Three Realities of Wabi Sabi

by Richard Powell (May 24, 2013)

The complexity of life can mask its poignancy. The web of daily tasks and events can seem so manifold, so knotty and tangled, that the deeper richness contained within them gets overshadowed, lost in the labyrinth of scheduling, obscured by the preoccupation with efficiency. The ongoing attempt to stay on track, to balance multiple demands for time, eventually conditions us to accept dizziness as normal, and multiple distractions as a daily inevitability.

We get good at screening calls, scanning emails, and multi-tasking. We grow used to over-stimulation, resigned to clutter and excess. Instead of periods of busyness, we find that the details of each opportunity pile up like snow during a very long winter. Each flake seems so small and harmless, lovely on its own as it drifts from the sky, but when there are several feet of those flakes piled up, those little details become a blanket of obfuscation.

There is Beauty in Not Knowing

by Richard Feynman (May 10, 2013)

I have a friend who is an artist, and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “Look how beautiful it is” and I’ll agree. And he says: “you see, as an artist I can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe, although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.

At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there. The complicated actions, which also have a beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions. The inner structure, also the processes, the fact that the colors and the flower are evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting. It means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Is this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which with science, knowledge, only adds to the excitement, and mystery, and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

True Integrity As Fidelity To Truth

by Aisha Salem (May 3, 2013)

In the turnover from the personal to the impersonal, the clear and truly loving, we face a definite turnover of our very understanding of what integrity is. In the exact same way as the definition of Love stands to be corrected along with the purification of Heart.

In the early steps of Life, we are faced with the task and responsibility of developing personal integrity. An integrity, which for starters becomes built on a moral code, to which we become hostages bound to be true to, due to the fact of needing love. The integrity which is based on personality is not true integrity. It is a fear-based conclusion, which as the outset ensures our very survival and belonging. At best a necessary step – of learning the base of right and wrong, according to being a straight person.

Once we meet up with the fact of Truth and surrender, we are confronted with the limitations of the do’s and don’ts hidden in the personal integrity along with its in-accuracy of being based on the personal- and thereby an individuals agenda. True integrity, on the other hand, is based on fidelity to Truth.

The Frontier Is Everywhere

by Carl Sagan (Apr 26, 2013) 

We were hunters and foragers.

The frontier was everywhere.

We were bounded only by the Earth, and the ocean, and the sky.

The open road still softly calls.

Our little terraqueous globe is the madhouse of those hundred, thousand, millions of worlds.

We who cannot even put our own planetary home in order.

Riven with rivalries and hatreds.

Are we to venture out into space?

By the time we’re ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passaged of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We’re an adaptable species.

It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses.

More confident, far seeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.

What new wonders undreamt of in our time will we have wrought in another generation? And another?

How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? And the next millennium?

Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the Solar System and beyond will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet and by the knowledge that whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth.

They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies.

They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of our raw potential once was.

How perilous our infancy.

How humble our beginnings.

How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way…

–Carl Sagan in The Pale Blue Dot. Listen to Carl’s own voice in this Sagan Series‘ video [Creative comic above by Dharma Comics ;-)]

To All Heart Warriors…

by Georgia Simone (Apr 19, 2013)  

The truth is, your heart is already and always free.

The truth is, that as you rest your attention more and more into the love that you are, prior to all thoughts, emotions, and sensations – the more this love seems to grow.

It was here all along, but your attention was elsewhere.

And as your attention dwells more and more in this love-filled awareness, you discover that freedom was always here.

The painful emotion, the negative thought, the unwanted sensation – all arise within this. When your attention is caught up with the stories in your mind or your experience out there, you fail to notice this awareness – the peaceful stillness – in which they arise.

Emotional contraction feels like your heart has closed, and pain feels like heart-break. But when you rest attention in awareness – in the heart, an effortless acceptance arises.

What seemed unbearable is now free to dance. What seemed closed is free to open. And what seemed contracted is free to expand.

Micro Moments of Love

by Barbara Frederickson (Apr 12, 2013)

It’s time to upgrade our view of love.

