Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.’ Mark Twain

 

BUDDHA

6 “Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.” (Buddha)

 

SENECA

7 “The greatest remedy for anger is delay.” (Seneca)

 

KEVIN KELLY

8 There is only One machine.

The web is its OS.

All screens look into the One.

No bits will live outside the web.

To share is to gain.

Let the One read it.

The One is us.

Kevin Kelly (see YouTube)

 

KAREN ARMSTRONG

9 “Like poetry, religion is an attempt to express the inexpressible.” – Karen Armstrong

 

M SCOTT PECK

10 Love = “The willingness to extend myself for the spiritual growth of myself or another”. (From “The Road Less Travelled”).

 

ANON and ECKHART TOLLE

11 The voice of God is silence

 

ANON and GHANDI

12  He/She/It has no religion.

 

ANAIS NIN:

13 The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.

 

ANAIS NIN:

14 We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

 

ANNE FRANK:

15 How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

 

ARTHUR MILLER:

16 The word now is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.

 

BRENDA PETERSON:

17 The Hopi Indians of Arizona believe that our daily rituals and prayers literally keep this world spinning on its axis. For me, feeding the seagulls is one of those everyday prayers.

 

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN:

18 Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.

 

CORITA KENT:

19 Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.

 

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING:

20 Light tomorrow with today!

 

GWENDOLYN BROOKS:

21 Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. 

And be it gash or gold it will not come 

Again in this identical guise.

 

HENRY FORD:

22 History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.

 

HUGH PRATHER:

23 To live for results would be to sentence myself to continuous frustration. My only sure reward is in my actions and not from them.

 

THICH NHAT HANH:

24 Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life..

 

JOANNA RUSS:

25 Faith is not contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler’s bet: it’s an act, an intention, a project, something that makes you, in leaping into the future, go so far, far, far ahead that you shoot clean out of time and right into Eternity, which is not the end of time or a whole lot of time or unending time, but timelessness, the old Eternal Now.

 

KALIDASA:

26 Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!

Look to this Day!

For it is Life, the very Life of Life.

In its brief course lie all the 

Verities and Realities of your Existence.

The Bliss of Growth,

The Glory of Action,

The Splendor of Beauty;

For Yesterday is but a Dream,

And To-morrow is only a Vision;

But To-day well lived makes 

Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,

And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.

Look well therefore to this Day!

Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

 

MARGARET BONNANO:

27 It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day to day basis.

 

MATTHEW ARNOLD:

28 Is it so small a thing 

To have enjoy’d the sun, 

To have lived light in the spring, 

To have loved, to have thought, to have done…

 

PEMA CHODRON:

29 Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. In other words, if we’re going to be more cheerful in the future, it’s because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.

 

ROBERT FROST:

30 Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON:

31 The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

Reflections inspired by Eckhart Tolle: 1

Could we experience stillness, oneness and Self without brain, mind and concepts!
Could we experience stillness, oneness and Self without brain, mind and concepts!

Perhaps arguing with Mr Tolle might be more accurate, great teacher though he is!

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.  When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness.  This is the I AM that is deeper than name and form. Stillness Speaks p.3

IMHO

1) It makes sense to distinguish between self and Self.

Self is Source/Wholenesss/Ultimate Reality/God etc, but unless you admit the usefulness of self as well no communication or pleasure or learning or anything is possible.  So its not yourself its your (true) Self – that gives meaning, purpose and en-formed identity.  If there is only Self talking to Self ad infinitum it is just God having perpetual inner dialogue.

2) The World is anything, at any moment, that stops us being in touch with Self.

4) I am as well as I AM – and that was God’s will.  The duality is the key dynamic in His ‘Great Big Teaching Machine’ – i.e. embodied reality – in this world – with others.  The ultimate extended metaphor of physical reality is another way to refer to His ‘Great Big Teaching Machine’.

5) ‘Name’ and ‘form’ is the means by which we come to discover namelessness and formlessness.

Federalism of spirit – or will there have to be another 1000 Mumbai massacres?

The branches of a tree don't make war on each other!
The branches of a tree don't make war on each other!

I added this post to an earlier piece but I think it is worth posting and developing because it contains an idea that is new to me!  The difference is that I place it here in the discussion concerning the recent massacre in Mumbai.

The suggestion is that the idea of federalism – politically it works well in many countries – could and should be popularized as a key to the peoples of the world relating more successfully at the religious ideological level.  Perhaps this could be termed ‘Federalism of spirit’ – the harmony that cherishes diversity.

