The beauty of practice is that it transforms us so that we outgrow our original intentions – and keep going! Our motivations for practicing evolve as we mature.
Between life’s stimuli and our habitual responses exists choice.
At the Integral stages of development, the entire universe starts to make sense, to hang together, to actually appear as a uni-verse – a “one world” – a single, unified, integrated world that unites not only different philosophies and ideas about the world, but different practices for growth and development as well.
The whole game is undone, this nightmare of evolution, and you are exactly where you were prior to the beginning of the whole show. With a sudden shock of the utterly obvious, you recognize your own Original Face, the face you had prior to the Big Bang, the face of utter Emptiness that smiles as all creation and sings as the entire Kosmos – and it is all undone in that primal glance, and all that is left is the smile, and the reflection of the moon on a quiet pond, late on a crystal clear night.
In other words, this world is not a sin; forgetting that “this world” is the radiance and Goodness of Spirit – there is the sin.
That is, my experience is that when the bodymind is strong and healthy – not ascetically starved and despised – it is all the easier to drop it, transcend it, let it go.
When most people are happy, it’s not really fun until you can share it with someone, especially someone you love, a mate or a friend.
Nihilism and narcissism are not traits that any leading-edge can actually operate with.
She runs in my blood and beats in my heart; she is part of me, always, so I don’t have to picture her to remember her.
Suffering is not just “negative”; it is a bond through which we all touch each other. Suffering, truly, is the first grace. Dear.
And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself.
I saw only the glory of green emeralds, and radiant buddhas walking everywhere, and there was no I to see any of this, but the emeralds were there just the same.
Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever.
And so now, today, one cannot think of the greats – Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Marx, Fichte, Freud, Nietzsche, Einstein, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Schelling – the whole Germanic sphere – without thinking, at some point, of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Sobibor and Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Chelmno. My God, they have names, as if they were human.
The cure for the disaster of modernity is to address the dissociation, not attempt to erase the differentiation!
As Wittgenstein said, “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
Thus, to see all memory as present experience is to collapse the boundaries of this present moment, to free it of illusory limits, to deliver it from the opposites of past vs. future. It becomes obvious that there is nothing behind you in time nor before you in time. You thus have nowhere to stand but in the timeless present, and thus nowhere to stand but in eternity.
The only way I could discover how to help someone was by listening. Only when I heard what they were trying to say could I get a sense of what they needed, of the issues they were confronting at that time, of the kind of help that would really help at that specific moment.
Thought is sequential, successive, one-dimensional, while the real world presents itself as a multidimensional, non-successive, simultaneous pattern of infinite richness and variety; and trying to make the one grasp the other is like trying to appreciate a beautiful landscape by looking through a narrow slit in a fence or trying to take in a Renoir painting by microscope alone.
The culture was constantly telling us one thing, and the realities of society were consistently failing to deliver it – the culture was lying. This was a deep and serious legitimation crisis: a culture that is consistently lying to its members simply cannot move forward for long.