My Favourite Quotes

Quotes

“The more that you love and trust yourself, the more in touch you become with your intuition.”  Raven Ishak

 

 

“In Madrid, the father looks up, and then replies to his son: “That’s the Milky Way. Don’t you remember learning about it?” “Yeah…,” the boy answers. “I just didn’t know that you could actually see it.” The father looks back up, then removes his glasses. They both stare and stare.”  David Abram – In the Ground of Our Unknowing

 

“We will not fight to save what we do not love.” Stephen Jay Gould

 

“You cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.”

 

“Nothing matters at all, and this is why everything does.”
Look: the sun pierces the tunnel; the belly of the Mother is seeded again as another year begins. Something will be born when the summer comes. You do not need to catalogue it, understand it. You do not need to learn anything at all from it.

You can just watch it come.

Cultures that last are cultures that do not build. Cultures that last are cultures that do not seek to know what cannot be known. Cultures that last are cultures that crawl into their chthón  (Earth) without asking questions. Cultures that know how  to be, that look at the sun on the mountain, and say, yes, this is the revelation.”
Paul Kingsnorth “Finnegas”  19/03/2020

 

“We live in a culture that is embedded in unquestioned beliefs passing as truth. These beliefs are the source of our current crisis. We attempt to solve the problems of degradation of our environment and climate disruption, but we do not look at these core beliefs. We hold on to the idea that capitalism is the only right way to organize an economy, that democracy is essential to our freedom, that freedom itself is a core ingredient to our happiness. We believe corporate slogans such as “Progress is our most important product” (General Electric), and subscribe to the belief that technology will solve whatever problems we have, even the ones caused by technology.” Norton Smith

 

“Unsustainable growth in politically volatile and water-stressed regions is a time-tested recipe for disaster.”  Ashish Sinha and Gayatri Kathayat

“Visit the great US Southwest whilst you don’t have to bring your own drinking water. Sky McCain

 

“We stand on the cusp of social and political disintegration, bequeathed to us by oligarchs who have seized total power. The ruling oligarchs will stymie all attempts at reform. This makes a crisis inevitable. Once we enter this crisis, the oligarchs will become the most potent enablers of despotism.”

Chris Hedges  November, 2019

 

“Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.”

Rachel Carson

 

“Life is a voyage, a discovery, including the discovery of death. It is about seeking truth, but also about experiencing wonder and awe, the capacity to love. The most fortunate of us make this voyage with someone with whom we share an intellectual and emotional affinity. Suffering and danger, as J. Glenn Gray, another great writer on war, wrote, does not create friendship. It creates its opposite, comradeship. Friends are not comrades. They do not revel in death and self-sacrifice the way comrades do. Friendship—and most of us, if we are honest, must admit we have only one or two real friends and some of us have none—is about descending to depths beyond articulation, gaining through the insights of the friend greater self-awareness and self-possession. The death of a friend is bitter and painful because it leaves us more alone, diminished. We lose a part of ourselves. Friendship is the most potent antidote to the trauma of war. ‘Its true domain is peace,’ Gray wrote of friendship, ‘only peace’.”

Chris Hedges

 

 

Peak Prosperity

 

“Our society’s pursuit of endless economic growth is unsustainable.

We’re at the point where we’ve sabotaged our future by taking on too much debt, while at the same moment, we’ve started to run dangerously low on the resources necessary to run our modern way of living, straining key ecosystems in the process.

But rather than change our behavior, we’re doubling down on our faith in growth, creating dangerous financial bubbles that threaten to ruin our economy when they burst.

And worse than that, we’re depleting our remaining precious resources — such as energy deposits, rich topsoils, underground aquifers, ocean fisheries, key commercial minerals — at rates that can never recover in our lifetime.

At this stage, it’s unrealistic to expect our government to ride the rescue in time, if at all — even if it weren’t dysfunctionally focused on protecting the very status quo that’s killing us.

Instead, we need to become our own heroes.” Adam Taggart

 

 

“If you are a black person and live in the black community all your life and walk out on the street every day seeing white policemen surrounding you […] And when you live under a situation like that constantly, and then you ask me, you know, whether I approve of violence. I mean, that just doesn’t make any sense at all.”

Angela Davis, 1972, from Marin County jail

 

“We live in a world in which everything is now privatized, transformed into what authors Michael Silk and David Andrews call “spectacular spaces of consumption” and subject to the vicissitudes of the military-security state, all the while accompanied by the rise of a fascist politics rooted in the mobilizing passions of ultranationalism, racism and an apocalyptic populism. One consequence is the emergence of what the late historian Tony Judt called an “eviscerated society”—“one that is stripped of the thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found” in any viable democracy. This grim reality has been called a ‘failed sociality’—a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and the promises of a radical democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals.” Henry Giroux

 

“American society has turned lethal, as is evident in its assaults upon poor children, undocumented immigrants and those considered disposable by virtue of their race, ethnicity, religion and color.”  Henry Giroux

 

“Under the reign of neoliberalism, the dark plague of fascism engulfs American society as the history of concentration camps disappear, the killing of intellectuals is forgotten and the terror of fascist violence evaporates in the spectacles of violence accompanied by anti-intellectual blabber and a rampant culture of forgetting.” Henry Giroux

 

“Something sinister and horrifying is happening to alleged liberal democracies all over the globe. Democratic institutions such as the independent media, schools, the legal system, the welfare state and public and higher education are under siege worldwide.”

Henry Giroux

 

“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.” —James Baldwin

 

“We have not taken to the streets, sacrificing our education, for the adults and politicians to take selfies with us and to tell us that they really, really, really admire what we do. We are doing this to wake the leaders up. We are doing this to get them to act. We deserve a safe future. Is that really too much to ask? … We will hold those who are most responsible for this crisis accountable and we will make the world leaders act. … Why should we study for a future that is being taken away from us? That is being sold for profit. … Everywhere I have been, the situation is more or less same. The people in power, their beautiful words are the same. … The empty promises are the same. The lies are the same, and the inaction is the same.”

Greta Thunberg  27 September, 2019, Lower Manhattan

 

“People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.

We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

 

“How dare you pretend that this can be solved with business-as-usual and some technical solutions. With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than eight and a half years.”

 

“There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today. Because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us. But young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you.

 

We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.”

Greta Thunberg  August, 2019

 

 

 

It takes courage to tell it as it is.  It takes courage to speak out when your neighbours are speaking with their heads in the sand. Our exploitative economic system sucks us into such a subservient system – a “country store” – binding that we are compelled to shut up and put up.  The ecosystem is still a misunderstood theory to many, boundless, loving Earth energy is credited to God and disaster is too often credited to God’s will. The environment is understood by many to be something “other” than us that we are at the mercy of. Many pray as if they think that the creator needs our praise and dishes out favours to selected followers. Some, hopefully a growing number realise that we “are” the planet.  Thus, as the planet suffers so do we.

“It is not a matter of being “close to nature.” The relationship is more one of identity, in the mathematical sense, than of affinity. The Earth is, in a very real sense, the same as ourself (or selves), and it is this primary point that is made in the fiction and poetry of the Native American writers of the Southwest.”  Paula Gunn Allen.  Maybe that’s why a homespun, behavioural, saying goes:  You must love yourself before you can love others.

As long as we see the Earth as “other” there is very little chance that we will change our behaviour or our destructive lifestyle.

 

 

“…when you’re faced with what looks like an unshiftable dilemma, ask a child.”

 

novelist Ali Smith https://www.truthdig.com/articles/a-revolutionary-writer-for-our-darkest-days/

 

“Thunberg has articulated the future to us, because the future is hers and her generations’ inheritance. Her presence is the appearance on the world stage of the possible future—one of frankness and goodness and unselfishness up against the conglomerate business mindset that thinks right now that it owns and can use both us and the world. That’s the choice we face. As Thunberg says, the real power belongs to the people. I’m not surprised to see the whole world turn to listen.”

 

novelist Ali Smith https://www.truthdig.com/articles/a-revolutionary-writer-for-our-darkest-days/

 

 

 

 

“It is our body being savaged. And we are not separate.  No cowardice, no folly, no failure will ever sever you from the living body of the Earth because that’s what you are.”  Joanna Macy

 

“And they know me.”  Sky McCain

 

“We have now drilled some 30 million miles of tunnel and borehole in our hunt for resources, truly riddling our planet into a hollow earth.” Looking backward from the distant future, he continues: “Our modern species-history is one of remorseless accelerated extraction, accompanied by compensatory small acts of preservation and elegiac songs.” –

Robert McFarlane

 

“As a man is, so he sees.”

William Blake

 

QUESTIONNAIRE

by Wendell Berry

1. How much poison are you willing

to eat for the success of the free

market and global trade? Please

name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much

evil are you willing to do?

Fill in the following blanks

with the names of your favorite

evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared

to make for culture and civilization?

Please list the monuments, shrines,

and works of art you would

most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and

the flag, how much of our beloved

land are you willing to desecrate?

List in the following spaces

the mountains, rivers, towns, farms

you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,

the energy sources, the kinds of security,

for which you would kill a child.

Name, please, the children whom

you would be willing to kill.

 

 

“Faith in progress really is the established religion of our time. Most people nowadays believe in the inevitability of progress just as fervently as medieval peasants believed in saints and angels.”  John Michael Greer

 

“So come my friends, be not afraid

We are so lightly here

It is in love that we are made

In love, we disappear”

—Leonard Cohen  “Boogie Street”

 

“A global system (internet in the beginning) of management that could watch the world in real time….This is the general background from which the internet emerged.”

Yosha Levine – The Secret Military History of the Internet

 

“We cannot step outside life’s songs.  This music made us; it is our nature.” George David Haskill “The Songs of the Trees”

 

“Our ethic must be one of belonging, an imperative made all the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying, rewiring, and severing biological networks worldwide. To listen to the trees, nature’s great connnectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.” George David Haskill “The Songs of the Trees”

 

“The climate apocalypse now upon us” Dahr Jamail

 

We are born onto this planet with the obligations of caring for it, and of making decisions based on what will be best for the future generations of all species.

Stan Rushworth Native American elder of Cherokee descent,

 

“So each morning, I awake and engage in my morning practice, part of which is pondering what I shall do each day to serve Earth and all her species. When I approach my life from this perspective, no matter how bleak the future appears, I always have work to do and services to perform.” Dahr Jamail

 

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” Václav Havel

 

“For me it begins and ends with being connected to the Earth.”  Dahr Jamail

 

“There is a road in the hearts of all of us, hidden and seldom traveled, which leads to an unknown, secret place. The old people came literally to love the soil, and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power.”  Chief Luther Standing Bear

 

“When you are in doubt, be still, and wait; when doubt no longer exists for you, then go forward with courage,” Chief White Eagle once said. “So long as mists envelop you, be still; be still until the sunlight pours through and dispels the mists, as it surely will. Then act with courage.”

“It is only by consistently re-grounding ourselves to the Earth, silently in order to listen, that we can allow the grief of these times to wash through us. And then, may we be clear-eyed and able to act with the conviction required by these times.”  Dahr Jamail

 

 

 

 

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”  — Omar Khayyam

 

“I read your story about Buck Ferris being killed.  And I believe he was. But here’s the hard truth son.  Corruption is a part of Capitalism.  It’s a by-product of the system. A necessary lubricant to make the machine work.  Given human nature, I mean. Because that’s the motive force of Capitalism. Greed. It’s the most pragmatic system there is.”   Cemetery Road, pg. 313   —Greg Isles

 

“When a parent dies, your center of gravity is altered.  Even if you lived apart from them — even if you walled yourself off from all contact — you are irrevocably lessened by their passing.  Death, like gravity, respects no barriers.  Cemetery Road, pg. 504  Greg Isles

 

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. — Dr. Albert Bartlett

 

“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.” —James Baldwin

 

from The Princess: Tears, Idle Tears

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

 

“He prayeth well who loveth well, Both bird and man and beast.”

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

“Nothing’s important except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,

of which this is a part, not be denied.   -Mary Oliver”

 

“We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone.”

—Alice Walker

“’Hey, baby, who your people?’ were often the first words out of my great-grandmother Myrtle Anderson’s mouth whenever she encountered someone new.’”

—Kinitra Brooks in Myrtle’s Medicine

 

 

Rabindranath Tagore’s “Last Poem”

_______________________________

Can you hear the sounds of the journey of time?

Its chariot always in a flight

Raises heartbeats in the skies

And birth-pangs of stars

In the darkness of space

Crushed by its wheels.

My friend!

I have been caught in the net

Cast by that flying time

It has made me its mate

In its intrepid journey

And taken me in its speeding chariot

Far away from you.

To reach the summit of this morning

I seem to have left behind many deaths

My past names seem to stream

In the strong wind

Born of the chariot’s speed.

There is no way to turn back;

If you see me from afar

You will not recognize me my friend,

Farewell!

If in your lazy hours without any work

The winds of springtime

Brings back the sighs from the past

As the cries of shedding spring flowers

Fill the skies

Please see and search

If in a corner of your heart

You can find any remnants of my past;

In the evening hours of fading memories

It may shed some light

Or take some nameless form

As if in a dream.

Yet it is not a dream

It is my truth of truths

It is deathless

It is my love.

Changeless and eternal

I leave it as my offering to you

In the ever changing flow of time

Let me drift.

My friend, farewell!

You have not sustained any loss.

If you have created an immortal image

Out of my mortal frame

May you devote your self

In the worship of that idol

As the recreation of your remaining days

Let your offerings not be mired

By the touch of my earthly passion.

The plate that you will arrange with utmost care

For the feast of your mind

I will not mix it with anything

That does not endure

And is wet with my tears.

Now you will perhaps create

Some dreamy creation out of my memories

Neither shall I feel its weight

Nor will you feel obliged.

My friend, farewell!

Do not mourn for me,

You have your work, I have my world.

My vessel has not become empty

To fill it is my mission.

I shall be pleased

If anybody keeps waiting

Anxiously for me.

But now I shall offer myself to him

Who can brighten the darkness with light

And see me as I am

Transcending what is good or bad.

Whatever I gave you

It is now your absolute possession.

What I have to give now

Are the hourly offerings from my heart.

You are incomparable, you are rich!

Whatever I gave you

It was but your gift

You made me so much indebted

As much as you took.

My friend, farewell!

☀️☀️☀️

 

“You’re on Earth,” advised Samuel Beckett. “There’s no cure for that.”

 

“All species have a right to exist for their own sake, and humans must learn to live in balance with the needs of nature, instead of trying to mold nature to fit the wants of humans”.

By Judi Bari  May 1992

 

And the Great Mother said:

 

Come my child and give me all that you are.

I am not afraid of your strength and darkness,

of your fear and pain.

Give me your tears.

They will be my rushing rivers and roaring oceans.

Give me your rage.

It will erupt into my molten volcanoes and rolling thunder.

Give me your tired spirit.

I will lay it to rest in my soft meadows.

Give me your hopes and dreams.

I will plant a field of sunflowers and arch rainbows in the sky.

You are not too much for me.

 

My arms and heart welcome your true fullness.

There is room in my world for all of you, all that you are.

I will cradle you in the boughs of my ancient redwoods

and the valleys of my gentle rolling hills.

My soft winds will sing you lullabies

and soothe your burdened heart.

Release your deep pain.

You are not alone and you have never been alone.

~ Linda Reuther.

from Homecoming ~

 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

 

“The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”

Charles Darwin

 

“Within this original ground of being there is no preference for either wisdom or ignorance, beauty or ugliness, since by its very nature this source-mind persists as the timeless womb of potentiality in which all things arise and dissolve in natural self-perfection and utter spontaneity.

 

In whatever form it offers itself to us, the only way to true self-knowledge is by letting go of any impulse to control things, completely immersing oneself in all of life without hesitation, condition, or any demand that it be other than it is. Let the world see, let everybody see what becomes of a life that no longer resists going under.”

Bob O’Hearn

 

“The man who is kind and who practises righteousness,

who remains passive amidst the affairs of the world,

who considers all creatures on earth as his own self,

He attains the Immortal Being, the true God is ever with him”

Kabir

 

“If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly

useless manner, you have learned how to live.”

Lin Yutang

 

 

“Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That’s all there is. That’s all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it’s all a shame, and on and on; it’s all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.”

― Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special

 

HOW I BECAME A WARRIOR

 

Once, I ran from fear

so fear controlled me.

Until I learned to hold fear like a newborn.

Listen to it, but not give in.

Honour it, but not worship it.

Fear could not stop me anymore.

I walked with courage into the storm.

I still have fear,

but it does not have me.

 

Once, I was ashamed of who I was.

I invited shame into my heart.

I let it burn.

It told me, “I am only trying

to protect your vulnerability”.

I thanked shame dearly,

and stepped into life anyway,

unashamed, with shame as a lover.

 

Once, I had great sadness

buried deep inside.

I invited it to come out and play.

I wept oceans. My tear ducts ran dry.

And I found joy right there.

Right at the core of my sorrow.

It was heartbreak that taught me how to love.

 

Once, I had anxiety.

A mind that wouldn’t stop.

Thoughts that wouldn’t be silent.

So I stopped trying to silence them.

And I dropped out of the mind,

and into the Earth.

Into the mud.

Where I was held strong

like a tree, unshakeable, safe.

 

Once, anger burned in the depths.

I called anger into the light of myself.

I felt its shocking power.

I let my heart pound and my blood boil.

Listened to it, finally.

And it screamed, “Respect yourself fiercely now!”.

“Speak your truth with passion!”.

“Say no when you mean no!”.

“Walk your path with courage!”.

“Let no one speak for you!”

Anger became an honest friend.

A truthful guide.

A beautiful wild child.