How can we prevent massive amplification of hatred?  What would be a starting point forward?    The teaching of the Golden Rule in all schools would be a great step forward – (SEARCH articles on the Golden Rule on this site).  But I’m suggesting that we teach, step-by-step, a Universalist world-view in addition to whatever is the majority religion.   Just as I am British, Chinese or Kenyan I am also first and foremost a human being.  Similarly I am proudly and faithfully a Christian/Moslem/Buddhist, or whatever, but I can also be a Universalist through recognizing;

1) The Golden Rule,

2) the essential Oneness of the mystical core of religions – Perennial Philosophy – and that

3) we are simply all emanations of one Source.

The deal at the moment for many is this – if I have a strong faith I am compelled  because of ‘exclusivity of truth’  to hate all deemed to be ‘other’.  If we all were Universalists as well as being of a particular tradition we could dialogue more profitably instead of killing each other.  Federalism works – even without oceans of blood as precursors.

Of course there are other elements and needs in the mix – the  need for greater political justice, the prevention of plain old crime etc. but shifting the world’s mind-set through teaching the Universal alongside the particular would improve matters enormously.

Eckhart Tolle is probably the most accessible proponent of Perennial Philosophy – the United nations should emply him and Karen Armstrong as Goodwill Ambassadors!

Perennial Philosophy, or mysticism, in one sentence

 

j0182665

Perennial Philosophy, or mysticism, in one sentence

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“We can be happy, and serve others well,

if we realize our true Self

by detaching ourselves from the egotistic lower self –

through our step-by-step becoming aware

of the stillness beneath the noise.”


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This is the mystical core of all of the great world wisdom traditions.


If you don’t have the time to delve deeply into one or all of the religions read Eckhart Tolle’s The New Earth and do this course presented by Oprah Winfrey – HERE


Roger’s ver as at Nov 30th 2008


What’s your version?

Set your goals to motivate your success – through ‘singing’ your ‘uni-verse’

j0178537

In my work as a life-coach I lead people to develop and focus their life-force so that they can get from where they are at, to where they want to be.

Getting in tune with your self and your life’s purpose is central to such achievement and success.

Getting in tune with you self and your life’s purpose is a matter of harmonization – of vision, goals, plans and action  and of head, heart and circumstances.

To ‘sing one’s song’ is a metaphor for finding and staying tuned with your life’s purpose.

Harmonization is also a matter of getting in touch with our inner wisdom.  Chinese wisdom places great emphasis on harmony.  Inner and outer harmony are both important.

Outer harmony depends on inner harmony.
Inner harmony depends on being, doing and having in relation to our life purpose – i.e. getting alignment.

We need to get alignment between head and heart, and between the activities of our inner and outer lives. Then we get ‘flow’ – when we are able to function in energized harmony – like an athlete ‘in the zone’.

Episodes of silence are vital.

If we are in a situation we don’t see as getting us toward our dream then ‘see it differently’ – that is see it as a stepping stone, as opposed to a mill-stone!

Decide on your life’s purpose – don’t worry it will evolve via experience – and further reflection.

Locating, tuning and singing your ‘song’ also requires a sufficiency of silence and experiences of living in the now – see my Eckhart Tolle articles and better still read and listen to Eckhart Tolle.

Just DECIDE and START!   (‘Ready. Fire. Aim!)

Set your goals – and work your goals day by day.  How? – here’s one way great way.

For every day draw 4 circles.

1st circle =   My Lifelong Dream,

2nd circle  = My Year,

3rd circle  =  My month,

4th circle =   My day.

Keep the 4 circles of your personal universe in harmony via working to your daily goal-setting.

The ‘universe’ as Wayne Dyer reminds us means ‘one song’.

Live your life singing your single, harmonised, song and you will succeed.

Harmony here is what enables us to be focused, and motivated.

Plan and work every day to achieve toward your monthly goals – etc.

Periodically adjust them all according to each other, so you have the motivation of always operating in a single, harmonized universe.

Keep the dream sharply visualized.

Don’t be afraid of adjustments – think of life as a ship’s journey – course corrections are inevitable and necessary.

Occasionally remind yourself of these two quotations;

1 “If you don’t think about the future, you won’t have one.” Henry Ford

2 “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke’s statement takes us even deeper by telling us that we create our future by what we are.

Balance doing, knowing and having with being.  The current master of ‘being’ is – Eckhart Tolle.

If you don’t plan your journey don’t be surprised if you end up somewhere you don’t want to be!

Have fun singing your song – literally as well as metaphorically.

