Whetstones

If treacherous talk is constantly in your ears, and unwanted thoughts are
constantly in your mind, you can turn these about and use them as whetstones
to enhance your practice. If every word that came to your ears was
agreeable, and all things in your mind were pleasant, then your whole life
would be poisoned and wasted.

The Ts'ai-ken t'an

Mud Work

Good to hear you are treating yourself with gentleness Anthony. I am sort of riding through a seeming low point in my life. Who knows if it is good or bad? I am doing alot of inner work as not much seems to be cropping up right now in my outer world. I am letting go of old jobs, old associations. There seems to be a gentle uneventful dailiness that I sometimes do not know what to do with. I am trying to find inspiration in it and be grateful for it. I feels like waiting. Like I am shedding an old skin and the new me has not quite arrived yet. The new me with solid sense of defined purpose and unshakable worth.

Life stuff

Nah, not really, Shelley :) When it involves other people I'd rather not discuss it on an open forum. Let's just say that I've been working out how to walk away from a situation in which I wasn't being treated too well. Needed to be clear about looking after myself. Think I did okay.

In the Spirit of Connection

Care to share Anthony?

back in the saddle

Been going through a bit of a difficult patch for a few weeks, but I'm back now and once I settle/recalibrate I hope to be able to post regularly again.

Waking up

"Breathing in, breathing out, feeling resentful, feeling happy, being able to drop it, not being able to drop it, eating our food, brushing our teeth, walking, sitting - whatever we're doing could be done with one intention. That intention is that we want to wake up, we want to ripen our compassion, and we want to ripen our ability to let go, we want to realize our connection with all beings. Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or to put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us."

Pema Chodron, Comfortable With Uncertainty

musings from Joseph Campbell

He quotes Schopenhaur.....

Campbell: One day, two policemen were driving up the Pali road [in Hawaii] when they saw, just beyond the railing that keeps the cars from rolling over, a young man preparing to jump. The police car stopped, and the policeman on the right jumped out to grab the man but caught him just as he jumped, and he was himself being pulled over when the second cop arrived in time and pulled the two of them back.

Do you realize what had suddenly happened to that policeman who had given himself to death with that unknown youth? Everthing else in his life had dropped off - his duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own life - all of his wishes and hopes for his lifetime had just dissappeared. He was about to die.

Later, a newspaper reporter asked him, "why didn't you just let go? You would have been killed" and his reported answer wasw, "I couldn't let go. If I had let that young man go, I couldn't have lived another day of my life". How come?

Schopenhaur's answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realisation, which is that you and that other are one, that you are two aspects of the one life, and that your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. this is a metaphysical truth which may become spontaneously realised under circumstances of crisis. For it is, according to Schopenhaur, the truth of your life.

The hero is the one who has given his physical life to some order of that truth. The concept of love your neighbrou is to put you in tune with this fact. But whether you love your neighbor or not, when the realisation grabs you, you may risk your life. That Hawaaian policemant didn't know who the young man was to whom he had given himself. Schopenhaur declares that in small ways you can see this happening every day, all the time, moving life in the world, people doing selfless things to and for each other.

Moyers: So when Jesus says, "Love they nieghbour as theyself" , he is saying in effect "love they neighbour because he is yourself".


pp110 - 111 The Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers

We are all capable of changing our attitudes about "falling in love."

"When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care. Often we hear of a man who beats his children and wife and then goes to the corner bar and passionately proclaims how much he loves them. If you talk to the wife on a good day, she may also insist he loves her, despite his violence. An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as we were also taught to believe that we were loved. For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families. Too many of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad."

"... we are all capable of shifting our paradigms, the foundational ways of thinking and doing things that become habitual. We are all capable of changing our attitudes about "falling in love." We can acknowledge the "click" we feel when we meet someone new as just that - a mysterious sense of connection that may or may not have anything to do with love. However it could or could not be the primal connection while simultaneously acknowledging that it will lead us to love. How different things might be if, rather than saying "I think I'm in love," we were saying "I've connected with someone in a way that makes me think I'm on the way to knowing love." Or if instead of saying "I'm in love" we said "I am loving" or "I will love." Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language."

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions.