Most of what I am writing is as much a reminder to me about where to look as it is anything. It is about things that I am learning or remembering that arise from a deeper place than my searching mind can see to. If we want to experience our lives and our selves directly and authentically we must learn to look beyond words and ideas. We must learn to let go of our need for authority and the expertise it offers and at times insists upon. We must learn to look in a different direction than these conventional efforts are leading us. If we are to look to a place that is more inherent and that is not found through reductionist, mechanical and empirical methods and when we have seen past all of this we will remember.
Spirituality is Knowing Ourselves
Published on May 4, 2012
Life for me is about discovering the straight forward truth about myself. It is not abour pursuing some mystical illusion about how the world is. I know that if I was afraid to see the truth spirituality would have no interest for me. It takes courage to look at the self honestly and to be open with the world about what we are and to face this with honestly. But on the other hand if we do not than we continue to act life out in a delusional unreal way. More than anything I would like to be able to know myself deeper in my relationship with other and I would like the same for them. This is the way to live a full life. However it may seem if we are not coming to know oursleves deeper we are missing what we need to know to live life fully.
Skillful Ignorance
Published on May 3, 2012
There is much about relationship that causes me to feel vulnerable. Yet the great love that I have for another can cause me to stay in the situation exposed to my vulnerability. I have avoided any experience of vulnerability in the past because of the the large amount of fear that it seems to initiate in me. I can be elaborate about finding ways out of it. I am finding it to be an absolutely new and extremely uneasy experience to stay with my vulnerability and not to react and run or attempt to numb or avoid it. I look for assurance from the one that I love at times which she is happy to do and that seems to soften the fear temporarally and than it returns. I can see and sense that it is the ultimate opportunity for me to face and open to my fear and embrace my vulnerability in love. What else is there to do that can soften the pain. I can always follow my past way of succumbing to the fear and continue with my elaborate and cunning efforts in ignorance. It saddens me to think that I have lived this way all of my life not choosing to go beyond and finding it not so difficult to find reasons to run from love and myself. I know now that it is not about the other. It is about coming to see truth for myself and in myself.
Holding Back Nothing
Published on May 2, 2012
Holding Nothing Back
Tami Simon speaks with Mark Nepo. Mark is a poet, philosopher, and spiritual teacher who is the author of numerous books and audio projects, including the New York Times #1 bestseller The Book of Awakening, which made the list of Oprah’s Ultimate Favorite Things. With Sounds True, Mark has created an eight-session audio learning course called Staying Awake: The Ordinary Art. In this episode, Tami has an intimate conversation with Mark about the two most important lessons he has learned from his journey with cancer, the role of effort and grace in our lives, what it means to take “the exquisite risk,” and how we can shift our perspective to see with the eyes of the heart. (73 minutes)
Questioning Our Perceptions and Our Thinking
Published on April 25, 2012
In all our education, training and teaching we seldom really undertake a way of exploring that encourages us to look at what we truly are. The closest we get is anatomy of the human. Philosophy sometimes explores these concepts and some of the great philosophers have explored them from a more contemplative and not so intellectual and/or academic point of reference. How can you scientifically explain the self and consciousness that we experience? Where does it come from.? Some of the German romantics like Kant, Hegel and my favourite Goethe explored and questioned what we are and what thinking is in a very insightful way. Descriptions of the self, and consciousness can sometimes be more amenable to a poetic expression.
In Buddhism contemplation of ” What I am “ is a key aspect of practice. In contemplating this we might see as Tibetan Buddhists have that at present, our body undoubtedly seems to be the center of our whole universe. We associate it, without thinking, with our self and our ego. This thoughtless and false association continually reinforces our illusion of their inseparable, concrete existence. Because our body seems so convincingly to exist, our “I” seems to exist, and “you” seem to exist, and the entire illusory, dualistic world we never stop projecting around us looks ultimately solid and real.
When we die, this whole compound construction falls dramatically to pieces.
Something Living Through me
Published on April 24, 2012
I am fortunate that I am able to now see the effort that I have made to engage in distractions for most of my life. I can also see how others are unconsciously indulged in them and it helps me to understand how humans individually and collectively have become trapped in this place of limited seeing. I wonder with the degree that the world is engaged in distraction how others will come to the necessary insight. The habitual urge to react in a way that lives to survive and prosper is compelling but I am able to see the folly of this more clearly these days. Sometimes I have the sense that there is a watching of this organism occurring that is somehow a part of what I am and have been. Even though I am able to act in a way that is influenced by awareness there is something of me that experiences grief if I abandon my past urges and than I am able to remember again that there is an essence that is greater that I am and that I am a part of, that is looking to express life through me. There is something eternal and unknowable through rational thought that has been present a long time before human kind appeared. I know nothing of what it is. If I can let go of my conditioning I can only understand by the way of intuiting that it is a part of me and that I am meant to be in a way that is unfolding from it. My efforts to grasp on to something that is permanent and unchanging thwart me from this awareness. Life somehow has much greater depth than the experience of self fixation can allow for me to see in a conventional way.
I think that the collective here in Germany are content to live in the German way
And that Germany is much better off with someone that is focused on externals, efficient and led in their thinking in a rational and calculated way. However much of a folly that I see it to be. It is a knowledge cut off from wisdom more than it is an inteligence and it leads us in a questionable direction.
I cant be in this way. I have chosen another way in my life and I have no regrets about that except in doing so that I might lose someone precious along the way.
But I have to be truthful about what I am.
The ways of looking to the external world for amusement and meaning does not give me the satisfaction that others derive from it. I find this way to be a distraction that makes deeper enjoyment more difficult.
Germany and Germans seem to be looking to a place of acting in a way that ensures security and identity. It has been quite a challenge to overcome this quality of distraction here in Germany and than again at the same time a very clear indication what we on this planet have to transcend.
Open Heart Open Mind
Published on April 23, 2012
This exerpt is from Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s Open Heart, Open Mind at the Tricycle Book Club.
From the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we fall into exhausted sleep, most of us are confronted with so many challenges: social, psychological, ecological, and economic. Given the current troubles of the world economy, the harmful effects of global climate change, the occurrence of natural disasters and epidemic illnesses, and the persistence of acts of violence by individuals and groups, the world in which we find ourselves can seem like a ticking time bomb, moments away from exploding.
Our interior lives, meanwhile, mirror the various dysfunctions of the external world. We’ve become experts at multitasking the possibilities of disaster. Our minds work like perpetual news channels, complete with big windows showing the main story of the moment, side windows showing stock and weather reports, and “crawlers” providing the latest, often sensational updates.
Or is it the other way around? Could the trauma evident on the world stage reflect a fractured internal image—a conflict between our longing for well-being and the fear, loneliness, and despair we acquire when someone or some situation inflicts a wound upon our hearts that seems impossible to heal?
As human beings, we find ourselves in an uncomfortable position of balancing thoughts, feelings, and actions over which we can acknowledge some conscious control, and mental, emotional, and behavioral habits formed by factors beyond conscious awareness. For many of us this discomfort feels as though we’re living a double life. A shadow seems to stalk us, a self behind the personality we consciously acknowledge and present to the world. Identifying and coming to terms with this shadow, for most of us, can be an unsettling experience.