Keep the dream – even if a ‘credit crunch’ means you have to do stuff that is a temporary delay.

Sometimes just surviving is the biggest step you can make that particular day – but that day in the future will be seen as being just as important – because you didn’t give up!

Survival is sometimes progress.

Sometimes survival is the best singing of your song possible on that particular day.  It’s still worth celebrating – you can’t sing at your own wake!

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I once used What’ll we do with a drunken sailor as a class song but be careful, a full rendition of all verses would remove all desire to go on living!  Others might be shocked as to how brutal was the British Navy of that time.

What’ll we do with a drunken sailor,
What’ll we do with a drunken sailor,
What’ll we do with a drunken sailor,
Earl-aye in the morning?

Chorus:
Way hay and up she rises
Patent blocks o’ diff’rent sizes,
Way hay and up she rises
Earl-aye in the morning

1. Sling him in the long boat till he’s sober,
2. Keep him there and make ‘im bale ‘er.
3. Pull out the plug and wet him all over,
4. Take ‘im and shake ‘im, try an’ wake ‘im.
5. Trice him up in a runnin’ bowline.
6. Give ‘im a taste of the bosun’s rope-end.
7. Give ‘im a dose of salt and water.
8. Stick on ‘is back a mustard plaster.
9. Shave his belly with a rusty razor.
10. Send him up the crow’s nest till he falls down,
11. Tie him to the taffrail when she’s yardarm under,
12. Put him in the scuppers with a hose-pipe on him.
13. Soak ‘im in oil till he sprouts flippers.
14. Put him in the guard room till he’s sober.
15. Put him in bed with the captain’s daughter*).
16. Take the Baby and call it Bo’sun.
17. Turn him over and drive him windward.
18. Put him in the scuffs until the horse bites on him.
19. Heave him by the leg and with a rung console him.
20. That’s what we’ll do with the drunken sailor. Source

You won’t believe the background to this song see WikiPedia HERE

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NB This article was inspired by Steve Chandler’s brilliant ‘100 Ways to Motivate Yourself’, one of my Top 10 Personal Development texts.

‘God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere’:Definitions of God and Religion

427px-creation_of_the_sun_and_moon_face_detail-wikipediaOh no this won’t do Mr M.!

Spiritual maturity, as related to religion, is a function of two things.

Firstly the degree toward which the ‘believer’ manages to de-anthropomorphise God, and gain a grown-up understanding of Ultimate Reality.

Secondly the ability to feel and think and do without attachment to ‘thumb-sucking’ supports – they vary with each individual.

The pay-off?  We consequently learn to live with justice as the conditioning influence of all we see, think and do – we come to see through his own eyes and not through the eyes of another.

God of course by definition is undefinable.

Here is one definition that defies that indefinablity AND manage to capture the essence of the combined immanence and transcendence of the theological position known as panentheism;

“God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.”

Anonymous, ‘The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers‘ (12thC)

Here are some other attempts -less satisfactory;

To define God is to limit Him. Still it seems inevitable that man should do that in order to get some edge to which his mind may cling. – Heywood Broun

When I was fifteen years old or so I came up with a definition of God to which, in my old age, I come back more and more, I would call it an operational definition. It reads as follows: God is the partner of your most intimate soliloquies. – Viktor Frankl

God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, Ah! – Joseph Campbell

We know God easily, if we do not constrain ourselves to define him. – Joseph Joubert

God… a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive. – Ayn Rand

A stimulating, and largely satisfactory phenomenological definition of God is;

The philosopher Michel Henry defines God in a phenomenological point of view. He says: “God is Life, he is the essence of Life, or, if we prefer, the essence of Life is God. Saying this we already know what is God, we know it not by the effect of a learning or of some knowledge, we don’t know it by the thought, on the background of the truth of the world ; we know it and we can know it only in and by the Life itself. We can know it only in God.” (I Am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity).

This Life is not biological life defined by objective and exterior properties, nor an abstract and empty philosophical concept, but the absolute phenomenological life, a radically immanent life which possesses in it the power of showing itself in itself without distance, a life which reveals permanently itself. A manifestation of oneself and a self-revelation which doesn’t consist in the fact of seeing outside of oneself or of perceiving the exterior world, but in the fact of feeling and of feeling oneself, of experiencing in oneself its own inner and affective reality.