 

Once, loneliness cut deep.

I tried to distract and numb myself.

Ran to people and places and things.

Even pretended I was “happy”.

But soon I could not run anymore.

And I tumbled into the heart of loneliness.

And I died and was reborn

into an exquisite solitude and stillness.

That connected me to all things.

So I was not lonely, but alone with All Life.

My heart One with all other hearts.

 

Once, I ran from difficult feelings.

Now, they are my advisors, confidants, friends,

and they all have a home in me,

and they all belong and have dignity.

I am sensitive, soft, fragile,

my arms wrapped around all my inner children.

And in my sensitivity, power.

In my fragility, an unshakeable Presence.

 

In the depths of my wounds,

in what I had named “darkness”,

I found a blazing Light

that guides me now in battle.

 

I became a warrior

when I turned towards myself.

 

And started listening.

 

– Jeff Foster

 

 

 

 

One of the Precepts of the Honorable Harvest

The Law of the Land

 

“What would the world look like if a developer poised to convert a meadow into a shopping mall had to ask the permission first of the Golden Rod and the Meadow Larks and had to abide by the answer?

Robin Wall Kimmerer

 

Khandro dPa’wo Nyi-da Mélong Gyüd

 

“Love touches people through Art: not simply through the Arts of music, painting, sculpture, poetry, literature, and drama – but through the constantly performing theatre of existence. Art and the nature of the senses continually imitate, intimate, and initiate each other.

Love is artistic openness: the responsiveness to whatever presents itself. Love is softness – the capacity for tears to well up in response to the poignance of human creativity. It is the way a ’cello is bowed – the way in which an exquisite cadence is given life by the voice.

Falling in love occurs through the exotic ordinariness of coincidence. It is always expressed as falling in love – never as climbing. Such mountains are never conquered, even though the heights of riotous glory are scaled. Love is the discovery of what has always been there, and—when it is found—it is simultaneously known that all that can be achieved is to return.

Love can only be experienced through relinquishing the definitions of who, what, where and when. Becoming besotted occurs when circumstances align themselves in such a way that two people catch glimpses of each other’s beginningless nondual being.

These glimpses are rays of light in the sky of being. In these glimpses the intrinsic nature of being is reflected. Mutual love is a rapturous reflection of the love which exists as the natural relationship between all beings and situations.

Mutual love arises and dissolves in the empty mirror of space – as the radiance of the inexhaustible nature of being. To know love is to recognise the nature of that which continually arises from vast expansiveness: spacious-passion and passionate-space.

Love is a divisionless dimension—a centreless play of energy—where there is no established division between the inner world and the outer world.

If boundaries are allowed to blur, lovers become endless flurries of provocative movement – gestures which express love: in the way in which a whale surfaces or a shark discovers its depth; the way in which surf roils in swells of the ocean and waves crash into bright shingle; the way a gull cries; an owl feels night beneath her wings; the wind blows; snow falls; thunder rolls; ice melts; frost glitters; or the sun and moon blaze through the unknown swathe of time.

Love is centreless dance: the spontaneous self-reflection of the interpenetrating-interengulfing quality of reality. Love is the poetic turbulence of each moment, in which mutual rhyming manifests without effort or contrivance.

Love is there when the artificial divisions dissolve into the iridescent spectrum of the beginningless nature of individuation. The love which radiates from the primordial state cannot help but sparkle through – no matter how insecure, frightened, isolated, anxious, or bewildered people become.

To fall in love and to realise beginningless nondual nature, have tantalising similarities. They reflect each other. The Khandro dPa’wo Nyi-da Mélong Gyüd is a teaching which elucidates the nature of this reflection in a manner which has the capacity to change the world.”

Ngak’chang Rinpoche

23 November, 2018

 

“Silence is an empty space. Space is the home of the awakened mind.”

– Buddha

 

“It will be remembered as a great irony that when we needed each other more than ever, our societies grew more divided. We long for answers to the world’s thorniest dilemmas and pray that this aching in our hearts will lead us to healing and change. Yet we see the rising tide of intolerance and indifference…and we wonder. Is it too late?

That is why community is so very important. We take refuge in beloved community so we can recharge and return to our vital work as activists, writers, caregivers, teachers, parents, mediators, leaders and servers of all kinds. Because whatever our gifts, whatever our privilege – these are urgently needed now in service to our collective future. Community is thus the path itself, community is the way forward.”

Community as Refuge and Path  November 13, 2018  Kosmos Community News

 

 

“Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breath taking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed. Candor and clarity go a long way in fertilizing the soil, but in the end there is always a degree of unpredictability in the climate of communication — even the warmest intention can be met with frost. Yet something impels us to hold these possibilities in both hands and go on surrendering to the beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient and abiding human gift. And the most magical thing, the most sacred thing, is that whichever the outcome, we end up having transformed one another in this vulnerable-making process of speaking and listening.”

Maria Popover, newsletter, 4 July, 2018

 

 

“Alone one is never lonely: the spirit adventures, waking

In a quiet garden, in a cool house, abiding single there;

The spirit adventures in sleep, the sweet thirst-slaking

When only the moon’s reflection touches the wild hair.

There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone:

It finds a lovely certainty in the evening and the morning.

It is only where two have come together bone against bone

That those alonenesses take place, when, without warning

The sky opens over their heads to an infinite hole in space;

It is only turning at night to a lover that one learns

He is set apart like a star forever and that sleeping face

(For whom the heart has cried, for whom the frail hand burns)

Is swung out in the night alone, so luminous and still,

The waking spirit attends, the loving spirit gazes

Without communion, without touch, and comes to know at last

Out of a silence only and never when the body blazes

That love is present, that always burns alone, however steadfast.”

“There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone.”

From MARIA POPOVA

CANTICLE 6

by May Sarton

Aloneness, connectedness, communion and silence. How do these concepts interrelate? Can we be both connected and still love aloneness and silence?  Can we engage in communion and still recognise the intimacy of personal spirit?  I think so. 27/10/2018 Sky

 

 

Man is forever lonely. There can be

no time or circumstance in all his days

to lead him out of loneliness. His ways

are those of clouds and tides. Not even he

 

who seeks the crowded solace of the street

can find a single comrade there. Nor yet

in secret bonds of love can men forget

their heart’s own solitude. Though lips may meet

 

and hand touch hand in intimate embrace,

a stranger still abides within the mind,

no words can touch, no vision ever find.

A lonely god, enthroned in lonely space

 

fashioned us out of silence, as we are.

As single as a tree, as separate as a star

 

Anon.

 

 

Rita Bletgen

10 hrs ·

Apart from the horrendous tragedy of human warfare – why is there this fear of ‘me’ not continuing? Is it because I don’t realize that all my fear and trembling is for an image? Because I really believe that this image is myself? In the midst of this vast, unfathomable, ever-changing, dying, and renewing flow of life, the human brain is ceaselessly engaged in trying to fix for itself a state of permanency and certainty. Having the capacity to think and form pictures of ourselves, to remember them and become deeply attached to them, we take this world of pictures and ideas for real. We thoroughly believe in the reality of the picture story of our personal life. We are totally identified with it and want it to go on forever. The idea of “forever” is itself an invention of the human brain. Forever is a dream.”

 

~Toni Packer

 

“McCain exits the stage at what is, perhaps, the twilight of the American century, when the nation has focused inward, concerned about potential dangers of immigration, the entanglements of multilateralism and the challenges of a global economy.”

The key moments in John McCain’s life By Anthony Zurcher

North America reporter  26 August 2018

 

 

“McCain’s spirit, wrote Post columnist Max Boot, remains “desperately needed at a time when his party has embraced an amoral, narcissistic demagogue who fawns over tyrants and flirts with isolationism and protectionism and white nationalism.”  Washington Post  27/08/2018

 

“It is impossible to experience the appearance of awareness. We are that awareness to which such an appearance would occur. We have no experience of a beginning to the awareness that is seeing these words. We have no experience of its birth. We have no experience that we, awareness, are born. Likewise, in order to claim legitimately that awareness dies, something would have to be present to experience its disappearance. Have we ever experienced the disappearance of awareness? If we think the answer is, ‘Yes’, then what is it that is present and aware to experience the apparent disappearance of awareness? Whatever that is must be aware and present. It must be awareness. When we are born or when we wake in the morning, we have the experience of the appearance of objects. When we die and when we fall asleep at night, we have the experience of the disappearance of objects. However, we have no experience that we, awareness, appear, are born, disappear or die. That”

― Rupert Spira, Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience

 

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

“Ring the bells that still can ring.”

Leonard Cohen

 

“Climate change, increasing inequality and rampant poverty are not ‘externalities’ of a well-functioning system, as the economists would have us believe, but rather the logical outcome of a set of rules, norms and cultural practices.”  Alnoor Ladha

 

“The present is the only thing that has no end.”

~ Erwin Schrödinger

 

Simon Jones: Yep the mind will never understand what just is.

Mind conceptualises everything when you see the world without naming and labelling.

All concepts dissolve.

And there is simply

This

 

Sky McCain: The knowing that you so rightly express is the whiteboard on which we paint

the concepts that we choose to make up a world of challenges that we choose to populate our world.

 

Free and Easy

 

“Happiness can not be found

through great effort and willpower,

but is already present,

in open relaxation and letting go.

.

Don’t strain yourself,

there is nothing to do or undo.

Whatever momentarily arises

in the body-mind

has no real importance at all,

has little reality whatsoever.

Why identify with,

and become attached to it,

passing judgment upon it and ourselves?

.

Far better to simply

let the entire game happen on its own,

springing up and falling back like waves

without changing or manipulating anything

and notice how everything vanishes and reappears, magically,

again and again, time without end.

.

Only our searching for happiness

prevents us from seeing it.

It’s like a vivid rainbow which you pursue

without ever catching,

or a dog chasing its own tail.

.

Although peace and happiness

do not exist as an actual thing or place,

it is always available

and accompanies you every instant.

.

Don’t believe in the reality of good and bad experiences;

they are like today’s ephemeral weather,

like rainbows in the sky.

.

Wanting to grasp the ungraspable,

you exhaust yourself in vain.

As soon as you open and relax

this tight fist of grasping,

infinite space is there –

open, inviting and comfortable.

.

Make use of this spaciousness,

this freedom and natural ease.

Don’t search any further

looking for the great awakened elephant,

who is already resting quietly at home

in front of your own hearth.

.

Nothing to do or undo,

nothing to force,

nothing to want,

and nothing missing –

.

Emaho! Marvelous!

Everything happens by itself.”

.

~Lama Gendun Rinpoche.

 

“Once you realize that the world is your own projection you are free of it. You need not free yourself of a world that does not exist except in your own imagination.”   Nisargadatta

Sky:  You can never be free of “a world” for we are reality structurers.  However, you are free to change your attitude toward what you experience.

 

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”  Friedrich Nietzsche

 

“To live in the world from a GreenSpirit orientation is to see oneself as being of the Earth rather than on it and to see the planetary ecosystem as a whole (rather than humans) as being of central importance in everything and at all times.”  ~ Marian Van Eyk McCain

 

 

Rupert: “It is not what we see, it is the way we see it.” In my opinion, this sentence is deeply profound.  My thoughts are that it is not the thinking function, conceptual and accepted definition of “the thing” we see; it is the feeling sense, the felt sense of what the “thing” triggers in our knowing that is based on our shared consciousness that seeps through the cracks in the detritus of our world view into the limitless, unbounded “being with,” as Christians may put it, “the peace that passeth all understanding.” It is, perhaps what Jean Klein may have had partially in mind when he said: “It is not what you do, but how you are while you are doing it.”

 

Rupert also told a story about a day when Turner was returning from a painting experience on hampstead heath.  A local resident passed by and asked Turner if he could see the day’s progress.  Turner showed it to him.  The local resident said that he had walked on Hampstead Heath most of the days of his life and he had never seen a view like that. “Turner says no, but don’t you wish you could?” Rupert Spira

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn-lWNSmsQs&t=15s

 

 

“There is no there out there.  There isn’t even an out there. The ‘there is‘

is only that which you use to reassure yourself that you are.  Sky McCain

 

“The mistake is to identify with the personality, to conceptualize it in memory and then take ourselves for this collection of crystallized images rather than letting all emotions, perceptions, and thoughts arise and die in us. We are in the theatre watching our own play on stage. The actor is always ‘behind’ his persona. He seems to be completely lost in suffering, in being a hero, a lover, a rascal, but all these appearings take place in global presence.

 

This presence is not a detached attitude, a witnessing position. It is not a feeling of separateness, of being ‘outside’. It is the presence of wholeness, love, out of which all comes. When no situation calls for an activity we remain in emptiness of activity, in this Presence.”  – Jean Klein, Who Am I?

 

“People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

~ Albert Einstein

 

“The actual reality is timeless (eternal) and spaceless (infinite), i.e. Now-Here. Every time of day, every season, every age, every location shows up Here-Now. We can never leave Here-Now. There is no edge where Here begins or ends, and nothing ever happens before or after Now. There is only Here-Now. This is our actual experience. But we ignore our immediate, direct experiencing in favor of the conceptual map-world, because the map gives us a sense of control, of certainty, of knowing what’s going on. Whereas, if we try to grasp this immediacy, this living reality, this awaring presence, this present experiencing, it cannot be grasped.” Joan Tollifson

 

“But when we finally relax into groundlessness, it turns out to be freedom itself. So-called liberation is simply seeing the false as false and not grasping the Truth by trying to formulate it or pin it down. Liberation isn’t about having the right answer or the right view, but rather about waking up from all the answers and views—not landing anywhere. Being this moment, just as it is.”  Joan Tollifson

 

“To paraphrase a famous saying from Vedanta, the world is unreal, consciousness alone is real, consciousness is the world. As consciousness itself, the world is real. A mirage or a dream is real as a mirage or a dream. It’s a real experience. It’s not real as what it SEEMS to be. “The world” that we conceptualize, imagine, project, remember and believe in—the supposedly observer-independent world that we think exists outside of consciousness—that is illusory. The world that we actually experience is an ever-changing, vibrational dance of sensations, a waving movement of consciousness—and that is reality itself.”  Joan Tollifson

 

“No wave can ever go off in a direction other than the one in which the ocean is moving. And ultimately, this happening is not definable or understandable. It simply IS. To call it good or bad, fortunate or unfortunate is in some way extra.”  Joan Tollifson

 

“Maybe the best gift we can offer at this time is the total acceptance or unconditional love that is the very nature of awareness and presence—being this moment, just as it is—being fully awake to this living reality here-now and not getting bamboozled by our capacity to imagine every possible future, or to endlessly re-run our memories of the past, or to fall into despair and bitterness or rage over what we think is happening—and when we do sometimes get bamboozled in these ways, to see these habit-patterns as part of what is, to not take them personally, and to simply wake up anew. Maybe our challenge is to see only God everywhere, to find the beauty even in the darkness.”    Joan Tollifson

 

Jean Klein passed away on February 22, 1998

 

“I was waiting one warm afternoon for a train. The platform was deserted and the landscape sleepy. It was silent. The train was late, and I waited without waiting, very relaxed and free from all thinking. Suddenly a cock crowed and the unusual sound made me aware of my silence. It was not the objective silence I was aware of, as often happens when one is in a quiet place and a sudden sound throws into relief the silence around. No, I was ejected into my own silence. I felt myself in awareness beyond the sound or the silence. Subsequently, this feeling visited my several times.”  Jean Klein

 

“In you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.”  Rainer Maria Rilke

 

“Consciousness is that in which all experience appears, that with which all experience is known and that out of which all experience is made.”   Rupert Spira

 

“May the Angel of Wildness disturb the places where your life is domesticated and safe, take you to the territories of true otherness where all that is awkward in you can fall into its own rhythm.”  John O’Donohue

 

“Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.”  Pema Chodron

 

“Our concepts hamper our thinking.  We struggle with words when the slime mold solves the maze because our concepts don’t fit the data. It is not that Nature lacks intelligence but that our own concepts do.”  Jeremy Narby

 

All mental constructs are a superimposition on immediate presence. When we refrain from identification with these constructs, which arise in the form of judgments, opinions, beliefs, and fantasies of interpretation on perception, but instead grant attention to this immediate presence, mind becomes quiescent. Of course, the usual tendency is to jump right back into the neural stream, and so true meditation involves allowing this immediate presence to outshine the habitual activity of obsessive thought. By persisting sincerely in such practice, the questions that mind raises dissolve, and we are left, not with answers, not with some kind of special knowledge, not with a triumphant enlightenment, but with the original innocence of our true nature, prior to the adventure of separation and confusion that constitutes the typical human experience. Thus, the great texts are no longer necessary, for we stand in the place in which all wisdom originates, and which no words can sufficiently describe.  Bob O’Hearn

 

Between deep sleep and awakening, there was a sudden vanishing of all the residues of ‘my persons’, each having believed themselves hitherto to be a doer, a sufferer, an enjoyer. All this vanished completely, and I was seized in full consciousness by an all-penetrating light, without inside or outside. This was the awakening in Reality, in the I am…I knew myself in the actual happening, not as a concept, but as a being without localisation in time or space. In this non-state there was a freedom, full and objectless joy.

 

Jean Klein –

 

“To be human is to unfold in time but remain discontinuous. We are living non sequiturs seeking artificial cohesion through the revisions our memory, that capricious seamstress, performs in threading the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. It is, after all, nothing but a supreme feat of storytelling to draw a continuous thread between one’s childhood self and one’s present-day self, since hardly anything makes these two entities “the same person” — not their height, not their social stature, not their beliefs, not their circle of friends, not even the very cells in their bodies. Somewhere in the lacuna between the experiencing self and the remembering self, we create ourselves in what is literally a matter of making sense — of craftsmanship — for, as Oliver Sacks so poignantly observed, it is narrative that holds our identity together.”  Maria Popova

 

“If we want to learn to live without suffering, we first have to learn to live with it. When suffering is welcomed so completely that there is not the slightest resistance to it, what we were seeking, by trying to get rid of it, is revealed at its heart…”  ~Rupert Spira

 

“What matters is to be natural and calm

In happiness and in unhappiness,

To feel as if feeling were seeing,

To think as if thinking were walking,

And to remember, when death comes, that each day dies,

And the sunset is beautiful, and so is the night that

remains . . .

That’s how it is and how I want it to be . . .”

― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

 

“We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”  Jack Reacher statement by author Lee Child

 

“If you were to ask me why I dwell among green mountains, I should laugh silently. My soul is serene, the peach blossom flowers, the morning water.  There is another heaven and earth beyond the world of men.”  Li Po.

 

When our love of the Earth and our astonishment, our marvelling, our wonder and reverence for the vastness and mystery of the universe becomes the focus of our spiritual lives, rather than some far off, dreamed-of heaven, then just as the Earth feeds our bodies, she also feeds our souls.  ~ Marian Van Eyk McCain

 

“The wise man … does not need to walk about timidly or cautiously: for he possesses such self-confidence that he does not hesitate to go to meet fortune nor will he ever yield his position to her: nor has he any reason to fear her, because he considers not only slaves, property, and positions of honor, but also his body, his eyes, his hands, — everything which can make life dearer, even his very self, as among uncertain things, and lives as if he had borrowed them for his own use and was prepared to return them without sadness whenever claimed. Nor does he appear worthless in his own eyes because he knows that he is not his own, but he will do everything as diligently and carefully as a conscientious and pious man is accustomed to guard that which is entrusted in his care. Yet whenever he is ordered to return them, he will not complain to fortune, but will say: ‘I thank you for this which I have had in my possession. I have indeed cared for your property, — even to my great disadvantage, — but, since you command it, I give it back to you and restore it thankfully and willingly…’ If nature should demand of us that which she has previously entrusted to us, we will also say to her: ‘Take back a better mind than you gave: I seek no way of escape nor flee: I have voluntarily improved for you what you gave me without my knowledge; take it away.’ What hardship is there in returning to the place whence one has come? That man lives badly who does not know how to die well.”  Seneca

 

 

“Alone one is never lonely: the spirit adventures, waking

In a quiet garden, in a cool house, abiding single there;

The spirit adventures in sleep, the sweet thirst-slaking

When only the moon’s reflection touches the wild hair.

There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone:

It finds a lovely certainty in the evening and the morning.

It is only where two have come together bone against bone

That those alonenesses take place, when, without warning

The sky opens over their heads to an infinite hole in space;

It is only turning at night to a lover that one learns

He is set apart like a star forever and that sleeping face

(For whom the heart has cried, for whom the frail hand burns)

Is swung out in the night alone, so luminous and still,

The waking spirit attends, the loving spirit gazes

Without communion, without touch, and comes to know at last

Out of a silence only and never when the body blazes

That love is present, that always burns alone, however steadfast.”

“There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone.”

CANTICLE 6   by May Sarton

 

 

“But I think that the very thought processes of materialistic affluence (and here the same things are found in all the different economic systems that seek affluence for its own sake) are ultimately self-defeating. They contain so many built-in frustrations that they inevitably lead us to despair in the midst of “plenty” and “happiness” and the awful fruit of this despair is indiscriminate, irresponsible destructiveness, hatred of life, carried on in the name of life itself.

 

In order to “survive” we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends.”

Thomas Merton

 

“In order to ‘survive’ we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends.”  Thomas Merton

 

“I’ve had at least as many conversations with so-called free market capitalists—I say “so-called” because, as Adam Smith himself pointed out, it’s the first concern of every self-respecting capitalist to make whatever market he or she frequents as unfree as possible, in order to maximize profits—in which raising the most modest question about the supposed benevolence of the market system is more than enough to get you accused of favoring Communism.”

John Michael Greer  Ecosophia  15 November, 2017

 

 

“Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer

 

“Who can free himself from achievement

And from fame, descend and be lost

Amid the masses of men?

He will flow like Tao, unseen,

He will go about like Life itself

With no name and no home.

Simple is he, without distinction.

To all appearances he is a fool.

His steps leave no trace. He has no power.

He achieves nothing, has no reputation.

Since he judges no one

No one judges him.

Such is the perfect man:

His boat is empty.”

― Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu

 

“Nature cannot become an abstraction. That has been the

whole deficit in our souls which has brought us to this pass.”

Jorie Graham

 

“What sane person could want to live in this world and not be crazy?”

Ursula Leguin

 

“Insanity – a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”

R.D. Laing

 

“Our picture of the world is and will always be a construct of the mind.”  Erwin Schrodinger.”

 

“It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar,”

Anaïs Nin

 

“The joy of meeting and the sorrow of separation,” Simone Weil wrote in contemplating the paradox of closeness, “we should welcome these gifts … with our whole soul, and experience to the full, and with the same gratitude, all the sweetness or bitterness as the case may be.”

 

a world which, in the sobering words of E.E. Cummings, “is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else.”

 

Just as the unlimited screen appears limited when it assumes the name and form of a character or object in a movie, but never actually becomes limited, so our Self, Awareness, seems to become temporary and limited when it assumes the form of thinking, sensing and perceiving, but is never truly limited by any of these.   Rupert Spira

 

“Aztec philosophy encourages us to question this received ‘Western’ wisdom about the good life – and to seriously consider the sobering notion that doing something worthwhile is more important than enjoying it.”  Sebastian Purcell

 

There’s no path to reach that which is not separate.

Randell Smith

 

Life at Midlife

 

I am no longer waiting for a special occasion; I burn the best candles on ordinary days.

I am no longer waiting for the house to be clean; I fill it with people who understand that even dust is Sacred.

I am no longer waiting for everyone to understand me; It’s just not their task

I am no longer waiting for the perfect children; my children have their own names that burn as brightly as any star.

I am no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop; It already did, and I survived.

I am no longer waiting for the time to be right; the time is always now.

I am no longer waiting for the mate who will complete me; I am grateful to be so warmly, tenderly held.

I am no longer waiting for a quiet moment; my heart can be stilled whenever it is called.

I am no longer waiting for the world to be at peace; I unclench my grasp and breathe peace in and out.

I am no longer waiting to do something great; being awake to carry my grain of sand is enough.

I am no longer waiting to be recognized; I know that I dance in a holy circle.

I am no longer waiting for Forgiveness.

I believe, I Believe.

 

Author: Mary Anne Perrone

 

Picture: Angela Farmer

 

WILD WOMAN SISTERHOOD

Embody your Wild Nature

 

 

“When we understand that what we deeply long for can never be found in an object, substance, activity, relationship or state, our longing naturally and effortlessly loses its direction and dynamism, flows back to its source, and is revealed as the happiness for which we were in search.”  Rupert Spira

 

 

 

“When doing slows down, the thinking that is at its origin is exposed; when thinking dissolves, the feeling that is behind it is uncovered; when feeling subsides, the Being that is at its heart is revealed.”  Rupert Spira

 

 

It’s time

 

There comes a day, somewhere in the middle of every woman’s life, when Mother Nature herself stands behind us and wraps her arms around our shoulders, whispering

 

“It’s time.”

 

“You have taken enough now. It’s time to stop growing up, stop growing older and start growing wiser – and wilder.

There are adventures still waiting on you and this time, you will enjoy them with the vision of wisdom and the companionship of hindsight, and you will really let go.

 

It’s time to stop the madness of comparison and the ridicule of schedule and conformity and start experiencing the joys that a life, free of containment and guilt, can bring.”She will shake your shoulders gently and remind you that you’ve done your bit. You’ve given too much, cared too much, you’ve suffered too much.

 

You’ve bought the book as it were and worn the t-shirt.Worse, you’ve worn the chains and carried the weight of a burden far too heavy for your shoulders.

“It’s time” she will say.

 

“Let it go, really let it go and feel the freedom of the fresh, clean spaces within you. Fill them with discovery, love and laughter. Fill yourself so full you will no longer fear what is ahead and instead you will greet each day with the excitement of a child.” She will remind you that if you choose to stop caring what other people think of you and instead of caring what you think of you, that you will experience a new era of your life you never dreamed possible.

 

‘It’s time’ she will say…

“to write the ending, or new beginning, of your own story.”

Donna Ashworth

 

Some believe it is great power that keeps evil in check,

but that is not what I have found.

I have found that it is the everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay.

Small acts of kindness and love.

~Gandalf

~ from the book, “The Lord of The Rings”

 

Peace is not something you must hope for in the future.

It is a deepening of the present,

and unless you look for it in the present,

you will never find it.  ~Thomas Merton

 

My actions are my only true belongings.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

 

For the One Who is Exhausted

 

You have traveled too fast over false ground;

Now your soul has come, to take you back.

 

Take refuge in your senses, open up

To all the small miracles you rushed through.

 

Become inclined to watch the way of rain

When it falls slow and free.

 

Imitate the habit of twilight,

Taking time to open the well of color

That fostered the brightness of day.

 

Draw alongside the silence of stone

Until its calmness can claim you.

 

John O’Donohue, Irish poet and philosopher

Excerpt from the blessing, ‘For One Who is Exhausted’

from BENEDICTUS (Europe) /

TO BLESS THE SPACE BETWEEN US (US)

 

“There is only one Self. What you feel toward somebody else, you are feeling toward yourself. What you do to anybody else you are doing to yourself. If you help somebody else, you are helping yourself, and if you hurt somebody else, you are hurting yourself. What your body does is karmic. It has nothing to do with you. When you realise, “I am not the body, I am not the mind, and I am not the doer,” then you are safe. But as long as you think you are doing something kind for somebody, then you want a reward, you want recognition. But when you know there is only one Self, you are automatically kind to everybody. Virtue is its own reward.”   Robert Adams

 

“Where are you now, that you ask this question?

Are you in the world, or is the world within

you? You must admit that the world is not

perceived in your sleep although you cannot deny

your existence then. The world appears when

you wake up. So where is it? Clearly the world

is your thought. Thoughts are your projections.

The I is first created and then the world. The

world is created by the I which in turn rises up

from the Self. The riddle of the creation of the

world is thus solved if you solve the creation of

the I. So I say, find your Self.”

Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi

 

All that is known is experience, but there is no independent self that experiences and no independent object, other or world that is experienced. There is just the experiencing of experience. Rupert Spira

 

My life is a succession of events, just like yours. Only I am detached and see the passing show as a passing show, while you stick to things and move along with them.  Nisargadatta

 

Memorial Day

Even though we have been at war with somebody

somewhere for most of our history, we proudly

claim to represent the cause of peace and justice.

 

Even though we launch hi-tech drones to target

our victims with precision, we are just kids at heart,

enjoying live-action gaming in air-conditioned rooms.

 

Our brave young men and women freely enlist to fight

for Exxon and Lockheed, to preserve that way of life.

 

We spend more on weapons than most of the rest

of the world combined, just to let freedom ring.

 

It is necessary because there are those who oppose

our way of life — naturally, we must kill them.

 

We love to preach to others about our patriotism,

and why the sick and poor should not complain.

 

Some say that there is blood on our hands,

but in our own minds, we’re innocent.

 

We’re like playful young seal pups frolicking

on the sea surface, unaware of the Orcas

swiftly rising from below.

 

Bob O’Hearn

 

 

All that is known is the knowing of experience and I, Awareness, am that knowing. Rupert Spira

 

It is only a thought rising in and made out of Awareness that imagines that I, Awareness, share the limits and destiny of the body and mind. With this thought the knowing of our own Being as it is, is veiled and the search for happiness begins.  Rupert Spira

 

“Mind is an activity of consciousness.”  Rupert Spira

 

“My love of this truth just dictated the form of my work.” Rupert Spira

 

“All that is known of a mind, body or world are thoughts, sensations and perceptions. All that is known of thoughts, sensations and perceptions are thinking, sensing and perceiving. All that is known of thinking, sensing and perceiving is the knowing of them. Thus, all that is ever known is Knowing, and it is Knowing that knows itself alone.”  Rupert Spira

 

“Every appearance is an impersonal act of creation. Seeing this clearly, relieves us of any sense of personal guilt, blame, judgement or responsibility. However, this understanding does not lead to irresponsible or unloving behaviour. On the contrary, it enables the mind and body to function on behalf of impersonal love and intelligence, rather than representing the fears and demands of a non-existent self.”    Rupert Spira

 

“Everything we know, is known through Awareness; therefore, our knowledge of anything is only as good as our knowledge of Awareness. If we believe that Awareness is limited, experience will appear in accordance with that belief, as a succession of limited, finite objects and selves. If we understand that Awareness is eternal and infinite, everything and everyone will be revealed as such.” Rupert Spira

 

“It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from the effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting any immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition.”

― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

 

 

“When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong–these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”

Winston Churchill

 

—House of Commons, 2 May 1935, after the Stresa Conference, in which Britain, France and Italy agreed—futilely—to maintain the independence of Austria. (My book* page 490).

 

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

George Santayana

 

“As a separate entity one always feels alone and, as such, life is a process of easing the pain of this loneliness through substances, objects, activities and relationships.

As Awareness one is also alone, but only in the sense that there are no others to be either separate from or one with. This is the aloneness of Love.”

~ Rupert Spira

 

Pristine Mind

Leave your mind alone, don’t populate the sky with clouds.

Refrain from creating mental events based on what has happened.

Leave your mind alone, don’t populate the sky with clouds.

Refrain from creating mental events based on what might happen.

Leave your mind alone, don’t populate the sky with clouds.

Refrain from creating mental events based on what’s happening now.

Leave your mind alone, don’t populate the sky with clouds.

In the absence of mental events, pristine mind self-reveals.

Pristine mind is original presence, prior to any mental event.

Pristine mind is meditation without object, basic aware space.

The original presence of pristine mind is always relaxed, at ease.

By refraining from creating mental events, stress becomes obsolete.

Thoughts, emotions, beliefs, memory associations, sensations,

judgments, desires, fears, self-images, ideals — all are mental events.

Leave your mind alone, don’t populate the sky with clouds.

Pristine mind cannot be acquired, fabricated, forced, or imposed.

It is the self-revealing presence that shines as it is when all efforts

to control, manipulate, improve, or modify mind are discarded.

When water is left to itself, all the sediment will eventually settle.

When mind is left to itself, all conditions will eventually subside.

Pristine water, pristine mind — all this is easy to understand.

Refraining from creating mental events, attention is self-liberated.

First realization: mind is naturally pristine, prior to any fixed identity.

Second realization: whatever appears is a passing mental event.

Third realization: meditation is being as you are, pristine mind.

Fourth realization: pristine mind is unconditional happiness.

(Bows of sincere gratitude to Orgyen Chowang Rinpoche)

 

 

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh.

 

 

WANDERER…..COME HOME.

Come home my friends. Turn towards your Inner Beloved, your peace, your stillness that has been validated by your searching and that you know exists now. Bring it all with you. The pain, fear, anxiety, and whatever else you’re trying to get rid of. Your Beloved is waiting and has always been here anticipating your return the whole time. Surrender the impulse to wander in the details of your life and profoundly trust that you are taken care of in the house of your own heart.

-Atreya Thomas

 

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

One of our favourite poems of all time.

“Wild Geese” written and read by Mary Oliver

 

Video created by Live Learn Evolve in partnership with We Are Wildness

http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/geese/geese.html

 

 

“WILD GEESE”

by Mary Oliver

 

“Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine…”

 

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”

 

 

“So Enlightenment is nothing other than one’s own mind in its purified condition. For this reason Padma Sambhava said: ‘the mind is the creator of Samsara and of Nirvana. Outside the mind there exists neither Samsara nor Nirvana. ‘Having thus established that the basis of Samsara and Nirvana is the mind, it follows that all that seems concrete in the world, and all the seeming solidity of beings themselves, is nothing but an illusory vision of one’s own mind.” NAMKHAI NORBU RINPOCHE

 

 

“Once you realize that the world is your own projection, you are free of it. You need not free yourself of a world that does not exist, except in your own imagination! However is the picture, beautiful or ugly, you are painting it and you are not bound by it. Realize that there is nobody to force it on you, that it is due to the habit of taking the imaginary to be real. See the imaginary as imaginary and be free of fear.”   Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

“You cannot have an object without a subject.”  Rupert Spira

 

“Spare me perfection. Give me

instead the wholeness that comes

from embracing the full reality of who

I am, just as I am. Paradoxically, it is

this whole self that is most perfect.”

–David G. Benner

From Richard Rohr daily reflection

31.7.16

 

It’s not true that you came into this world. You came out of it, in the same way a flower comes out of a plant or a fruit comes out of a tree. An apple tree apples, the solar system peoples…You are a function of this total galaxy”  Alan Watts

 

We tend to think that we are individuals performing actions upon the universe-al stage. But in our anthropocentric arrogance we actually have it back to front. We are not doing things to the universe; the universe is doing us. It is living us, breathing us, it is speaking through our mouths, it is looking at itself through our eyes. Tom Das

 

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

Meister Eckhart (1260-1368)

 

Do not stand at my grave and weep

I am not there, I do not sleep.

 

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight

On the ripened grain.

I am the gentle autumn’s rain.

 

 

When you awaken in the morning hush,

I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

 

Do not stand at my grave and cry. I am not there.

I did not die. My Spirit is still alive…

 

Mary Elizabeth Frye, 1932

 

‘When I was born into this world

The only things I knew were to love, laugh, and shine my light brightly.

Then as I grew, people told me to stop laughing.

“Take life seriously,” they said,

“If you want to get ahead in this world.”

So I stopped laughing.

People told me, “Be careful who you love

If you don’t want your heart broken.”

So I stopped loving.

They said, “Don’t shine your light so bright

As it draws too much attention onto you.”

So I stopped shining

And became small

And withered

And died

Only to learn upon death

That all that matters in life

Is to love, laugh, and shine our light brightly!’

Anita Moorjani

 

 

Inayat Khan said, “The god who is intelligible to man is made by man himself, but what is beyond his intelligence is the reality.”

 

“The conventional wisdom holds that someone, somewhere, will think of something that will allow us to replace Earth’s rapidly emptying fuel tanks and resource stocks, on the one hand, and stabilize its increasingly violent climatic and ecological cycles, on the other.  That blind faith remains welded in place even as decade after decade slips past, one supposed solution after another fails, and the stark warnings of forty years ago have become the front page news stories of today. Nothing is changing, except that the news just keeps getting worse.”  John Michael Greer

 

“Upon thorough investigation, what’s clear is that it is never life’s situations that make us happy or sad, it is always the attitude we assume in the midst of arising conditions.” Bob O’Hearn

 

“Indeed, one of the biggest lessons we can learn during our time here is that gratitude is a powerful antidote to the emotional contraction at the heart which so many of us carry around inside us.”  Bob O’Hearn

 

“I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men’s hands even at the height of their arc of rage because we have finally realized there is just one flesh we can wound.” Hafez

Question:

” How can I act in a way that doesn’t create further reaction, karma?

Answer:

“Whenever love and kindness are in your heart, you will have the intelligence to know what to do and when and how to act.

When the mind sees its limitations, the limitation of the intellect, a humility and innocence arise which are not a matter of cultivation, accumulation or learning, but the result of instantaneous understanding. The moment you see your helplessness, that nothing works, you come to a point of surrender, a stand-still, where you are in communion with silence., ultimate truth. It is this reality which transforms your mind, and not effort or decision.”

– Jean Klein , New Mexico, 1980

( In: The Ease of Being, p. 28)

 

“God is Love. And Love must love. And to love there must be a Beloved. But since God is Existence infinite and eternal there is no one for Him(sic) to love but Himself . And in order to love Himself He must imagine Himself as the Beloved whom He as the Lover imagines He loves.

Beloved and Lover implies separation. And separation creates longing; and longing causes search. And the wider and the more intense the search the greater the separation and the more terrible the longing.

When longing is most intense separation is complete, and the purpose of separation, which was that Love might experience itself as Lover and Beloved, is fulfilled; and union follows. And when union is attained, the lover knows that he himself was all along the Beloved whom he loved and desired union with; and that all the impossible situations that he overcame were obstacles which he himself had placed in the path to himself.

To attain union is so impossibly difficult because it is impossible to become what you already are! Union is nothing other than knowledge of oneself as the Only One.”

Meher Baba

 

“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children,”

David Brower

 

 

Warding off Despair

 

“The Power That Preserves”  Book Three of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by

Stephen R. Donaldson      October, 1978

 

“Further, I tell you that there is no blame for us in the wisdom or folly, victory or defeat, of the way we have elected to defend the Land. We are not the Creators of the Earth.  Its final end is not on our heads. We are creations, like the Land itself. We are accountable for nothing but the purity of our service. When we have given our best wisdom and our utterest strength to the defence of the Land, then no voice can raise accusation against us. Life or death, good or ill – victory or destruction – we are not required to solve these riddles. Let the Creator answer for the doom of his creation.”  Pg. 48

 

“What people do with their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them.”  Lynn White Jr

 

“The victory of Christianity over Paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.” Lynn White Jr

 

“The thought manifests as the word;

The word manifests as the deed;

The deed develops into habit;

And the habit into character.

 

So, watch the thought and its ways with care

And let it spring from love

Born out of concern for all Beings.

As the shadow follows the body,

As we think, so we become.”

 

~ Dhammapada

 

“We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money.

 

They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.” ~by Chris Hedges~

 

“A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. ~Chris Hedges

 

“Washington has become our Versailles. We are ruled, entertained, and informed by courtiers — and the media has evolved into a class of courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are mostly courtiers. Our pundits and experts, at least those with prominent public platforms, are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception.” ~Chris Hedges

 

“Unfettered, or unregulated capitalism, is about societies that cannibalize themselves. When capitalism is the dominant ideology… it turns everything into a commodity, including human beings…” ~Chris Hedges

 

“You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.” ~Eckhart Tolle

 

“Insisting that political decisions ought to be made exclusively on the basis of evidence sounds great, until you try to apply it to actual politics. Take that latter step, and what you’ll discover is that evidence is only tangentially relevant to most political decisions.

 

Consider the recent British referendum over whether to leave the European Union. That decision could not have been made on the basis of evidence, because all sides, as far as I know, agreed on the facts. Those were that Britain had joined the European Economic Community (as it then was) in 1973, that its membership involved ceding certain elements of national sovereignty to EU bureaucracies, and that EU policies benefited certain people in Britain while disadvantaging others. None of those points were at issue. The points that were at issue were values on the one hand, and interests on the other. By values I mean judgments, by individuals and communities, about what matters and what doesn’t, what’s desirable and what isn’t, what can be tolerated and what can’t. These can’t be reduced to mere questions of evidence.” John Michael Greer

 

 

“Engineers are trained to figure out what works. Give them a problem, and they’ll beaver away until they find a solution—that’s their job, and the engineering profession has been around long enough, and had enough opportunities to refine its methods of education, that a training in engineering does a fine job of teaching you how to work from a problem to a solution. What it doesn’t teach you is how to question the problem.”  John Michael Greer

 

Being understanding

“We have come together to find out what we mean by truth, or our real nature, globality. This inquiry calls for a certain quality of attention, an attention free from any expectation. It is really a state of not-knowing, where we are simply open. It should also be clear that what we are looking for, we already are. It is completely objectless. Truth cannot be known by the mind and requires a different kind of perceiving than the mind uses. It is not a functional perceiving which is in duality—“I perceive this”—but a being the perceiving, where there is only perceiving without any perceiver or thing perceived. In other words, where we are the perceiving.

All that can be obtained, perceived, thought, is an object, but we are the subject of all objects. So if we remain in a state of trying to achieve understanding, we will only find an object and not the objectless truth. This object may be a subtle state, but what we are fundamentally is not a state. In trying to obtain ourselves, we go away from ourselves. When this is understood, our mind is automatically brought to a stop where all the energy used in projecting and attaining is no longer directed, and we find ourselves in non-directionless openness, waiting without waiting. This is really the most profoundly relaxed state of the body and the mind. We are simply open, open to the all-possible, open to the unknown. We can never go to it, because there is no one to go and nowhere to go. We can never take it. We can only be taken by it. So we must allow it.

We are accustomed to using the mind to understand, so we must go until the end of the mind, until it comes to the point of being completely exhausted. In other words, the mind must know its limits. This brings an absolutely relaxed state. The mind functions in space and time, but what we are, profoundly, is out of time. So time, the mind, can never understand what is beyond time. When the mind is exhausted, we are at the threshold of our real being. This threshold is a global feeling, free from any conceptualization. What is important is that when we say, “I have understood,” we feel how the understanding has acted on us. Intellectual understanding dissolves in silence, and this silence is our real being. We may have a clear geometrical understanding in our mind, but this understanding is still objective; the geometrical understanding must dissolve in being understanding, which is a global feeling. It is really this global feeling that is meant when we speak of being the understanding.

– Jean Klein”

 

 

 

“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”

― Etty Hillesum

 

“Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.”

― Etty Hillesum

 

“Mystics are people who begin their quest for wisdom or for God not in the world of externals but in the microcosm of their own soul. There they allow themselves to be fully present to the experiences of a deep-felt joy or sorrow, of beauty or suffering, of gain or loss, so that these opposing poles might in time reconcile and grow and ripen into a harmonious whole. Once this inner harmony has grown from within and wells up as a peace that defies all rational explanation, mystics can carry this inner harmony into the world, thus becoming catalysts in the transformation of the world.”

~Etty Hillesum

 

 

 

“Don’t move.

Just die over and over.

Don’t anticipate.

Nothing can save you now

because you have only this moment.

Not even enlightenment will help you now

because there are no other moments.

With no future, be true to yourself and express yourself fully.

Don’t move.”

~ Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

 

“Who can free himself from achievement

And from fame, descend and be lost

Amid the masses of men?

He will flow like Tao, unseen,

He will go about like Life itself

With no name and no home.

Simple is he, without distinction.

To all appearances he is a fool.

His steps leave no trace. He has no power.

He achieves nothing, has no reputation.

Since he judges no one

No one judges him.

Such is the perfect man:

His boat is empty.”

~Thomas Merton

 

 

 

Q: I’ve heard you say you’re a lover of reality. What about war and rape and all the terrible things in the world? Are you condoning them?

 

Byron Katie: Quite the opposite. I notice that if I believe it shouldn’t exist when it does exist, I suffer. Can I just end the war in me? Can I stop raping myself and others with my abusive thoughts and actions? Otherwise I’m continuing through me the very thing I want to end in the world. I start with ending my own suffering, my own war. This is a life’s work.

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” – David Bohm

 

“The self is not the source of the thought but rather the thought is the source of the self” J. Krishnamurti as presented by David Bohm

 

“All you have to offer another being is the quality of your presence”

Richard Moss

 

English words carry their own meanings within each individual, and thus, my words are only translated as one desires them to be.

 

It is important to remember, all of us see and experience things the way we so choose. Although the original source truth is always the same, how we each choose to express it is our own personal journey.     Sparrow

 

“Welcome hardship more than you welcome ease. Hardship will present you with challenges, and it is in overcoming these obstacles, that you will develop character and skill. Challenges are our greatest teachers.”

Chan master Hsu Yun

 

“Blue sky and green sea

Are the Buddha’s original face.

The sound of the waterfall and the bird’s song

Are the great sutras. Where are you going?”

 

Zen Master Seung Sahn

 

There is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly… Mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of our whole and unbroken movement.

David Bohm

 

 

The Best and Beautiful of Nisargadata

 

Your love of others is the result of self-knowledge, not its cause.

 

Q:   If I am free, why am I in a body?

 

M:   You are not in the body, the body is in you!  The mind is in you. They are there because you find them interesting. Your very nature has the infinite capacity to enjoy. It is full of zest and affection. It sheds its radiance on all that comes within its focus and awareness and nothing is excluded.  It does not know evil or ugliness, it hopes, it trusts, it loves. You people do not know how much miss by not knowing your own true self. You are neither the body nor the mind, neither the fuel nor the fire. They appear and disappear according to their own laws.

That which you are, your true self, you love it and know it, and whatever you do, you do for your own happiness. To find it, to know it, to cherish it is your basic urge. Since time immemorial you loved yourself, but never wisely. Use your body and mind wisely in the service of the self, that is all. Be true to your own self, love yourself absolutely. Do not pretend that you love others as yourself. Unless you have realized them as one with yourself, you cannot love them. Don’t pretend to be what you are not. Don’t refuse to be what you are. Your love of others is the result of self-knowledge, not its cause. Without self-realization, no virtue is genuine. When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realize the depth and fullness of the love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection. But when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only self-realization can break it. Go for it resolutely.”

 

I Am That

Nisargadata  Page 212

third edition  revised and re-edited

 

Sky: There can be no peace nor cessation of planetary destruction until this is understood.

 

She lets the confused stay confused

if that is what they want

and is always available

to those with a passion for the truth.

In the welter of opinions,

she is content with not-knowing.

She makes distinctions

but doesn’t take them seriously.

She sees the world constantly breaking

apart, and stays centered in the whole.

She sees the world endlessly changing

and never wants it to be

different from what it is.

~ Chuang Tzu

 

“Sunyata” in Buddhism points to the emptiness of all things or to the fact that reality has no inherent existence. The mathematical equations of quantum physics do not describe actual existence – they describe potential for existence. Niels Bohr puts it like this: “There is no world of quantum, there is only a quantum mechanical description“. Matter and energy are not in themselves phenomena, and do not become phenomena until they interact with the mind.

From Science and Non-duality Conference

 

 

“And yet in English, we speak of our beloved Grandmother Earth in exactly that way: as ‘it’. The language allows no form of respect for the more-than-human beings with whom we share Earth. In English, a being is either a human or an ‘it.’”  Robin Wall Kimmerer

 

“There are entire self-help industries and spiritual techniques out there designed to help you “get rid” of your anger. They erroneously believe that you can escape what already IS.

It’s not only impossible to escape anger, it is unwise. If anger is arising, that is what is arising. Any movement to escape it or get rid of it is denying a flow of energy that is arising within you. It is through resistance that you feed this energy.

When I feel anger rising within me, instead of trying to get rid of it, I choose to notice it. Stop for a moment. Notice the mental stories that feed your anger and the strategies your mind uses to escape it. Allow those stories and strategies to come and go organically and effortlessly in the space of your conscious awareness.

Anger arises from within our conscious awareness. When we choose to notice it, we can take a step back into conscious awareness, and away from being fixated in the feeling of anger itself. When we transform anger in this way, instead of avoiding it, anger becomes a beautiful divine quality: compassion for ourselves and others.

Compassion is the energy of anger, the frustration of what is happening, transformed and diluted through wisdom, into the understanding of what is.”  Mateo Sol

 

“Love isn’t something you have. You can’t talk about Love because you are it. That’s why you cannot be separated from that which you love, said Bartholomew”  Sky

 

“The only thing stronger than our will to live, is the bond we share with animals…”    Respect is Due Community

 

 

“Now is not a time. Here is not a place.”  Science and Nonduality

 

“The present moment is the source of a chain of interdependence. This absolute point includes all changing phenomena, all impermanent existence, the entire cosmos.”

~ Taisen Deshimaru

“The entire field of becoming is open and accessible; past and future coexist in the eternal now.”

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

Why do humans think Earth is silent beneath all that stone and dirt?

Why don’t they hear her as clearly as I do?

The whispers of moonlight, the summons of sun, the longing of river

and the shout of thunder.

Earth is not silent.

She speaks in every turning of her axis, every tilting of her hips,

and in the secrets she shares with the seasons and in every tectonic shift.

Earth is not silent.

She speaks through weather and breathes through forests

and she loves through her trees. She dances in her the oceans

and she rests in her deserts.

Why do humans think She is so silent when she has so much to say?

If only we could learn to truly listen.

—Edveeje Fairchild

 

“It is very difficult to get a man to understand something if his lifestyle depends on him not understanding it.”   Unknown

 

“We cannot sow bloodshed and reap peace. I no longer require these medals.”

Unknown

 

“There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.”  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

 

“Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.

The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state… In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role…”  JFK, Amherst College, 1963

 

When you become more sensitive to your body

you have the impression that

the inhalation-exhalation is no longer localised.

It is all around you.

It is important to see how we live mainly in our heads.

Think with your whole body,

feel with your whole body.

In the whole feeling, the global sensation,

you go into your room and touch your whole room.

You go outside and touch the clouds, the trees, the water.

You do not live in isolation.

In your radiation you are in communion with all things.

In this expansion there is no place for the ego

because the ego is a contraction.

Love is expansion, a feeling of spaciousness.

Jean Klein, The Ease of Being

 

Natural Perfection

“The land of natural perfection

is free of buddhas and sentient beings;

the ground of natural perfection

is free of good and bad;

the path of natural perfection

has no length;

the fruition of natural perfection

can neither be avoided nor attained;

the body of natural perfection

is neither existent nor nonexistent;

the speech of natural perfection

is neither sacred nor profane;

and the mind of natural perfection

has no substance nor attribute.

The space of natural perfection

cannot be consumed nor voided;

the status of natural perfection

is neither high nor low;

the praxis of natural perfection

is neither developed nor neglected;

the potency of natural perfection

is neither fulfilled nor frustrated;

the display of natural perfection

is neither manifest nor latent;

the actuality of natural perfection

is neither cultivated nor ignored;

and the gnosis of natural perfection

is neither visible nor invisible.

The hidden awareness of natural perfection

is everywhere,

its parameters beyond indication,

its actuality incommunicable;

the sovereign view of natural perfection

is the here-and-now, naturally present

without speech or books, irrespective

of conceptual clarity or dullness,

but as spontaneous joyful creativity

its reality is nothing at all.”

~Longchepa

 

“There is nothing special about the wise ones.

They have only stopped believing their minds.

They understand that there is no Beyond.

Beyond is a creation of the mind.

There is Being and Before Being,

That Most Antecedent which

Sources appearances and

To which all appearances

Return once concluded.

They have mastered the effortlessness of

Being oneself.

They are never dissatisfied with

The present moment and

They never nurture any vision of

How things ought to be.

Each in their own way,

They have come to something so simple that

Speech retired in total frustration.

As such, they are mostly silent.

When questioned, they answer and

Every word is laden with power

To those whose ears truly hear.”

Wu Shin

 

“To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions,” Hannah Arendt asserted in her spectacular meditation on the life of the mind, would be to “lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.” Indeed, that gap between what we yearn to know and what we might never know is filled with the creative restlessness responsible for almost all human achievement!  Our art and our science and our philosophy, those myriad tentacles by which we reach for the unknown knowing full well it might be unknowable, but reaching nonetheless.  Brain Pickings – Maria Popova

“A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world.”  Rebecca Goldstein

 

“Fanaticism is bred by hopelessness and despair. It is not the product of religion, although religion often becomes the sacral veneer for violence. The more desperate people become, the more this nihilistic violence will spread.”  Chris Hedges

 

“I am not old … she said … I am rare.

 

I am the standing ovation

At the end of the play.

 

I am the retrospective

Of my life as art

 

I am the hours

Connected like dots

Into good sense

 

I am the fullness

Of existing.

 

You think I am waiting to die …

But I am waiting to be found

 

I am a treasure.

I am a map.

 

And these wrinkles are

Imprints of my journey

 

Ask me anything.”

 

~ Samantha Reynolds

 

Excerpts from Alone

The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are… One of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand our deep reluctance to be left to ourselves… At the beginning of the twenty first century, to feel alone or want to be alone is deeply unfashionable: to admit to feeling alone is to reject and betray others, as if they are not good company, and do not have entertaining, interesting lives of their own to distract us, and to actually seek to be alone is a radical act; to want to be alone is to refuse a certain kind of conversational hospitality and to turn to another door, and another kind of welcome, not necessarily defined by human vocabulary…to find ourselves alone as a looked for achievement, not a state to which we have been condemned.  David Whyte

 

“A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it; and then he looks and rejoices and laughs; and then he sees and knows. He knows that his life will be over altogether too soon. A man of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country, but only life to be lived, and under these circumstances his only tie to people is his controlled folly. Thus a man of knowledge endeavors, and sweats, and puffs, and if one looks at him, he is just like any ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under control. Whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn’t, is in no way part of his concern.”  Don Juan Matus A Separate Reality, Carlos Castaneda, 1971, pg. 85

 

“The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is. If we stop telling ourselves that the world is so-and-so, the world will stop being so-and-so.” Don Juan Matus

 

“The life of a warrior cannot possibly be cold and lonely and without feelings, because it is based on his affection, his devotion, his dedication to his beloved… The Earth knows that he loves it, and it bestows on him its care. That’s why his life is filled to the brim and his state, wherever he’ll be, will be plentiful. He roams on the paths of his love… This Earth… Only if one loves this Earth with unbending passion, can one release one’s sadness. A warrior is always joyful, because his love is unalterable and his beloved, the Earth, embraces him and bestows upon him inconceivable gifts. The sadness belongs only to those who hate the very thing that gives shelter to their beings. This lovely Being, which is alive to its last recesses and understands every feeling, soothed me, it cured me of my pains, and finally when I had fully understood my love for it, it taught me freedom. Only the love for this splendorous Being can give freedom to a warrior’s spirit; and freedom is joy, efficiency, and abandon in the face of any odds.”

Tales of Power Carlos Castenada

 

“Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?”  Don Juan Matus from Carlos Castenada

 

“This is personal. It is our planet, our future. It matters. It is time to wake up and act. Become yourself, eat the food your body really wants, clean up your relationships, dispose of unwanted baggage, train your mind, follow your heart, trust your soul nature. Do something spectacular, or outrageous, because your soul is telling you to do it, and however unrealistic it seems, trust your soul, and follow your dream.”

Tony Conway via Vale das Lobas

 

Humans don’t Respond Directly to Stimuli

“Still, divination is a crutch, or at best a supplement; human beings have their own onboard novelty generators, which can do the job all by themselves if given half a chance.  The process involved here was understood by philosophers a long time ago, and no doubt the neurologists will get around to figuring it out one of these days as well. The core of it is that humans don’t respond directly to stimuli, external or internal.  Instead, they respond to their own mental representations of stimuli, which are constructed by the act of cognition and are laced with bucketloads of extraneous material garnered from memory and linked to the stimulus in uniquely personal, irrational, even whimsical ways, following loose and wildly unpredictable cascades of association and contiguity that have nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the roots of creativity.” John Michael Greer

 

“…only over time can the intelligence of a place lay claim upon my person. Slowly, as the seasonal round repeats itself again and again, the lilt and melody of the local songbirds becomes an expectation within my ears, and so the mind I’ve carried with me settles into the wider mind that enfolds me.” ~ David Abram

 

Language creates reality

 

“Among indigenous peoples, the concept of “weed” does not exist. Every plant has a purpose or it would not be here.”  Mathew C. Bronson

 

“Language creates reality rather than merely describes it as the First Peoples still remember.” Mathew C. Bronson

 

“English lacks an animate third person singular pronoun. This is evidence to support the suspicion that the English language is currently complicit in it-ing Mother Earth to death. Perhaps this is worth considering as English continues making progress as an all-consuming world language — no language comes without its own attitudinal baggage.”  Mathew C. Bronson

 

“The simple act of naming has changed my relationship with this tree and, by extension, helped to engage me in intimate communion with the more-than-human world in which I am embedded. I note that it is very hard to kill, or mow over unconsciously, something you have named and thereby conferred with animacy. I invite readers to practice using language in a similar fashion in order to reanimate aspects of their personal relationship with nature and with the “others” in their lives.”  Mathew C. Bronson

 

“The Hopi term rehpi means “flashed” and would be properly used when, say, one saw lightning in the sky, without any implication at all that “something” flashed: the flashing and “what” is flashing are coterminous3.”  (3) As pointed out by linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf.

 

 

 

“In the one mind, all possibilities, all configurations of information appear to exist in potential, all superimposed on one another, awaiting some prompt in order to transform into actuality in our world of experience.  Larry Dossey

 

“The universe, the solar system, and planet earth in themselves and in their evolutionary emergence constitute for the human community the primary revelation of that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being.” Thomas Berry

 

“It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of consciousness is the ultimate universal reality.”  Eugene Wigner

 

“The reason why alternative worldviews do not catch on more quickly is that mainstream descriptions of them are couched and boxed in containers using only the words acceptable to the authors.  These words are inadequate to frame any alternative view in a structure that would appeal to mainstream grounded readers.  Being able to control the use and definitions of words is the arrowhead of thought and worldview preservation.”  Emma Restall Orr

 

“Man…Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money…  Then  he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives As if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.” Dalai Lama

 

‘We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.” ~ Wendell Berry

 

“The neo-greens do not come to rejuvenate environmentalism; they come to bury it.” Paul Kingsnorth

 

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

– George Bernard Shaw

 

 

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.  Max Planck

 

“The Earth is all we have in common”  Wendell Berry

 

“Firstly, the primary status of the universe. The universe is, ‘the only self-referential reality in the phenomenal world. It is the only text without context. Everything else has to be seen in the context of the universe’. The second element is the significance of story, and in particular the universe as story. ‘The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.’”  Michael Colebrook

 

 

 

“You should know by now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he is finished acting.  A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it; and then he looks and rejoices and laughs; and then he sees and knows.  He knows that his life will be over altogether too soon; he knows that he, as well as everybody else, is not going anywhere; he knows because he sees that nothing is more important than anything else.  In other words, a man of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country, but only life to be lived, and under these circumstances his only tie to his fellow men is his controlled folly.  Thus a man of knowledge endeavors, and sweats, and puffs, and if one looks at him he is just like any ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under control.  Nothing being more important than anything else, a man of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if it matters to him.  His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn’t; so when he fulfils his acts he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn’t, is no way part of his concern.”  A Separate Reality, Carlos Castaneda, 1971, pg. 85

“Those who will not reason Perish in the act:

Those who will not act Perish for that reason.”

— W. H. Auden

 

“You fight others all the time for your survival as a separate body-mind, a particular name and form. To live you must destroy. From the moment you were conceived you started a war with your environment – a merciless war of mutual extermination, until death sets you free.”    ~Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

“Lights were coming on in the villages now.  In another hour, they would provide a scattering of sequins in the cape of night.”  Elizabeth George

 

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”  G.B.S

 

“All things are in the universe, and the universe is in all things:

we in it, and it in us: and in this way everything harmonizes

in perfect unity.” ~ Giordano Bruno

 

“As we recover a sense of the wild within, we may also come into a new relationship with Nature outside us. Each being in the natural world is beautiful and of value in itself; each is a unique face of the inexpressible, Only Being, the divine Beloved.”

~ Neil Douglas-Klotz

 

 

“A living universe is intent on growing self-referencing and self-organizing systems within itself at every scale.”  Duane Elgin

 

“Awakening to our identity as simultaneously distinct and intimately interconnected with a living universe can help us transform feelings of existential separation and species-arrogance that threaten our future.”  Duane Elgin

 

The Living Universe “the universe as a unified system that is sustained continuously by the flow-through of phenomenal amounts of energy and whose essential nature includes consciousness or a self-reflective capacity that enables systems at every scale of existence to exercise some freedom of choice.”  Duane Elgin

 

“Love the earth and sun and animals,

Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,

Stand up for the stupid and crazy,

Devote your income and labor to others…

Re-examine all you have been told

at school or church or in any book;

Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

~Walt Whitman~

Leaves of Grass

 

“The Walk”

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,

going far ahead of the road I have begun.

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;

it has its inner light, even from a distance –

 

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,

into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;

a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave …

but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1924)

 

“Love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the Earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need – if only we had eyes to see.”

~ Edward Abbey

 

“The Walk”

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,

going far ahead of the road I have begun.

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;

it has its inner light, even from a distance –

 

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,

into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;

a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave …

but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1924)

 

“Winning does not tempt that man, This is how he grows, by being defeated decisively, by greater and greater beings.” Rainer Maria Rilke

 

“I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life so far as to deem the Earth only a dry clod, and to seek angels above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky.”  Gustav Fechner Experimental Psychologist – Ueber die Seelenfrage (“Concerning the Soul”) (1861)

 

“The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.  People protect what they love.”  Jacques Cousteau

 

“Your brightness is my darkness.

I know nothing of You and, by myself,

I cannot even imagine how to go about knowing You.

If I imagine You, I am mistaken.

If I understand You, I am deluded.

If I am conscious and certain I know You, I am crazy.

The darkness is enough.”

—Thomas Merton, prayer before midnight mass at Christmas, 1941.

 

“In the field of consciousness research—and also in physics and astronomy—we are breaking past the cause-and-effect, mechanistic way of interpreting things. In the biological sciences, there is a vitalism coming in that goes much further toward positing a common universal consciousness of which our brain is simply an organ. Consciousness does not come from the brain. The brain is an organ of consciousness. It focuses consciousness and pulls it in and directs it through a time and space field. But the antecedent of that is the universal consciousness of which we are all just a part.”   Joseph Campbell in Mythic World’s, Modern Words, p. 286

 

“If you truly love Nature, you will find beauty everywhere.”

~ Vincent Van Gogh

 

“Religion must step down from fixed dogmatic views that long ago were shattered by science, such as the creation myth in Genesis. Images of God must be jettisoned next, since a bearded patriarch sitting above the clouds has never been anything but a metaphor. Finally, and hardest of all, religion must abandon its claim to the supernatural. As long as there is one reality for science (Nature) and another for religion (the mystical supernatural), a unified understanding of reality will be unreachable.

Science has cherished beliefs it must give up also. The first is exactly the same as for religion. The belief that all spiritual experience is supernatural and therefore invalid prevents a full understanding of the universe and our place in it. The division between objective and subjective, along with rational versus irrational, must be abandoned, because it’s a false duality. All experience is subjective, including the experience of doing science.”

 

Deepak Chopra

 

“What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.”

don Miguel Ruiz

 

“The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.”

― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

 

“Some day the earth will weep, she will beg for her life, she will cry with tears of blood. You will make a choice, if you will help her or let her die, and when she dies, you too will die.”

Words of John Hollow Horn, Oglala Lakota, 1932:

 

“But while scientists are seeking to keep their language balanced and unemotional, they are missing the story that really would engage, excite, and in spire people:  the story of themselves and their passion for their science.  After all, what truly engages the emotional brain are personal stories, and what convinces us of the trustworthiness of the communicator is our evaluation of his or her own commitment.”  George Marshall  “Don’t even think about it.”

 

“Among indigenous peoples, the concept of “weed” does not exist. Every plant has a purpose or it would not be here.”  Mathew C. Bronson

 

“Language creates reality rather than merely describes it as the First Peoples still remember.” Mathew C. Bronson

 

“English lacks an animate third person singular pronoun. This is evidence to support the suspicion that the English language is currently complicit in it-ing Mother Earth to death. Perhaps this is worth considering as English continues making progress as an all-consuming world language — no language comes without its own attitudinal baggage.”  Mathew C. Bronson

 

“The simple act of naming has changed my relationship with this tree and, by extension, helped to engage me in intimate communion with the more-than-human world in which I am embedded. I note that it is very hard to kill, or mow over unconsciously, something you have named and thereby conferred with animacy. I invite readers to practice using language in a similar fashion in order to reanimate aspects of their personal relationship with nature and with the “others” in their lives.”  Mathew C. Bronson

 

“The Hopi term rehpi means “flashed” and would be properly used when, say, one saw lightening in the sky, without any implication at all that “something” flashed: the flashing and “what” is flashing are coterminous3.”  (3) As pointed out by linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf.

 

 

 

“A trophy is a kind of prize, memento or symbol of some kind of success. To kill a sentient creature for the purpose of using its body or part of it as a trophy is essentially killing it for fun or as a celebration of violence.”

Wolf biologist John Vucetich and Oregon State University’s Michael P. Nelson

 

 

 

“At the center of the Universe dwells the Great Spirit and that center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.”

 

~Black Elk

 

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

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.”

 

mevlana jelaluddin rumi – 13th century

 

LOVE IS STRONGER THAN DEATH

 

Where does a loved one ‘go’ when they die?

Where does a wave ‘go’ when it crashes onto the shore?

Nowhere. No place.

The wave was never separate from the vastness of the ocean in the first place, so it cannot ‘return’ there. Water cannot leave water, nor return.

Nothing happens at all, from the perspective of our true nature.

Death is simply the deepest relaxation into unborn, undying presence.

Your loved one did not ‘go’ anywhere, friend. They simply rested even more deeply in their own nature, which is your nature, which is presence. Not two. Never two.

They are now where they always were – in your heart of hearts. And they can never leave.

You will carry them.

Love is stronger than death.  – Jeff Foster

 

“Man is the most insane species.  He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature.  Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.  Why?”   Hubert Reeves

 

“We are part of nature. Nature made us and at our death we will be reabsorbed into nature. We are at home in nature and in our bodies. This is where we belong. This is the only place where we can find and make our paradise, not in some imaginary world on the other side of the grave. If nature is the only paradise, then separation from nature is the only hell. When we destroy nature, we create hell on earth for other species and for ourselves.

Nature is our mother, our home, our security, our peace, our past and our future. We should treat natural things and habitats as believers treat their temples and shrines, as sacred – to be revered and preserved in all their intricate and fragile beauty.” ~ Paul Harrison

 

And so it makes sense to say that we ARE the Earth.   ~ Sky

 

“We get given our faces, thinks Audie, but we inherit our lives, our happiness and our unhappiness.  Some get a lot, some get a little.  Some savour every morsal and suck the marrow out of every bone.  We take pleasure out of the sound of rain, the smell of cut grass, the smiles of strangers, the feeling of dawn on a hot day.  We learn things and realise that we can never know more than we don’t know.  We catch love like a cold and cling to it like wreckage in a storm.  …Life is short. Love is vast.  Live like there’s no tomorrow.”

Michael Robotham, Life or Death

 

“The middle ages? The conquistadors? They were nothing. Just a pick-up note to the song of human cruelty we’ll sing on a dying world.”  LuckyMortal

 

“In the real world, in the course of ordinary history, these things happen. So does the decline and fall of civilizations that deplete their resource bases and wreck the ecological cycles that support them. As I noted above, I’m aware that true believers in progress insist that this can’t happen to us, but a growing number of people have noticed that the Progress Fairy got her pink slip some time ago, and ordinary history has taken her place as the arbiter of human affairs. That being the case, getting used to what ordinary history brings may be a highly useful habit to cultivate just now.”   John Michael Greer

 

“You can change your thinking all you like, but if you don’t deal with the nonrational factors that drove your previous thinking, your brand new thoughts are going to head in the same old directions.”

-John Michael Greer

 

“Activism has its place, to be sure, and potentially an important one, but activism only matters if the people who are doing it have already followed Gandhi’s advice and become the change that they wish to see in the world.”

-John Michael Greer

 

“By growing a garden and raising chickens in your backyard instead of buying packaged and processed vegetables and eggs that are shipped halfway across the continent, conserving energy relentlessly and getting as much as you can from local renewable sources, and sharply downscaling the pursuit of material excess in favor of a life that’s rich in experiences, relationships, and meaning, it’s possible to get by very comfortably on a small fraction of the energy, stuff, and stimulation that most Americans think they need.”

-John Michael Greer

 

“To complete the task of breaking away from the murky thinking and the tangled nonrational drives that dominate contemporary life in today’s America, it’s necessary to break away from the lifestyles and everyday choices that are produced by that thinking and those drives. Mind you, the same equation works the other way around: to make the break away from lifestyles that demand energy and resource flows we can’t count on getting for much longer—and making that break is perhaps the most essential task of the decade or so immediately before us—it’s going to be necessary to turn away from the thinking patterns and the unmentioned and usually unnoticed passions that make those lifestyles seem to make sense.”

-John Michael Greer

 

“Right now, with calm, clear rationality, big corporations and their friends in Congress continue to claim that they’ve got everything under control.

And if that isn’t something to be alarmed about, I don’t know what is.”

Eric Holthaus  AUG. 20 2014

 

“If archeologists thousands of years from now try the same test, they’ll find yet another eroded topsoil layer at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the legacy of an agricultural system that put quarterly profits ahead of the relatively modest changes that might have preserved the soil for future generations.”  John Michael Greer

 

 

“I am so absorbed in the wonder of the earth and the life upon it, that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.” ~ Pearl S. Buck

 

“Even elements of the environmental movement approach the earth as an object to be preserved, rather than as a spiritual reality to be respected. This misconception may prove to be fateful, for, as Tony Gonnela Frichner of the Onondoga Nation has pointed out, ‘How can you “save the Earth” if you have no spiritual relationship with the Earth? There is an intellectual abstraction about the environment but no visceral participation with the Earth. Non-Indians can’t change the current course of destruction without this connection.’ ”

—Joseph Epes Brown

 

“Do we have justification for calling ahead and cancelling the reservations of the next generations just because we want to eat their lunch?”  Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point

“We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.”

~ Andy Goldsworthy

 

“Pantheists choose to regard the Universe with awe, reverence, love, feelings of belonging and a recognition of tremendous power, beauty and mystery. This is an aesthetic and emotional choice and basically lies beyond any challenge from logic or evidence. But it is based on objective qualities of the Universe and Nature.” ~ Paul Harrison

 

 

“Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth. There are no heretics in Nature’s church; all are believers, all are communicants. The beauty of natural religion is that you have it all the time; you do not have to seek it afar off in myths and legends, in catacombs, in garbled texts, in miracles of dead saints or wine-bibbing friars. It is of today; it is now and here; it is everywhere.”

~John Burroughs, Accepting the Universe

 

“For some, what humans fabricate is now natural.  This loss is frightening and devastating.  We just don’t have the wisdom to be co-creators of future life.  Better we study and figure out how Gaia managed to do without us for so long.”

Sky McCain

 

“Corporations have no conscience. At what point are we going to label this abusive?”

~ Derrick Jensen

 

“We cannot afford the still-birth of new ideas that lack the life force that comes from the depths. We are called to return to the root of our being where the sacred is born. Then, standing in both the inner and outer worlds, we will find our self to be part of the momentous synchronicity of life giving birth to itself.”

—Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

 

“The future is already here, just not evenly distributed yet.”

Bruce Sterling

 

“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.

 

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”

 

 

“What is becoming clear is what we experience as separate things is actually an illusion. Since there is only a fundamental unity then the idea that you are somehow separate from the outside environment begins to fade.  The earth in which you live, is you, you are the earth and everything within it.  You are the universe, everything it takes to make a universe is contained within all of us. Remember, consciousness has no boundaries, the only limits to your consciousness, is your imagination.”  Laura Jane

 

“Your everyday life has to be your spiritual practice, whatever that is.” Ngak’chang Rinpoche

 

“We have always been ‘enlightened’ – always dwelt in the non-dual state. Our confusion is merely our fear of that fact. There is nothing more, or less, to ‘what we are’ – than ‘that’ which is immediately apparent. But we seem unable to see it. The nondual state is ours to see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and ideate – but all we seem to sense, is the shifting surface images of that vastness. We see reflections – but are blind to the nature of the mirror. We see waves, but fail to experience the ocean. We see clouds, but cannot conceive of the sky.” – Khandro Déchen

 

“Enlightenment turned out to be far more of a mixed blessing than its more enthusiastic prophets liked to imagine, and if so many achievements of science and technology turned into sources of immense misery once they were whored out in the service of greed and political power, the same can be said of most human things: “If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin,” Tolkien commented of a not dissimilar trajectory, “that was of old the fate of Arda marred.” Still, the window of opportunity through which modern industrial civilization might have been able to escape its unwelcome destiny has long since slammed shut.”

John Michael Greer

 

“Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.”  Khalil Gibran

 

“O, Great Spirit Whose voice I hear in the winds, And whose breath gives life to all the world, hear me. I am small and weak. I need your strength and wisdom. Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset. Make my hands respect the things I have made and my ears sharp to hear your voice. Make me wise so that I may understand the things you have taught my people. Let me learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock. I seek strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy – myself. Make me always ready to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes. So when life fades, as the fading sunset, my spirit may come to you without shame.” ~ A Sioux Indian Prayer ~ An original image of a Sioux Indian fasting to receive spiritual insight from the Great Spirit.

 

“To say that a random universe gave rise to purpose and meaning through the accidental bump of particles in the night is just as tortuous as claiming that the same random activity enabled matter to learn to think.”

Deepak Chopra

 

“Your everyday life has to be your spiritual practice, whatever that is.” Ngak’chang Rinpoche

 

“We have always been ‘enlightened’ – always dwelt in the non-dual state. Our confusion is merely our fear of that fact. There is nothing more, or less, to ‘what we are’ – than ‘that’ which is immediately apparent. But we seem unable to see it. The nondual state is ours to see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and ideate – but all we seem to sense, is the shifting surface images of that vastness. We see reflections – but are blind to the nature of the mirror. We see waves, but fail to experience the ocean. We see clouds, but cannot conceive of the sky.” – Khandro Déchen

 

 

“…the long day of national delusion that dawned back in 1980, when Ronald Reagan famously and fatuously proclaimed “it’s morning in America,” is drawing on rapidly toward dusk, and most Americans are hopelessly unprepared for the coming of night.

They’re just as unprepared, though, for the psychological and emotional costs of that shattering transformation—not least because the change isn’t being imposed on them at random by an indifferent universe, but comes as the inevitable consequence of their own collective choices in decades not that long past.”

“The hard fact that most people in this country are trying not to remember is this:  in the years right after Reagan’s election, a vast number of Americans enthusiastically turned their backs on the promising steps toward sustainability that had been taken in the previous decade, abandoned the ideals they’d been praising to the skies up to that time, and cashed in their grandchildrens’ future so that they didn’t have to give up the extravagance and waste that defined their familiar and comfortable lifestyles. As a direct result, the nonrenewable resources that might have supported the transition to a sustainable future went instead to fuel one last orgy of wretched excess.  Now, though, the party is over, the bill is due, and the consequences of that disastrous decision have become a massive though almost wholly unmentionable factor in our nation’s culture and collective psychology.”

John Michael Greer

 

“The middle- class lifestyle in the United States and other “advanced” nations requires unfathomable supplies of finite and rapidly depleting resources for its daily operation.”  Erik Lindberg

 

Ah listen, for silence is not lonely!

Imitate the magnificent trees

That speak no word of their rapture, but only

Breathe largely the luminous breeze.

 

From Corot by D.H. Lawrence

 

“When we love all the life we see, we see the love in all life.” ~ A.D. Williams

 

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

—Aldo Leopold

 

“Always go with your passions. Never ask yourself if it’s realistic or not.”

~ Deepak Chopra

Ram Dass

“I wanted someone to explain to me what I was missing. At that time, I was a Buddhist, but by chance I was delivered to a Hindu Guru {Neem Karoli Baba} He certainly had siddhis and that power impressed me, but his love took me by storm. I had never had unconditional love, and I felt that same feeling of I’m home…I’m home. His power opened the door, and when I tasted his love it made me loving.”

 

“When you get into your soul,” he continued, “the whole world is made of love—trees are made of love; beings, in their souls, are made of love.”

 

“When you’re in ego you inhabit your roles: the nurse role, doctor role, teacher role, mother role, or the seeker role. They’re all roles. You stand in your role and talk to other people, but because your role is a cover it makes everybody else get in their role. For example, there is the role of nurse and the role of patient. So, the game is to bring your identification from ‘role’ to ‘soul,’” he says as he slowly brings his hand down from his head to his heart. “Role to Soul. The roles have anxiety and fear in them, but the soul came from the One. It came from love. As you go through these planes of consciousness, first you see love, then you be love. See love, be love.”

 

Sky:  This is probably why Jean Klein didn’t want to assume the role or be acknowledged in the role of a teacher.  Yet, like a few others who met Indian gurus, he was asked to return to Europe and teach.  Maybe it is just because of my reluctance or inability to surrender to a teacher, but the grace he channelled for me left me with no obligations at all.  I felt complete freedom.  What lingered and cried out in me was just thankfulness.  There was no desire to “hang around” or kiss his feet or bow.  To this day, I have found no rational explanation as to what happened.  I saw infinity through his eyes; that’s as far as I have been able to go in all these years.[around 28 years ago]

 

“Lights were coming on in the villages now.  In another hour, they would provide a scattering of sequins in the cape of night.”  Elizabeth George

 

“I think we should feel very sober, and a little afraid, at the power of human credulity, the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith.  For this particular denial is the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy.”

^Galen Strawson, philosopher^

 

“For the Lakota, kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them. And so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.

 

The animals had rights — the right of man’s protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man’s indebtedness — and in recognition of these rights the Lakota never enslaved an animal and spared all life that was not needed for food and clothing. For the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them.

 

This concept of life and its relations was humanizing and gave to the Lakota an abiding love. It filled his being with the joy and mystery of living; it gave him reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all.

 

From Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, there came a great unifying life force that flowed in and through all things — the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks, trees, birds, animals — and was the same force that had been breathed into the first man. Thus all things were kindred, and were brought together by the same Great Mystery.”

 

~ Luther Standing Bear

(Ota Kte, Mochunozhin)

(1868-1939) Lakota chief

 

“Intellectual illumination and emotional catharsis are the twin rewards of the act of creation, and its re-creative echo in the beholder.  The first constitutes the moment of truth, the Aha reaction, the second provides the Ah… reaction of the aesthetic experience. The two are complementary aspects of an indivisible  process.”  ~ Arthur Koestler in Janus A Summing Up. 

 

“There is but one safe way to avoid mistakes:to do nothing or, at least, to avoid doing something new…The unknown lends an insecure foothold and venturing out into it, one can hope for no more than that the possible failure will be an honourable one.”  ~ Albert Szent-Cyorgyi

 

“Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate.  But when you feel that the earth loves you in return,the feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street to a sacred bond.”  ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

 

“Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

 

“I think we tap a tremendous reservoir of power and strength when we allow that we’re entirely born of this breathing planet and that we really are nothing other than parts of Earth. That our real flesh is this immense spherical metabolism that envelopes us, that the deep, dense energy of the Earth is pulsing into us all the time. When we think of ourselves as not just earthly beings, but as Earth then we have all that wildness and all that power surging through us to meet whatever challenges come up. It doesn’t make it easy by any means. But it alters the way we feel.”

~ David Abram

(in All Our Relations: GreenSpirit connections with the more-than-human world GreenSpirit ebook 2013)

 

“If you love someone, the greatest gift you can give them is your presence”

― Thích Nhất Hạnh

 

“This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy of kindness.”  -The Dalai Lama

 

“The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.”

― Thomas Wolfe

 

“We are the land. To the best of my understanding, that is the fundamental idea embedded in Native American life and culture in the Southwest. More than remembered, the earth is the mind of the people as we are the mind of the earth. The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies. It is not a means of survival, a setting for our affairs, a resource on which we draw in order to keep our own act functioning. It is not the ever-present “Other” which supplies us with a sense of “I.” It is rather a part of our being, dynamic, significant, real. It is ourself, in as real a sense as such notions as “ego,” “libido” or social network, in a sense more real than any conceptualization or abstraction about the nature of human being can ever be. . . . Nor is this relationship one of mere “affinity” for the Earth. It is not a matter of being “close to nature.” The relationship is more one of identity, in the mathematical sense, than of affinity. The Earth is, in a very real sense, the same as ourself (or selves), and it is this primary point that is made in the fiction and poetry of the Native American writers of the Southwest.”

–Paula Gunn Allen, “Iyani: It Goes This Way”

 

“Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. Every breath we take, every step we take, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. The question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.”

― Thich Nhat Hanh

 

 

The Art of Living:

“Winston Churchill said: “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”. Enjoying what you do means feeling the aliveness behind the doing. THAT is more fulfilling than a successful outcome (which is appreciated as a bonus). This non-attachment to the outcome activates higher energy and is probably the greatest secret of all success. I wish you success in the art of living. “

-Eckhart Tolle

 

“The brain is a processor of inputs, not a mirror to realty.”  Deepak Chopra

 

“The question that all would-be conquerors need to ask themselves, in other words, is what will happen if their planned campaign of conquest fails. None of the 17th-century thinkers who played a role in launching humanity on its assault on Nature seems to have posed that question, even in private, much less tried to think through the answers. I’d encourage my readers to have this in mind when the latest reports of glorious victories place these latter more and more often in territory that was supposedly conquered in earlier campaigns. I’d also encourage them, to push the metaphor a step further, to think about what terms of surrender might be demanded of us when Man’s grand attempt to conquer Nature ends in defeat.”  John Michael Greer

 

“Education is the best contraceptive of all”  Alan Weisman

 

“For without asking the deepest questions about what is real and how do we know the truth, the current state of physics and biology will be mired in speculation and doubt.”  Deepak Chopra

 

 

“To be alive in this beautiful, Self-Organizing Universe – to participate in the Dance of Life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it – is a wonder beyond words. Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art. Furthermore, it is a privilege to be alive in this time when we can choose to take part in the self-healing of our world.”

 

~ Joanna Macy ~

 

“The Land knows you, even when your lost.”  Braiding Sweet Grass pg 36

Robin Wall Kimmerer

 

 

 

 

Behold, I have reached the peak of the mountain and my spirit has taken flight in the heavens of freedom and liberation. I have gone far, far away, O children of my mother; the hills beyond the mists are now hidden from my view, the last traces of the valleys have been flooded by the ocean of serenity, and the paths and trails have been erased by the hand of oblivion. The roar of ocean waves has faded. I no longer hear anything but the anthem of eternity, which harmonizes with the spirit.

Khalil Gibran

 

Put the ego in service to what we love.  Marian Van Eyk McCain

 

Bacon asserted the creed that “scientific knowledge equals power over Nature.” Bacon’s inductive method implied that science is progressive.

 

I remember teaching a man how to experience mystical

consciousness with four simple instructions: stop thinking,

heighten awareness, experience the world exactly as it is, and

come into the Presence through your own presence.

John C. Robinson, Ph.D., D.Min.

 

Society does not want individuals that are alert, keen, revolutionary, because such individuals will not fit into the established social pattern and they may break it up. That is why society seeks to hold your mind in its pattern and why your so called education encourages you to imitate, to follow, to conform.

 

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti ~

 

 

“The wise understand the ignorant, for they were themselves once ignorant. But the ignorant do not understand either themselves or the wise, never having been wise themselves”  Unknown

 

1.The top 1% of Americans owns  40% of the Nation’s wealth.

 

2.  The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Take Home 24 Percent Of National Income: While the richest 1 percent of Americans take home almost a quarter of national income today, in 1976 they took home just 9 percent — meaning their share of the national income pool has nearly tripled in roughly three decades.

3. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Own Half Of The Country’s Stocks, Bonds, And Mutual Funds: The Institute for Policy Studies illustrates this massive disparity in financial investment ownership, noting that the bottom 50 percent of Americans own only .5 percent of these investments.

 

4. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Have Only 5 Percent Of The Nation’s Personal Debt:

Using 2007 figures, sociologist William Domhoff points out that the top 1 percent have 5 percent of the nation’s personal debt while the bottom 90 percent have 73 percent of total debt.

 

5. The Top 1 Percent Are Taking In More Of The Nation’s Income Than At Any Other Time Since The 1920s: Not only are the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans taking home a tremendous portion of the national income, but their share of this income is greater than at any other time since the Great Depression, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities illustrates in this chart using 2007 data:

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/03/334156/top-five-wealthiest-one-percent/?mobile=nc

 

 

“To get along without is the most radical solution in any economy of scarcity.”

Joseph Wood Krutch

 

“It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

 

To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do. ~ Hermann Hesse

 

‘If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.’ ~ Hermann Hesse

 

“This body is not me.

I am not limited by this body.

I am life without boundaries.

I have never been born,

and I have never died.

 

Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars,

manifestations from my wondrous true mind.

 

Since before time, I have been free.

 

Birth and death are only doors through which we pass,

sacred thresholds on our journey.

Birth and death are a game of hide and seek.

So laugh with me,

hold my hand,

let us say good-bye,

say good-bye, to meet again soon.

 

We meet today.

We will meet again tomorrow.

We will meet at the source every moment.

We meet each other in all forms of life.”

 

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

 

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”

 

~ Henry David Thoreau ~

 

 

“The small mind works by comparison and judgment; the great mind works by synthesizing and suffering with alternative truths. We are a mass of contradictions longing to be reconciled.”

 

Richard Rohr

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

― Simone Weil

 

“We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.”

~Thich Nhat Hanh ♥

 

“It’s quite common for people raised in a given culture to see its view of things as normal and natural, and to scratch their heads in bewilderment when they find that people in other places and times saw things in very different ways. Modern industrial civilization, for all its self-described sophistication, is no more exempt from this custom than any other human society. To make sense of the future closing in on us, it’s going to be necessary to get past that easy but misleading habit of thought, to recognize that the contemporary faith in progress is a culturally specific product that emerged in a highly unusual and self-terminating set of historical circumstances, and to realize that while it was highly adaptive in those circumstances, it’s become lethally maladaptive now.”

John Michael Greer

 

 

“The Web is normalizing deviant behavior”  P. J. Tracy

 

“Water has a memory and carries within it our thoughts and prayers. As you yourself are water, no matter where you are, your prayers will be carried to the rest of the world.”   -Masaru Emoto

 

“Why aren’t more people in jail? If you rob a bank, you go to jail. If a bank robs you, it gets a bailout.” Jamie Dimon

 

“Those idiots in Washington actually write laws regulating the manner in which they would like to be bribed.”  Jamie Dimon

 

 

“Water is truly the medium, message and means of life.”  Mae-Wan Ho

 

“We are playing Russian roulette with the planet.”  Nicolas Stern

 

“Gaia is no mere formula — it is our own body, our flesh and our blood, the wind blowing past our ears and the hawks wheeling overhead. Understood thus with the senses, recognized from within, Gaia is far vaster, far more mysterious and eternal than anything we may ever hope to fathom.”

