A blog on understanding your 'self' – and for lovers and teachers of interfaith as inter-spiritual living. It's an ongoing stream of interspiritual Nondual & interfaith resources for realizing happiness by finding our way home to our true Self.
Tolle in Chapter 7 of A New Earth brilliantly separates out the timeless from the necessity of ‘clock time’;
The elimination of time from your consciousness is the elimination of ego. It is the only true spiritual practice.
When we speak of the elimination of time, we are, of course, not referring to clock time, which is the use of time for practical purposes, such as making an appointment or planning a trip. It would be almost impossible to function in this world without clock time.
What we are speaking of is the elimination of psychological time, which is the egoic mind’s endless preoccupation with past and future and its unwillingness to be one with life by living in alignment with the inevitable ‘isness’ of the present moment.
I had the temerity to put two of my photographs with a sublime piece of writing by A J Heschel:
The search for reason ends at the shore of the known;
on the immense expanse beyond it
only the sense of the ineffable can glide.
It alone knows the route to that
which is remote from experience and understanding.
Neither is amphibious:
reason cannot go beyond the shore,
and the sense of the ineffable
is out of place where we measure, where we weigh…….
Click separately to enlarge…
Citizens of two realms, we must all sustain dual allegiance:
we sense the ineffable in one realm;
we name and exploit reality in another.
Between the two we set up a system of references,
but can never fill the gap.
They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody,
as life and what lies beyond the last breath.
The tangible phenomena we scrutinize with our reason,
The sacred and indemonstrable we overhear with the sense of the ineffable.
Heschel A. J. (1971), Man is Not Alone, New York: Octagon Books p.8
What is life? What is photography? How far is photography an extended metaphor for the mystical?
Lo, the Nightingale of Paradise singeth upon the twigs of the Tree of Eternity, with holy and sweet melodies…… Baha’u’llah (Baha’i Faith)
…….there’s no getting away from the fact that photography is a chaotic art, that its subject is chaos. Time can’t be posed. One click of the shutter and it’s a bird on a branch; another, and the bird has flown.
Life is a set of opportunities to realize, or fail to realize, our true Self. We do this via encounters against the reality of that which is eternally good, true and beautiful.
Heschel tell us that to be human is to be conscious of the difference between what we are and what we are called to be. That’s the reality of human beings being human – that gap between what is and what ought be. But like so many great souls I suspect he had, for minor erring a sense of compassion, empathy and humour.
Heschel also said;
“Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine. … to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.”
What has photography to do with this?
1 Photographs potentially bridge time and timelessness. Photographs are very pro-vocative as well as e-vocative.
2 Photographs seem to counter Heraclitus, “You cannot step twice into the same stream. For as you are stepping in, other waters are ever flowing on to you.” They are about delusions as well as illusions.
3 They are opportunities to shift our consciousness between time and timelessness – to the reality of that which is eternally good, true and beautiful. Sometimes we do.
4 They are opportunities to self-learn, to shift from data, information and ‘knowledge’ to wisdom. Sometimes we do. Mostly we stay with regret, nostalgia ……
5 Photographs kid us that when we view one we can see what was – when in truth we can see only what is.
6 They act like embodiments of our desire that cannot – ever – be satisfired. (satisfired – an interesting typo in this context!) Every photograph offers the opportunity t shift from ‘not-having’ to beingness.
7 Life and photographs are a set of opportunities to realize the timeless from within the womb of time. Ultimately as
What’s the spiritual connection?
Eternal mystical truth and reality shows that;
“We can be happy, and serve others well,
if we realize our true Self
by detaching ourselves from the egotistic lower self –
through step-by-step becoming aware of the stillness beneath the noise, and the timelessness beneath the time.”
The eternal moment is timeless. The photograph also exists outside of time and in the eternal moment.
This is why photography is such a complex and tantalizing extended metaphor of the spiritual life. There is no better text to start to explore photography as a metaphor of the time-timeless conundrum than The Ongoing Moment. I have listed some reviews HERE
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.
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.
Soul Needs - One Garden 