As Michel Henry says also in this same book, “God is that pure Revelation that reveals nothing other than itself. God reveals Himself. The Revelation of God is his self-revelation”. God is in himself revelation, he is the primordial Revelation that tears everything from nothingness, a revelation which is the pathetic self-revelation and the absolute self-enjoyment of Life. As John says, God is love, because Life loves itself in an infinite and eternal love. See HERE for more

The Baha’i view is also panentheistic;

In the Bahá’í Faith, God is described as a single, imperishable God, the creator of all things, including all the creatures and forces in the universe. The connection between God and the world is that of the creator to his creation. God is understood to be independent of his creation, and that creation is dependent and contingent on God. God, however, is not seen to be part of creation as he cannot be divided and does not descend to the condition of his creatures. Instead, in the Bahá’í understanding, the world of creation emanates from God, in that all things have been realized by him and have attained to existence. Creation is seen as the expression of God’s will in the contingent world and every created thing is seen as a sign of God’s sovereignty, and leading to knowledge of him; the signs of God are most particularly revealed in human beings.

The above two are more less long-winded – why not just say with the blessed Anonymous from the 12thC “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.”

Each of us, each and every part of Creation is a ‘sunbeam’ shining out of the Whole.  All is Spirit.  Spirit with a capital ‘S’ is the Whole, the ultimate Oneness, Mystery, ultimate Reality……God (not anthropomorphised) if you prefer.

All that isn’t Spirit per se is spirit-as-emanation, emanation set aside in each case for a special purpose.  The rock is spirit-as-emanation set aside for the purpose of manifesting the rockness of a rock.  The tree is spirit-as-emanation set aside for the purpose of manifesting the treeness of a tree.  The human being is spirit-as-emanation set aside for the purpose of manifesting the positive and noble humanness of a human being.

What would be a starting point forward?    The teaching of the Golden Rule in all schools would be a great step forward – SEARCH articles on the Golden Rule on this site.  But the Universalist world view, including the panentheistic perspective enables something much more importanta federalist position.  Just as I am British, Chinese or Kenyan I am also first and foremost a human being.  Similarly I am proudly and faithfully Christian/Moslem/Buddhist or whatever but I am also a Universalist through recognizing

1) The Golden Rule,

2) the essential Oneness of the mystical core of religions and that

3) we are all emanations of one Source.

Probably no idea has more power to overcome the seemingly endless capacity for suffering and creating suffering than this; ‘There are many paths to the summit but only one summit’.

Revised Dec 01 2008

Back to the Eckhart Tolle discussion – intellectuality & the mind are as spiritual as prayer & meditation

sun-and-plant

In the context of discussion with contributor ‘Patrick’ I offer a contribution to the issues I raised concerning the brilliant Eckhart Tolle. I do this via a beautiful poem that describes, with exquisite simplicity, the mystical experience of non-duality, or oneness. The poem is by the renowned Chinese poet Li Po;

The birds have vanished into the sky,

and now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountains and me,

until only the mountains remain.

Li Po (701-762)

IMHO

1 Clearly for Li Po there was, to start with, on that occasion, duality.

2 I’m assuming that Li Po returned from non-duality, back in to duality – unless he sat there until his bones turned to dust.  I assume he returned in order to do the laundry, chop wood, carry water.  Of course he would now do them on the bed-rock of enhanced consciousness derived from his mystical/aesthetic experience of non-duality.  Both wings of being human would be beating – as he scrubbed and carried and chopped. Enlightenment is now – if we let it.

In this world – the contingent world, the world of duality, the ‘Kingdom of Names’ – the complementarity of duality and non-duality is the key. Duality is not a curse, or a failing. When in dynamic inter-relation with non-dual experience it is heaven and perfection. Without non-dual experience it is hell, including the hell of relativity. The purpose of life is not just transcendence and timelessness – it is also immanence and being in time, moment by moment. Complementarity is the key.

3 The non-duality or mystic state is the same as the state of creativity (or the truly aesthetic experience).  We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ as we say in modern parlance.  Art  and ‘religion’ are not similar, they are the same – as Coomaraswami says.  It is the forgetting of self, a loss of ego boundaries, a letting go and letting God etc.  But the artist as well as the mystic comes out of the non-dual state back into the dual state. – and s/he becomes someone who lives with what s/he has created. What s/he has produced might even be a bit of a shock – a bit like the dumb panda who jumps when she sees that something is moving on the floor beneath her i.e the cub to which she has just given birth.  The artist becomes nurturer/appreciator/critic – more or less. They in duality are the left-brain evaluator (criticality mode) to complement their non-dual right-brain creativity mode. Complementarity is the key. One mode, and only one mode is in the foreground at any one time. Duration is from milliseconds to hours in the case of non-duality.