David Abram

 

“The way people treat you is a statement about who they are as a human being.  It is not a statement about you.”  Unknown

 

“Detachment is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.”   Ali ibn abi Talib

 

“Wherever there is an other, fear arises.” It is the emergence of the separate self–the “I”- ness, the egoic structure–which is at the heart of man’s cruelty,”  Sushil Kumar

 

“To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.” Clive Hamilton

 

“We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime.  And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”  Ronald Wright

 

“Climate change denial is just one symptom of the greater malaise here: as long as people think all the environment represents is some place you go on vacation, in corporate eyes everything is fine.”  John Mason

 

“No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.”

Albert Einstein

 

“The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there”   Roshi, Yasutani

 

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Friedrich Nietzsche

 

~She sings with the bird on the tree;

Like the rainbow she bends from above,

O’er the earth and the tremulous sea;

She gleams through the woodlands that shine

in the light of her comrade, the sun;

Like her spirit the twilight divine…

Glides earthwards when daylight is done ♥

~Poems of Nature and Life~

 

 

“Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, and he can rob a country.”  Unknown

 

“The repercussions of our acts — the constructs we create — endure well past the dissolution of our convictions and desires. Our actions exist as living architecture that surrounds the breathing moment. Future generations will dwell in the world we erect, thought by thought, deed by deed.”  Phil Rockstroh

“To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.”  Chris Hedges

 

“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those

who watch them without doing anything.” Albert Einstein

 

“Jean, the people of your time, toward the end of this century, will be taking the tiller of the world.  Remain always true to yourself, but move ever-upward toward greater consciousness and greater love.”

The last words spoken to Jean Huston by Teilhard de Chardin in 1955

 

“There is no sudden breakthrough that remains forever-there are only sudden glimpses. But these glimpses encourage us to see more. And so, gradually, we develop the ability to integrate these experiences of unconditioned being into our lives.”Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen

 

“To live is to dance with an unknown partner whose steps we can never wholly predict, to improvise with in a field of forces whose shifting qualities we might feel as they play across our skin, yet whose ultimate nature we can never entirely grasp or possess in thought.” -David Abram

 

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything begins to look like a nail.”  Ken Wilber, No Boundaries

 

“A compulsion towards partisanship serves to censor the disorderly dialog of the heart, and thus compels one to remain locked within an ego-fortified structure of imprisoning platitudes and self-serving rationalizations.”

Phil Roskstroh

 

“To be an individual is not an easy thing, you see. That means you are very ordinary. It is very difficult to be ordinary, you know. You want to be something other than what you are. To be yourself is very easy, you don’t have to do a thing. No effort is necessary. You don’t have to exercise will, you don’t have to do anything to be yourself. But to be something other than what you are, you have to do a lot of things.”  U.G. Krishnamurti

 

 

“The comfort zones of the checked-out, distracted, self-involved citizens of empire are perched upon a mountain of corpses. When the agendas of a culture are circumscribed to merely selfish agendas and empty appetites — compulsive materialism, militarist aggression, bigotry cloaked as religious conviction — the world seems to wend towards wasteland.” Phil Rockstroh

 

“Propelling one past angst-inducing nuance and complexity, hate, masked as purity, can carry us. After a time, its monolithic shadow becomes inseparable from one’s own. When one stabs at the perceived darkness of an enemy, one wounds oneself. Confused, enveloped by one’s own darkness, a person can come to believe the blow was delivered by a foe. Thus, all too often, one will hate what is different, seeing that difference as being a threat. In this way, irrational, self- awareness-devoid hatred threatens all near it.

The machinations of Power have entered a new phase: a full-spectrum counterfeiting of the images of the soul…that rise like a fever dream from the abysmal, group-mind of late stage capitalism.” Phil Rockstroh

 

“The fact that so many U.S. citizens continue to believe that they inhabit a democratic nation, devoted to the concept of freedom of speech, of the press, and of free assembly reveals something very troubling: that the internalization of the tacit tenets of the corporatist state (a mutant strain of classic fascism) is now embedded so deeply in the collective psyche of the U.S. populace, and has rendered all too many with only a cursory, at best, understanding of what civil liberties involve.

 

Withal, it is not possible to grieve (or become outraged at) the loss of something one has no concept of ever having existed in the first place. How is it possible for one who has spent his entire lifetime in a windowless prison to know the grief experienced by fellow inmates who have known the beauty beheld when viewing the prismatic light of a dawning day?

 

Those who have encased themselves in a self-referential bubble of rationalization, by reflex, dismiss the assertion that complicity in an odious system (such as a blood-sustained, militarist empire) amounts to silent affirmation of the harm the system (although nebulous in nature) reaps.”  Phil Rockstroh

 

 

 

 

“What is life?”– nobody can give an answer to that question — we really don’t know. So the question cannot stay there; the question burns itself out, you see. The question is born out of thought, so when it burns itself out, what is there is energy. There’s a combustion: thought burns itself out and gives physical energy. In the same way, when the question is burnt, along with it goes the questioner also. The question and the questioner are not two different things. When the question burns itself out, what is there is energy. You can’t say anything about that energy — it is already manifesting itself, expressing itself in a boundless way; it has no limitations, no boundaries. It is not yours, not mine; it belongs to everybody. You are part of that. You are an expression of that. Just as the flower is an expression of life, you are another expression of life. What is behind all this is life. What it is, you will never know. U.G.

 

“Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is ‘you’. There is nothing there inside you other than that.”

U.G.

 

“ I know how to handle stress better than that.  Things have been good enough that I forgot what it’s like to be graceful when they’re not.”

Gregg Hurwitz

 

“Man is the most vicious species on earth. No other animal wantonly kills its own kind…..”  U.G.

 

 

“Suffocating in the tension of his own moral purity”

Ngak’chang Rinpoche  or  [Ngapa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen]

 

“We, along with all materiality, are the sensing mechanisms of the planet.”

Sky McCain

 

“It is almost as if you need someone else to tell you who you are or to hold up the mirror for you.”  Michael Crighton

 

“Rilke said (paraphrasing) everyone has a letter written within and if you don’t live the life your heart wants to live … you don’t get to read this letter before you die.”  Phil Rockstroh

 

“We must fall in love with the Earth — the living, sacred planet, this “dynamic system,” in the words of the Bolivian legislation acknowledging its rights, ‘made up of the undivided community of all living beings, who are all interconnected, interdependent and complementary, sharing a common destiny.’”  Robert Koehler

 

“…And a Man sad alone. Drenched deep in sadness. And all the animals drew near to him and said ”We don not like to see you so sad. … Ask us for what ever you wish and you shall have it. The man said: I want to have good sight. The vulture replied ”you shall have mine”. The main said “I want to be strong”. The jaguar said: ”You shall be strong like me”. Then the man said: I long to know the secrets of the earth. ”The serpent replied ” I will show them to you” . And so it went with all the animals. And when man had all the gifts that they could give… he left. Then the owl said to the other animals “Now the Man knows much and is able to do many things…suddenly I am afraid”. The deer said: “The Man has all that he needs. Now his sadness will stop”. But the owl replied: “No. I saw a hole in the Man…deep like a hunger he will never fill… it is what makes him sad and what makes him want. He will go on taking and taking…until one day the World will say: “I am no more and I have nothing left to give”….

Michael Plesner

 

 

“A native American taught me that division between ecology and human rights was an artificial one, that the environmental and social justice movements addressed two sides of a single larger dilemma.  The way we harmed the earth affects all people, and how we treat one another is reflected in how we treat the earth”.  Paul Hawken

 

“The Way that can be conceived of is not the Eternal Way; the Name by which it can be named is not its Eternal Name.” Lao-tzu

 

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”  Max Planck

 

“When you dare speak truth to power, the reality is that power already knows the truth, doesn’t want you to share it, and will punish you for your trouble.”   William Astore

 

“Life is real. Reality is good. Goodness, gratitude, love and joy are the natural state of the awakened heart.” Gerald Grow

 

“The global crisis we are now facing is, at its root, a crisis of consciousness—a crisis born of the fact that we have prodigious technological powers, but still remain half-awake. We need to awaken to who we are and what we really want.”  Peter Russell

 

“When we awaken to our true nature, we are freed from a dependence on the external world both for our sense of self and our inner well-being. We become free to act with more intelligence and compassion, attending to the needs of the situation at hand rather than the needs of the ego. We can access the wisdom that lies deep within us all. This is the next step in evolution of intelligence: the transition from amassing knowledge to developing wisdom.” Peter Russell

 

The possible result of the concept of a separate self looking out on a world “out there.”

“the continuous chain reaction of craving, jealousy, ill will, indifference, fear, and anxiety that fills the mind.” Charlene Spretnak

 

“Observational evidence is indeed evidence, not in the sense that any theory can be deduced, induced or in any other way inferred from it, but in the sense that it can constitute a genuine reason for preferring one theory to another.”  David Deutsch

 

“We need to re-shape our language to fit our new realization of who we really are—one organism among the billions that make up the body of the living Earth.”

Marian Van Eyk McCain

 

“You Americans, you’ve mastered the art of living with the unacceptable.”

Breyten Breytenbach

 

“Tyranny can never be complete as long as there’s wilderness.”

Tim DeChristopher

 

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.”    Richard Bach

 

“An atom is the building block of nature whether you believe that true or not. Your opinion does not matter here. Your faith does not matter here — because a fact is not equivalent to opinion or faith. Facts do not change on the whim of every individual.” Jeff Schweitzer on the confounding of fact and opinion.

 

“Skepticism about climate change comes with a particularly rich irony. Many doubters cite the earth’s past cycles of glaciation and warming to discount what we are seeing today as nothing but natural variation. How do the skeptics know of that climate history? From the very scientists whose conclusions they now doubt!” Jeff Schweitzer

 

 

 

“We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”

Lynn White Jr.

 

“The evolution of large brains confers no exalted status on the human race.”

Jeff Schweitzer

 

“But unlike cheetahs or bacteria, our particularly notable evolutionary achievement enables us to reason and communicate, and we therefore have a monopoly on making any claims about our status in the world. This monopoly has led to the self-serving and comforting conclusion that humans are somehow separate from, and superior to, the rest of the animal kingdom. The long-term survival of our species may require that we change this perspective.”  Jeff Schweitzer

 

“We invented a hierarchy and declared ourselves to be at the top of it.”

Marian Van-Eyk McCain

 

Guest post by Nick Orenstein

“We find ourselves at a time where advances in scientific discovery and information gathering have accelerated faster than the general public’s understanding of issues equally vital to everyone on Earth. As a result, many non-scientists among us are: confused by too much math, politically biased by convenient half-truths, or somehow religiously opposed to the consequences of the scientific data.”

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Just-Science-app-shows-climate-change-happening.html

 

 

“Living systems are thus neither the subjects alone, nor objects

isolated, but both subjects and objects in a mutually communicating universe of meaning. In contrast to the neo-Darwinist point of view, their capacity for evolution depends, not on rivalry or on might in the struggle for existence. Rather, it depends on their capacity for communication. So in a sense, it is not individuals as such which are developing but living systems interlinked into a coherent whole. Just as the cells in an organism take on different tasks for the whole, different populations enfold information not only for themselves, but for all other organisms, expanding the consciousness of the whole, while at the same time becoming more and more aware of this collective consciousness. Human consciousness may have its most significant role in the development and creative expression of the collective consciousness of nature.”

Mae-Wan Ho

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/gaia.shtml

 

“Human consciousness may have its most significant role in the development and creative expression of the collective consciousness of nature.”

Mae-Wan Ho

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/gaia.shtml

 

 

 

Quotes from lots of wise (mostly male) people, including Jean Klein.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1NBGap/spiritquotes.com/

 

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. ”

Edmond Burke

 

 

“I do not want and I do not hope, I intend.”  Vadim Zeland

 

“500 years ago, the Pope could condemn Galileo’s science on religious grounds, because religion had won the underlying power struggle over what reality is. Today science is dominant; it has won the underlying power struggle over what is real. Philosophy lags far behind; you have to go back to the origins of civilization — to the ancient Greeks in the West and the Vedic rishis, or sages, in the East — to find a time when philosophy was so dominant that it answered questions that we assign today either to God or to laboratory experiments.”  Deepak Chopra

“There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality.”    – Ramana Maharshi

 

 

“I won­der whether the world is being run by smart peo­ple who are putting us on, or by im­be­ciles who re­ally mean it.” –Mark Twain

 

“There comes a time when we must trust our deep knowing, the knowing that has arisen out of our stories, our personal story that contains the only validity we can trust, the validity formatted in what we know first hand; the validity that goes beyond scientific evidence. Experience outside the narrow limits of what science, traditional science, accepts as real and worthy of consideration.”

Sky McCain  November, 2011

 

 

“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more

I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.”

George Bernard Shaw

 

“Re­gard­less of the dis­sem­bling of cor­po­rate-state pro­pa­gan­dists, free-mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism has al­ways been a gov­ern­ment-sub­si­dized, bub­ble-in­flat­ing, swindlers’ game, in which, psy­cho­pathic per­son­al­i­ties (not “job cre­ators” but con-job per­pe­tra­tors) thrive.

By the ex­ploita­tion of the many, a ruth­less few have amassed large amounts of cap­i­tal by which they dom­i­nate main­stream nar­ra­tives and com­pro­mise elected and gov­ern­men­tal of­fi­cials, thereby gam­ing the sys­tem for their ben­e­fit.” Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.

 

 

“Be­cause as long as the an­i­mus of the mid­dle class re­mains fix­ated on the poor, the crim­i­nal car­tels known as the eco­nomic elite can con­tinue to ply their trade. Of course, in re­al­ity, by their greed and com­plic­ity, what the mid­dle-class has gained is this: trustee sta­tus in the cap­i­tal­ist work­house.”

 

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.

 

“The planet can­not en­dure the as­saults wrought by a sys­tem that re­quires ex­po­nen­tial growth to be main­tained.” Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City

 

“Apro­pos to the shame-based Calvin­ism of the cap­i­tal­ist state: If I was duped in a rigged game, what does that say about me? The nar­ra­tive of cap­i­tal­ism in­sists that if I work hard, ap­ply­ing savvy and dili­gence, at ful­fill­ing my as­pi­ra­tions then I would, at some point, ar­rive in the rar­i­fied realm of life’s win­ners.

But if suc­cess proves elu­sive, then my flawed char­ac­ter must be the prob­lem – not the dis­hon­est eco­nomic setup – and mi­as­mic shame de­scends upon me. Yet I can count on right-wing media to pro­vide the type of pro­vi­sional so­lace prof­fered by dem­a­gogues, i.e., im­part­ing the rea­son that folks like me can’t get ahead is be­cause schem­ing so­cial­ists have hi­jacked my par­cel of the Amer­i­can Dream and de­liv­ered it to the un­de­serv­ing thereby trans­form­ing my shame into dis­placed out­rage… Ac­cord­ingly, I might turn to Fox News and other well-re­warded, pro­fes­sional dis­sem­blers of the po­lit­i­cal Right, im­plor­ing them to dis­solve my doubts and dread.

To es­cort and en­sconce my trou­bled form back into my com­fort zone by telling me the prob­lem is not the iron boot of the cor­po­rate state upon my neck; rather, my op­pres­sion stems from the bare­foot hip­pie left­ies of OWS “who need a bath and a job”; it is their odi­ous pres­ence in our lives that has sub­dued my happy cap­i­tal­ist des­tiny by the per­ni­cious act of lay­ing down an ef­flu­via (more de­mo­bi­liz­ing than pep­per spray) of patchouli musk and has caused cap­i­tal­ism it­self to weaken into an en­er­vated swoon.

Yes, this has to be the case: The cause of my op­pres­sion. Those Amer­ica-hat­ing Oc­cupy Wall Street hip­pies are ac­tu­ally the hid­den hand that con­trols the global order and who pos­sess a craven de­sire to smelt down the gleam­ing steel of the hum­ming en­gines of U.S. cap­i­tal­ism into creepy, Burn­ing Man stat­u­ary, who want to hold 24/7 Nurem­berg-style ral­lies in the form of an­noy­ing drum cir­cles.” Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City

 

 

 

“Let us take heart, let us rejoice in life, let us join in loving, let us remove the mal grammatica from our communities and let us walk facing the sun with nostalgia, the sweet pain for the place of our true origin.”

From  Law  The Toltec Legacy  http://www.toltec-legacy.com/public/law.html

 

“Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.”

Nicola Tesla

 

“….Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.”

Kahlil Gibran  in The Prophet

 

 

“I’ve been severely criticized for saying worms are more important than people… I made that statement intentionally. Why? Because it’s true. Worms are more important than people because they can live on the earth without us. We cannot live without them. Bees are more important than we are. We can’t live without them. They can live without us. That’s what we have to realize and understand. That if we’re going to survive on this planet, we have to respect the rights of all of those species to survive. Because we need them more than they need us.”

 

– Captain Paul Watson

 

Attributed to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society:

 

http://www.seashepherd.org/

 

 

“Another ice age will never occur, unless humans go extinct. A single chlorofluorocarbon factory can produce gases with a climate forcing that exceeds the forcing due to Earth orbital perturbations.”  James Hansen and several co-authors  5 May, 2011  http://fromjameshansen.blogspot.com/

 

“As soon as you drop internal and external importance, your credo will be released and you’ll feel it right away.  When importance is zero, you have nothing to defend and nothing to conquer. You are simply living according to your credo and calmly, without insisting, taking what is yours.”  Vadim Zeland

 

“the sweaty ambiguity that soaks the fabric of everyday life.”

Robert Foreman

 

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.  Edmund Burke

 

“…when the body begins to sag, it is abandoning sham and hypocrisy. The body leads the way down, deepening your character. It doesn’t know how to lie.”  James Hillman

 

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.