4 The question is are both states normal, desirable and, if the term is acceptable, God-given, i.e. both part of the life’s teaching-machine from which we are supposed to learn.  Or is one state bad, immature, to be got rid of, so that we can be non-dual 24/7?

5 Intellectuality is not the same as intellectualism, just as individuality is not the same as individualism.  In both cases the first is normal, healthy, proper, desirable.  In both cases the second is excessive, unbalanced, undesirable and pathological.  The same difference incidentally exists between sexuality and sexual-obsession. Tolle IMHO makes the mistake of not distinguishing between ego and the egotistic. He also can give the impression that he is trying to invalidate mind per se instead of distinguishing between true mind and the neurotic egotistical mind, trapped as it is by attachment.

Awareness, raised consciousness, is true mind. True mind is ‘xin’ heart-mind, interiority bathed in the light of the intellect and the warmth of true love, without attachment to forms – derived from the complementarity of the modes of duality and non-duality. ‘Without attachment to forms’ doesn’t mean without love of forms. Forms are the means (the only means) by which we can come to understand the essentiality of formlessness.

True love as Tolle says is realization of oneness – complementary to which is the glory of diversity.

God loves our celebrating diversity with Him as much as wanting us to realize oneness.

The one who is awakened is a one as well as a not-one – the Buddha was not non-Buddha – at least as a gateway, a pointer.

Spirituality or transcendence or consciousness is not increased by a diminution of intelligence, or more correctly a diminution of intellectuality. The intellect as enlightened heart-mind is the human spirit. Enlightenment comes from realization of the true Self, as opposed to self, that is the eternal. Unlimited Whole, the Silent One, God the Father, God without Name, the Nameless One etc.

Complementarity is the key. Yin is lovely only in the balanced presence of yang – and vice-versa.

6 ‘Before all else, God created the mind.’ (Koranic tradition)  The intellect is the supreme gift of God to man, the pinnacle of the way in which we are made in His image – providing we realize that all rivers flow back to the one Ocean, from which those parts also have their origin. Complementarity is the key.

7 The fear and misunderstanding of the term ego. The ego is simply the part of the self – the dimension or mode – that deals with immediate reality. As such it is neutral – like the heart or lungs or kidney. Whether it is healthy or diseased – now that is a different matter. The ego is as much part of the enlightened one as with the crass self-obsessive.

God celebrates His Creativity in the uniqueness of me, as well as in His Creation of our species.

We believe what we believe – some we choose to believe, some is ingrained.

The happiest of worlds is one where we can believe different things without feeling an obligation to kill each other! Complementarity is the key.

The ultimate sickness is to know who you are through knowing who you hate.

Enough

Namaste!

The web is only 5,000 days old – Kevin Kelly on predicting the next 5,000 days

The Web is only 5,000 days old.  Kevin Kelly’s reading of the next 5,000 days he summarizes as;

There is only One machine.
The web is its OS.
All screens look into the One.
No bits will live outside the web.
To share is to gain.
Let the One read it.
The One is us. Kevin Kelly

Curiously mystical?  I wonder what the connection here is with Eckhart Tolle?

Kelly of course discussing the web in terms of it becoming our ‘global brain’, but doesn’t mention that this phenomenon was coined by Peter Russell in 1984 – now that was a truly inspired prediction!

Is Eckhart Tolle anti-intellectual?

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A thoughtful respondent stimulated me in to raising a few more issues re Eckhart Tolle, so here they are.

Is Eckhart Tolle in his teachings anti-intellectual – or at least might he be playing into the hands of anti-intellectualists?

My perspective is from within a Perennial Philosophy and Universalist world-view, as is Wilber and Tolle.

So, in my understanding:-

You said:

‘Tolle does not speak of ‘non-duality as everything’. But he speaks of duality and our relationship to it often.’

The ‘it’ that relates to the non-duality I am arguing is part of the design – not just a deficiency on our part!

Does he celebrate duality as one of the two wings of being human, in this world with others. Or does he say, or imply, that the non-dual is not just desirable but the only goal – to such an extent that a newcomer might think, “I’m not good, I’m not normal, I’m not a true Tolle-ist (God forbid – but I bet it happens) unless I experience complete non-duality 24/7.”

I guess my question is, “Would God’s Creativity have failed if for all humans there was 24/7 non-duality?”

I want to argue that non-duality is the goal and indispensable to unity, peace, stability, conflict-resolution, an end to suffering etc. BUT being in duality is also normal, beautiful, testing, the source of compassion and empathy etc. It is more than just the darkness to the realization of the beauty of light.

I don’t underestimate the collective pain-body and collective insanity that continues to rule our world.

Duality is THE means of all growth and development – up to the need to realize non-duality. It’s the name of the game in this world. My understanding is that babies don’t immediately realize that they are separate beings from their mothers – although the birthing process and daily experiences get that process going pretty quickly!

My point is that although duality is not the goal – it is the means, and a means without which we would neither realize the essentiality of non-duality nor would we have the means to accomplish the realization of it.  We have to feel separate to realize at-one-ness. If this is the case then both non-duality and duality are part of the game – and part of God’s great teaching ‘machine’.

So in my view we come to realize that we need (at least in this world) two wings – not one wing and a useless stump! To change metaphors – the purpose of life is for the drop to lose itself in the Ocean – not all the time but sufficiently deeply and sufficiently often to become the conditioning bedrock for all of our living within duality. The dynamic is where knowledge comes from – and duality is not just a design fault or sin!

I have the same problem with an even greater ‘genius’ Ken Wilber. God speaks via duality as well as non-duality, He speaks via subjectivity as well as objectivity AND He speaks via mind and reason as well as their opposites.

A separate, but vitally connected subject concerns the nature of the pain-body and how it relates to mind and thought. The great Tolle also gives the impression that the mind is virtually the same as the pain-body. I would say the the ‘egoic-mind’ = the pain-body – or more accurately the pain-body is the habituated shadow-self created in us via our egoic responses.

He should be ‘condemning’ the egoic-mind not the mind! The mind free of the egoic pain-body = a ray of the Holy Spirit. I don’t think because I’m sinful, I think because I am made in the image of God! Tolle is at risk of giving the mind and thinking a really bad name, whereas they are, when free from the egoic pain-body, first in Creation – the very purpose of Creation.

I have the same problem with (possibly) an even greater ‘genius’ Abraham Joshua Heschel.

You said:
‘When a person is not in the now, it is natural to ask where they should be, because there is an inner sensing that they are not where they belong.’

The ache you refer to is when we haven’t realized that we already have enlightenment, and that it is simply a matter of ‘letting go and let God’. When we have had experiences of non-duality, and re-cognize them and re-alize them, the wood chopping is in the enlightenment and the enlightenment is in the wood chopping!

You said:
‘When you are not in the now, God continues on. Your presence in the now, or not, has no effect on God.’

Yup! The sun shines whether I choose to face it and reflect it or not.

You said:
‘Duality is not ‘not non-being’. Duality is the natural state of the world of form. Seeking an understanding of ‘non-duality’ is not the only thing to do in life, but understanding ‘non-duality’ gives one a profound foundation for all of living.’

Yup! – Beautifully put.

You said:
‘All knowledge comes from consciousness, and you are consciousness. So when you behold, or categorize, the inter-play between duality and non-duality, you, that is consciousness, has created knowledge.’

Ah but what is ‘you’?

For me your term ‘inter-play’ is the key – it indicates the dynamic between experiences of duality and of singleness: me-not me, me and ‘the greater whole of which I and all other phenomena are emanations’ etc.

The explanation that works for me goes like this. I ask of my Spirit a question. My Spirit answers, and lo the light breaks forth. The ‘I’ of course is the egoic self and the Self, ultimately, is God within. But it is more then the pain to which I am addicted – it is God’s Creativity via difference (diversity) – complementary to His/Her/It’s creativity via sameness.

Ultimately I suppose I’m arguing that to deny God’s Creativity in His creation of difference is to deny some aspect of Him/Her/It that cannot be denied. I, and you and him and her and them, are important outside of  complete self-abnegation in non-duality!  Hooray – vivre la difference – I want dia-logos from you as well as silence, I gratefully acknowledge the dia-logos within me as well as the speechless silence of complete self-abnegation!

The ‘me’ is vital – along with experiences of non-duality – for God to perpetually continue His Creation-emanation. The film projected needs a screen. Every lily of the field is different or unique as well as belonging to the same species.

If you accept the temporary naming of the un-nameable both are part of God’s teaching machine. Difference as well as sameness reveals. The uniqueness as well as the sameness of each of us ‘reveals’ – to us and to others. It is ‘me and non-duality’ that gives rise to development in consciousness, which gives rise to the kind of knowing to which you refer.

This ‘knowing-that-comes-through-raised-consciousness’, comes to us as a ‘gift’ without book-learning and academic study. It is the majority of what we know.