Max Planck

 

From John Michael Greer

I think the words of the Buddha pretty much sum it up:

“Do not believe in what you have heard.

Do not believe in tradition just because it is handed down over many generations.

Do not believe in anything just because it has been spoken many times.

Do not believe just because written statements come from some old sage.

Do not believe in conjecture.

Do not believe in authority or teachers or elders.

But after careful observation and analysis, when it agrees with reason and it will benefit one and all, then accept it and live by it.”

 

 

“The greatest injustice of continued fossil fuel dominance of energy is the heaping of climate and environmental damages onto the heads of young people and those yet to be born in both developing and developed countries. The tragedy of this situation is that a pathway to a clean energy future is not only possible, but even economically sensible.”

[The Case for Young People and Nature: A Path to a Healthy, Natural, Prosperous Future]

 

 

“To Hawking, physics can answer everything. But, I agree with you [Ron Krumpos] that consciousness is the real key. As you stated, there are no exact measurements for consciousness. As I mentioned in the post, there’s not even a good working definition of consciousness that all science branches can use. I believe finding that is the Holy Grail of a lot of disciplines these days.”  MaAnna Stephenson, 2010 www.SageAge.net

 

 

“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The non-existent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
~Nikos Kazantzakis

 

“Having seen that I was not capable of using all my resources in political action, I returned to my literary activity. There lay the the battlefield suited to my temperament. I wanted to make my novels the extension of my own father’s struggle for liberty. But gradually, as I kept deepening my responsibility as a writer, the human problem came to overshadow political and social questions. All the political, social, and economic improvements, all the technical progress cannot have any regenerating significance, so long as our inner life remains as it is at present. The more the intelligence unveils and violates the secrets of Nature, the more the danger increases and the heart shrinks.” (from Nikos Kazantzakis by Helen Kazantzakis, 1968)

 

 

 

“In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, improved, or freed, or educated.  But in our century, they want to be entertained.  The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do.  A sense that we are not amused.”  Michael Crighton Timeline  pg 443

 

“The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it.”

 

“It is amazing that we should be so sensitive to suicide, homicide, and genocide and have absolutely no moral principles for dealing with biocide or geocide. Over-concerned with the well-being of the human, we feel it is better that everything is destroyed than that humans suffer to any degree.”    Thomas Berry

 

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”   Chronicles of Narnia

 

“The silence of the forest, the peace of the early morning wind moving the branches of the trees, the solitude and isolation of the house of God, these are good because it is in silence, and not in commotion, in solitude and not in crowds, that God best likes to reveal Himself most intimately to men.” – Thomas Merton

 

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space. We now experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest….a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a prison for us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in her beauty.” Albert Einstein

 

Tolerance

“The most lovable quality any human can have is tolerance.  It is the vision that enables one to see things from another’s viewpoint.  It is the generosity that concedes to others the right to their own peculiarities.  It is the bigness that enables us to let people be happy in their own way instead of our way.”  Unknown

 

“The ego can only understand happiness objectively, as a state to be obtained in the future.”  Francis Lucille

 

“Everything is created from moment to moment, always new.  Like fireworks, this universe is a celebration and you are the spectator contemplating the eternal Fourth of July of your absolute splendour.”  Francis Lucille

 

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” ~ Theodor Seuss Geisel (‘Dr Seuss’)

 

“I am not interested, my friend, about your religión or if you are religious or not. “What really is important to me is your behaviour in front of your peers, family, work, community, and in front of the world.”

“Remember, the universe is the echo of our actions and our thoughts.”

Dalai Lama

 

“The best religion is the one that gets you closest to God. It is the one that makes you a better person.”  Dalai Lama

 

“What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of. When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s there, but you’re not affected by it. You’re not controlled by it; you’re not enslaved by it. That’s the difference.” Anthony de Mello, SJ

 

“Don’t try to make them happy, you’ll only get in trouble. Don’t try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it irritates the pig.” Anthony de Mello, SJ

 

“If the 9 billion people predicted to be with us by 2050 were to have the same lifestyle as Americans, we would need five planets.” Ahmed Djoghlaf, the UN’s leading figure on biological diversity.

 

 

“Although, when I thought about it (death) being dead seemed a lot like not being born yet, and I hadn’t especially minded that.”  Barbara Kingsolver

The Bean Trees, pg. 153  USED

 

How full of the creative genius is the air in which theses are generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius. Full of the divinity: so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. –Henry David Thoreau

 

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods.
There is a rapture on the lonely shore.
There is a society where none intrudes.
By the deep sea and music in its roar:
I love not man the less. But nature more.
–Lord Byron

 

“Practicing Nature means being in tune with her rhythms. She instructs: Notice the phase of the Moon. Day by day see her movement across the sky. Notice from month to month how she rises later or earlier. What is her position in the sky? Watch the birds as they pass through on their journeys southward or northward. Who lingers longest? Listen to the squirrels. Notice colors of trees and plants and sky. Learn Autumn. Learn Winter. Learn Spring. Learn Summer. Tune into her. Feel your connection to her. Adore her. That is the beginning of the practice of Nature.”  Diane Wolverton in OriginalBlessing.ning 17 March, 2010

 

 

“The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.  It is the same life that shoots in joy  through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of gras and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.  It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.”

Gitanjali. Rabindranath Tagore

 

 

“Sacred Witness” is what someone called me awhile back because of how I pay attention to life.   Carla Royal

 

Expansion of consciousness

‘Solidarity’ was the foundation stone of the trade union movement -a stone now badly eroded by the relentless battering it’s had from corporate power in the last fifty years.
But it seems to me that the rise of corporate power, the weakening of community ties and the rise of a rather selfish-looking individualism have all been the negative – but perhaps inevitable – side effects of something bigger, which is the evolutionary expansion of human consciousness.
Evolution has two drivers: competition and co-operation. Both are built into us. The former has been developed and encouraged. Now it is time to work on the latter and I think that is exactly what we are seeing. That’s the stage we are moving into – the one that’s been referred to as ‘The Ecozoic Era.’
That means recognizing the need for co-operation -for solidarity, if you like – not just with our fellow humans but with all other inhabitants of the planet, for we are all interconnected and interdependent. A leaf on a tree is an individual, for sure, but it is also part of something bigger. It is that sort of consciousness we need to develop. We need to heed not merely an injunction to share our cookies but a reminder that the world, as Thomas Berry said, is “…not just a collection of objects but a communion of subjects.” We are all leaves on the planetary tree and if the tree dies, so do we.

Marian Van Eyk McCain

http://transitionculture.org:80/2010/02/22/solidarity-by-joanne-poyourow/comment-page-1/

 

 

From the last page of Abbey’s Road: Take The Other:

Black sun
Heart’s sun
Black raging sun of my heart
Burn me pure as the flame
Burn me and take me
And let me sleep
Down by a river I know
In the land of stone and sky
Until we wake again
In a new and bolder dawn

 

Benedictio
by Edward Abbey

Benedictio: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing views.
May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottoes of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you– beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

 

 

“This aloneness is worth more than a thousand lives. This freedom is worth more than all the lands on earth.

To be one with the truth for just a moment is worth more than the world and life itself.”  Rumi

 

 

“One regret, dear world, that I am determined not to have when I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough.” ~  Hafiz

 

 

“The natural state is a non-state of not-knowing, non-concluding. When there is knowing, there is a state. But your real nature is not-knowing. It is a total absence of all that you think you are, which is all that you are not. In this total absence of what you are not, there is presence. But this presence is not yours. It is the presence of all living beings.”

Jean Klein  A Talk in Delphi, 1990

 

 

“Will you make the point here that certain things are not spiritual? All things are spiritual, and all things are beauty.”

 

“Again the why! There is nothing spiritual or not spiritual. All is spiritual. Everything becomes spiritual the moment it refers to its background, to silence. It is silence which makes an object sacred. It is sacred when it refers to ultimate awareness. Then it ceases to be an object, because it is an expression of consciousness, an extension of consciousness. Don’t forget it; there are not two, there is only one.”
Jean Klein

 

“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Those wise ones who see that the consciousness within themselves is the same consciousness within all conscious beings, attain eternal peace.

Katha Upanishad

 

 

“Science can and should take us to a place where we exclaim ‘how wonderful creation is’.”    Laura Smith

http://www.allhallowsleeds.org.uk/worship/sermons/LauraSmith030330.shtml

 

 

“To preserve the natural world as the primary revelation of the divine must be the basic concern of religion.”  Thomas Berry

 

“The universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects”  Thomas Berry

 

 

Our first teacher is our own heart.

(Cheyenne)

 

http://home.earthlink.net/~tessia/Native.html

 

 

Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead.

Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow.

Walk beside me that we may be as one.

(Ute)

http://home.earthlink.net/~tessia/Native.html

 

 

What is Life

 

What is Life?

It is the flash of a firefly in the night.

It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time.

It is the little shadow

which runs across the grass

and loses itself in the Sunset.

– Crowfoot –

Blackfoot Indian

 

http://home.earthlink.net/~tessia/Native.html

 

 

Cherokee Prayer Blessing

 

May the warm winds of heaven

Blow softly upon your house.

May the Great Spirit

Bless all who enter there.

May your mocassins

Make happy tracks

In many snows,

And may the rainbow

Always touch your shoulder

 

http://home.earthlink.net/~tessia/Native.html

 

Native American Beliefs

 

“Native American beliefs are deeply rooted in their culture. We believe EVERYTHING is sacred from the largest mountain to the smallest plant and animal. A lesson can be found in all things and experiences and everything has a purpose.To sum up Native Spirituality; it is about HONOR, LOVE, and RESPECT. Not only do we love, honor, and respect our Creator and our Mother Earth, but also every living thing. It is about being in touch with ourselves and everything around us. It is about knowing and understanding that we are part of everything, and everything is a part of us. We are all One. We also believe that our Elders hold the answers. Our Elders keep our culture alive. We have much to learn from our Elders, and they deserve and receive our utmost respect. Listed below is some poems, quotes and rules that show the beliefs native americans hold. No matter the person nor the tribe it is taken from. you can see a common string that runs through them. I have been asked many times what it is to be Native American. What it is we believe, and though I have given the above definition to this day I still refer to the simple words of a departed loved one and teacher. White Feather; navajo/apache born medicine man. To him I dedicate this page.”

 

http://home.earthlink.net/~tessia/Native.html

 

 

“Native American isn’t blood; it is what is in the heart. The love for the land. The respect for it, those who inhabit it; and the respect and acknowledgement of the spirits and the elders. That is what it is to be indian.”

White Feather  Navajo Medicine Man

 

“Native American Spirituality has no fixed dogmas although it has many traditions. The people that practice it all believe in a universal web of power or energy which supports all things. In fact, the inter-connection of all things is fundamental in the Native American belief system. There is a common energy force that all things share. There is a oneness with the earth. We are all part of a greater whole, with one common destiny.

In the Native American view, there is no separation of nature and spirituality in daily living. It is all one. The consciousness of the Creator lives in the animals, plants, rocks, mountains, oceans and in us, collectively called, the Great Spirit. We see and experience the Creator every time we see a majestic tree, a mountain, a winding river, a sunrise, a shinning star, or each other.

We hear the voice of the Creator every time we hear the birds sing, the the winds blow, the laughter of a child , the sound of falling rain and the cry of the eagle. All is the voice of the Creator. We must recognize Him everywhere and in all things. We seek to contact the Great Spirit that exist in everything, but we cannot make contact until we realize that contact can only be made by respecting Him where He lives now, in all creation. We must respect the earth , ourselves and all creation , for we are all one; all is related and all is sacred.”

http://www.lilytherese.com/NEW.HTM

Lily-Therese, also known as Sacred Dove, is a noted Native American Visionary, with mixed ancestral roots (Métis).

 

“If you take [a copy of] the Christian Bible and put it out in the wind and the rain, soon the paper on which the words are printed will disintegrate and the words will be gone.  Our bible IS the wind.” Statement by an anonymous Native American woman.

 

“The culture, values and traditions of native people amount to more than crafts and carvings. Their respect for the wisdom of their elders, their concept of family responsibilities extending beyond the nuclear family to embrace a whole village, their respect for the environment, their willingness to share – all of these values persist within their own culture even though they have been under unremitting pressure to abandon them.” Mr. Justice Thomas Berger, Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, (aka the Berger Inquiry), Canada.

 

According to Paula Gunn Allen, the American Indian writer and mystic, the Native Americans’ deep awareness of the connection to Mother Earth is the basic insight from which their spirituality emanates. She writes:

“We are the land. To the best of my understanding, that is the fundamental idea that permeates American Indian life; the land (Mother) and the people (mothers) are the same. As Luther Standing Bear has said of his Lakota people, `We are of the soil and the soil is of us.’ The earth is the source and being of the people and we are equally the being of the earth. The land is not really a place separate from ourselves, where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies. . . The earth is not mere source of survival, distant from the creatures it nourishes and from the spirit that breathes in us, nor is it to be considered an inert resource on which we draw in order to keep our ideological self functioning. . . Rather for the American Indians . . . the earth is being, as all creatures are also being: aware, palpable, intelligent, alive.”

Christ, Carol P.Rebirth of the Goddess:Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. New York, NY 10001. Routledge,1997. ISBN: 0- 415-92186-4 pp. 114,115  http://www.great-spirit-mother.org/

 

 

“It is easy to feel nurtured among these ancient trees. I breathe the forest. I drink its waters. I take in the forest through all my senses. In order to survive here for any length of time, I would need to wear the forest, its fur and skin and fiber; I would need to draw my food from what lives here alongside me; I would need to burn its fallen branches for cooking and for keeping warm; I would need to frame my shelter with its wood and clay and stone. Above all, I would need to learn to think like the forest, learn its patterns, obey its requirements, align myself with its flow.

There are no boundaries between the forest and the cosmos, or between myself and the forest, and so the intelligence on display here is continuous with the intelligence manifest throughout the universe and with the mind I use to apprehend and speak of it.”

“I recognize the danger of hubris. It’s flattering to suppose, as many religions do, that humans occupy a unique place in the order of things. The appeal of an idea is not evidence for its falsity, however, but merely a reason for caution. Cautiously, therefore: Suppose that the universe is not a machine, as nineteenth-century science claimed, but rather a field of energy, as twentieth-century science imagined. Suppose that mind is not some private power that each of us contains, but rather a field of awareness that contains us—and likewise encompasses birds, bees, ferns, trees, salamanders, spiders, dragonflies, and all living things, permeates mountains and rivers and galaxies, each kind offering its own degree and variety of awareness, even stars, even stones.

What if our role in this all-embracing mind is to gaze back at the grand matrix that birthed us, and translate our responses into symbols? What if art, science, literature, and our many other modes of expression feed back into the encompassing mind, adding richness and subtlety? If that is our distinctive role, no wonder we feel this urge to write, to paint, to measure and count, to set strings vibrating, to tell stories, to dance and sing.”

by Scott Russell Sanders

Published in the November/December 2009 issue of Orion magazine

 

“Perhaps a new revelatory experience is taking place, an experience wherein human consciousness awakens to the grandeur and sacred quality of the Earth process.  Humanity has seldom participated in such a vision since shamanic times, but in such a renewal lies our hope for the future for ourselves and for the entire planet on which we live.”  Thomas Berry pg. 106

 

(The Great Work, Thomas Berry, 1999, Bell Tower, New York

 

“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall.  He will end by destroying the earth.”  Albert Schweitzer

 

The World is the Mirror of your Attitude Towards it. Vadim Zeland

 

The search for the absolute

 

The search for the absolute is vain and barren.  There is only the unfolding.  I don’t speak of my purpose in life.  Probing more deeply into the implications of purpose reveals that having a purpose implies that we are moving along, going somewhere.  That leads to the thought that we are moving toward something, some end point, some pinnacle of achievement or fulfilment.  It is not necessary to limit oneself with a belief in an overall purpose.  What is the purpose of an oak tree? None of us are really going anywhere.  Where would we go anyway?  We are Earthlings, we are home.

However, if one chooses to adopt a purpose then perhaps it might be to simply expand our awareness.  Sky McCain

 

“Thus, beyond the new science that glimmers a new world view, we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself. This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet — it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System.”   Stuart A. Kauffman

 

 

MICHAEL LERNER: I’d start by saying this: The fundamental reality of the universe is that we are all interconnected as part of the unity of all Being. And the alienation that we experience is first and foremost an alienation from who we are. It is a product of our failure to understand ourselves as connected to all other human beings and then to all other beings. That failure manifests in a zillion ways in contemporary life, but it’s the root of the problem because every specific form of alienation is rooted in our distance from or our lack of awareness of our fundamental interconnection with all other beings. “I simply cannot understand how somebody can be a spiritual being and not be actively involved in transforming the world,” says Rabbi Michael Lerner.

 

 

“To destroy the stereotypes of the usual world view, in order to break free from the box of conditionality and to wake up in the dream you are dreaming awake.”  Vadim Zeland

Reality Transurfing  #3 Forward to the past

 

“The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.”  Lynn White Jr.

 

“We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well – for we will not fight to save what we do not love.”  Stephen Jay Gould

 

 

“Life is a vast Cooperative Venture”

Seth

 

Animals have no legal rights, even our dear planet has no rights.  Our hubris knows no bounds.

 

 

“The Universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects”

Thomas Berry

 

“…for nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society than freedom!”  Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

“Our current accounting system treats the Earth as a business in liquidation”

Joe Grabill

 

“The love religion has no code or doctrines. There are no rules for worship.”

Rumi

 

“There is only one prayer: Oh God, please tell me what to do”  Sky McCain