An Islamic (hence Arabic terms) and Bahá’í distinction helps (me) here;

SOURCE: Two words for knowledge, but very different kinds of knowledge. Ilm can be acquired by education and training and through the exercise of reason. Irfan is higher knowledge, or gnosis, that can only be acquired by, first, education, and then contemplation under the guidance of a master. The guidance would include spiritual training in zikr, music (sama) and meditation. Ilm is expected to lead to the sober contemplation of God as both Creator and Judge—his awesome power– whereas irfan may lead to ecstasy as a person is simply overwhelmed by God’s immense beauty and falls in love with that Beauty.  SOURCE

The sheer weight of emphases in Tolle might give the impression that mind and thinking = bad. Whereas although the soul is infinite because it is ultimately God, and the mind is finite, the two are essential – from our perspective. Religions can suffer from anti-intellectualism as well as what a friend calls ‘adminology’ in which the essential heart is set aside in favour of jurisprudence and nit-picking.

I am wondering if Tolle, understandably, started from the (to me erroneous) Western view that separates heart and mind, as opposed to the Chinese view of heart-mind – ‘xin’.

I don’t think Tolle is anti-intellectual but I wish he would celebrate a bit more the other wing of being human – duality, without which non-duality would not be.

******

May the Nameless One, who some call God,  finish raising up the Self-actualized 2% , the yeast for the bread of humanity!

Maybe He/She/It already has and they are just really badly organized!

“How does the energy generated by Tolle actually get transformed into social action and social transformation?”

Now that’s a really challenging question!

Photo source: Microsoft Clipart

Don’t forget the chocolate Mr Eckhart Tolle – enlightenment and wood-chopping, awe and concepts, the Whole and the parts.l

Light is light in whatever lamp it shines
Light is light in whatever lamp it shines

“Concepts are delicious snacks with which we try to alleviate our amazement.” – A J Heschel

Yesterday I wrote a short open letter of questions to Eckhart Tolle.

I also wrote a short introduction to the Dictionary of Concepts in development on a sister site allied to this one.  The latter in part answers the questions.   The introduction to the Dictionary reads;

Everything here on this site, and its allied sites, is about how we have to balance the myriad parts of life, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the Whole – from which everything emanates, including us.

The 1000+ ways or categories are also concepts, and HERE the concepts are gathered as a Dictionary

But our interest in concepts needs to be balanced with interest in the Whole from which all things emanate and take form, and to which they return – in the formless and infinite.

The Whole is nameless because it cannot be conceptualized.  In terms of our experience we can briefly lose ourselves in the non-duality of the infinite Whole.  This is beyond the logic-chopping of religions (and the illogic-chopping!) .  ‘God has no religion’.  God is no-thing.  We can only point – and be silent.  Silence is the language of God.

On the site there is a place you can go, to take you beyond concepts HERE.  Let the few words dissolve as you realize the oneness of the light, and the silence that, embraces others all around the globe, who also rest right now, in the now, and the silence – and let go their egoic forms.

The greatest need humanity has is for all peoples to realize that they are the cells of a single body. That realization comes as we learn to live in the now, and the silence beyond all concepts – that is to feel the Whole.  This has been the mystic teaching, the perennial philosophy, to be found at the heart of all of the world’s wisdom traditions – but so often obscured by the dust of human egotism.

But for those who love chocolate, and beautiful landscapes, and sailing and beautiful bodies we have, during our time in this world, to fly with the wing of ‘duality’ – as well as our experiences of non-duality.  After enlightenment the comes the water carrying and wood chopping.  After the water carrying and wood chopping – enlightenment.  The two are complementaries – at least in this world.  Hooray!   Hallelujah!  Amen!  Om!  Pass the chocolate!

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GIF by candleworld

Questions for Eckhart Tolle

jigsaw-from-the-air

Dear Mr Tolle

You speak as though non-duality is everything, instead of one wing of the bird of being.

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When I’m not in the silence of now where should I be?

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When I’m not in the silence of now is God being less Creative?

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If duality is not non-being what are the standards, whilst in duality – surely they are more than seeking non-duality?

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Am I wrong in thinking that knowledge flows from the dynamic inter-play between duality and non-duality?

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The Credit Crunch and Managing Motivation

waterskyrock

The Credit Crunch and Managing Motivation: goal-set to motivate your success through ‘singing’ your ‘uni-verse’

In my work as a life-coach I energize people to get from where they are at, to where they want to be.

Getting in tune with your self and your life’s purpose is central to such achievement and success.  Getting in tune with you self and your life’s purpose is a matter of harmonization.

Chinese wisdom places great emphasis on harmony.  Inner and outer harmony are both important.

Outer harmony depends on inner harmony.

Inner harmony depends on being, doing and having in relation to our life purpose – i.e. getting alignment.

We need to get alignment between head and heart, and between the activities of our inner and outer lives. Then we get ‘flow’ – when we are able to function in energized harmony – like an athlete ‘in the zone’. Episodes of silence are vital.

If we are in a situation we don’t see as getting us toward our dream then ‘see it differently’ – that is see it as a stepping stone, as opposed to a mill-stone!

Decide on your life’s purpose – don’t worry it will evolve via experience – and further reflection.

Just DECIDE and START!   (‘Ready. Fire. Aim!)

Set your goals – and work your goals day by day.  How? – here’s one way great way.

For every day draw 4 circles.
1st circle =   My Lifelong Dream,
2nd circle  = My Year,
3rd circle  =  My month,
4th circle =   My day.

Keep the 4 circles of your personal universe in harmony via working to your daily goal-setting.

The ‘universe’ as Wayne Dyer reminds us means ‘one song’.

Live your life singing your single, harmonised, song and you will succeed.

Harmony here is what enables us to be focused, and motivated.

Plan and work every day to achieve toward your monthly goals – etc.

Periodically adjust them all according to each other, so you have the motivation of always operating in a single, harmonized universe.

Keep the dream sharply visualized.

Don’t be afraid of adjustments – think of life as a ship’s journey – course corrections are inevitable and necessary.

Occasionally remind yourself of these two quotations;

1 “If you don’t think about the future, you won’t have one.” Henry Ford

2 “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”  – Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke’s statement takes us even deeper by telling us that we create our future by what we are.  The current master of ‘being’ is Eckhart Tolle.

Have fun singing your song.  Keep the dream – even if a ‘credit crunch’ means you have to do stuff that is a temporary delay.

Sometimes just surviving is the biggest step you can make that particular day – but that day in the future will be seen as being just as important – because you didn’t give up!

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NB This article was inspired by Steve Chandler’s brilliant ‘100 Ways to Motivate Yourself’, one of my Top 10 Personal Development texts.

Twenty things to remember about Eckhart Tolle

What isn't and what is this contemporary mystic teaching?
Eckhart Tolle

Ten things to remember about Eckhart Tolle.

What isn’t Eckhart Tolle saying and doing?

He has impacted on my life as he has on millions of others.  In addition to his general spiritual illumination of our lives and of reality I am interested in how he can illumine specialist areas of life including teaching, parenting and management.  However this first post is an attempt to separate what he is doing and saying from what he isn’t.  Why?  Well take a look at the cistern of hate and mis-representation that has poured out from ‘Christians’ and others on YouTube and elsewhere.

1 He is not a religionist.

2 He has not started a religion.

3 He is not speaking from the point of view of inter-faith but meta-faith or pan-faith and beyond.

4 He doesn’t speak from within a religion, or about others’ religious beliefs.

5 He avoids religion, and thereby teaches the purest heart of religion.

6 His life has been in three stages.

7 Before the age of 29, there was extensive ‘dark-night-of-the soul’ experience.

8 At the age of 29 he had a transformative experience.

9 The subsequent 35 years, his life’s work, has simply been a commentary on that transformative experience.

10 The 35 years is itself split into two phases, the first of which was 30 years processing the experience – via reflection, study and articulation.

11 The writing of his few books, has been over the last half decade, and the meteoric rise in their and his popularity over just the last year or two.

12 He is a Universalist, and one who most of the time avoids the trigger words that set off fundamentalists and ‘exclusivists’ and other professional haters. (That hasn’t stopped a rag-bag of fundamentalists and ‘exclusivists’ and other professional haters from attacking him, especially since Oprah gave him a platform!)

13 He is existentialist by tone and direction.

14 He is not a theologian (thank God), but he is closest theologically to panENtheism.

15 He avoids scholarship (thank God) as one of many ego-traps that potentially ensnare any of us.

16 He is quintessentially the doer as opposed to the talker – but via talking about non-talking and non-duality!

17 He is quintessentially a Universalist.

18 He is directly in the tradition(s) of all of the great mystics.

19

20

I haven’t decided on the 18th and 19th – which ones would you add to the list?

The WikiPedia entry on Tolle is a good place to start if you want to know more about him.

Photo source Flickr