First and foremost, love is an emotion, a momentary state that arises to infuse your mind and body alike. Love, like all emotions, surfaces like a distinct and fast-moving weather pattern, a subtle and ever-shifting force. As for all positive emotions, the inner feeling love brings you is inherently and exquisitely pleasant — it feels extraordinarily good, the way a long, cool drink of water feels when you’re parched on a hot day. Yet far beyond feeling good, a micro-moment of love, like other positive emotions, literally changes your mind. It expands your awareness of your surroundings, even your sense of self. The boundaries between you and not-you — what lies beyond your skin — relax and become more permeable. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others — really see them, wholeheartedly — springs open. Love can even give you a palpable sense of oneness and connection, a transcendence that makes you feel part of something far larger than yourself.

Love, like all emotions, surfaces like a distinct and fast-moving weather pattern, a subtle and ever-shifting force.  And the new take on love that I want to share with you is this: Love blossoms virtually any time two or more people — even strangers — connect over a shared positive emotion, be it mild or strong.  

In The Hearts Of The Farm Workers

–by César Chávez (Apr 04, 2013)

In honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.’s memory we also acknowledge nonviolence as a truly powerful weapon to achieve equality and liberation. [...]

Dr. King’s entire life was an example of power that nonviolence brings to bear in the real world. It is an example that inspired much of the philosophy and strategy of the farm workers’ movement. This observance of Dr. King’s death gives us the best possible opportunity to recall the principles with which our struggle has grown and matured. [...]

The first principle of nonviolent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating. [...]

We are convinced that nonviolence is more powerful than violence. Nonviolence supports you if you have a just and moral cause. Nonviolence provides the opportunity to stay on the offensive. If we resort to violence then one of two things will happen: either the violence will be escalated and there will be many injuries and perhaps deaths on both sides, or there will be total demoralization of the workers. Nonviolence has exactly the opposite effect. If, for every violent act committed against us, we respond with nonviolence, we attract people’s support. We can gather the support of millions who have a conscience and would rather see a nonviolent resolution to problems. We are convinced that when people are faced with a direct appeal from the poor struggling nonviolently against great odds, they will react positively. The people [in the part of the Planet we call the U.S.] and people everywhere still yearn for justice. It is to that yearning that we appeal. [...]

Most people don’t understand the power of nonviolence and tend to be amazed by the whole idea. Those who have been involved in bringing about change and see the difference between violence and nonviolence are firmly committed to a lifetime of nonviolence, not because it is easy or because it is cowardly, but because it is an effective and very powerful way. [...]

It’s amazing how people can get so excited about a rocket to the Moon and not give a damn about smog, oil leaks, the devastation of the environment with pesticides, hunger, disease. When the poor share some of the power that the affluent now monopolize, we will give a damn. [...]

The Insanity of Being Perfectly “Sane”

  –by Thomas Merton (Mar 29, 2013)

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Otto Adolf Eichmann trial –a Nazi lieutenant colonel who, because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, was given the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe, and later faced trial on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes– was that a psychiatrist examined him, in the 1960′s, and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.

If all the Nazis had been psychotics their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, “well-balanced,” unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well. He was not bothered much by guilt. I have not heard that he developed any psychosomatic illnesses. Apparently he slept well. He had a good appetite, or so it seems. It all comes under the heading of duty, self-sacrifice, and obedience. Eichmann was devoted to duty and proud of his job.

The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.

Be Always Coming Home

–by Ursula LeGuin (Mar 22, 2013)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Initiation Song from the Finders Lodge

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be your mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

–Ursula LeGuin in Always Coming Home [Picture from global oneness project]

Kindness and Rebellion

–by Sharon Salzberg (Mar 15, 2013)

A friend of mine, at the end of a retreat, offered a provocative reflection that intrigued and inspired me. After looking intensively at her inner experience for nine days of meditation and seeing many of her life choices in a brand new light, she commented, “If you really want to be a rebel, practice kindness.” [...]

I think she was absolutely right about kindness and rebellion.

The world may tell us to grab as much as we want, and we might think that the audacity of rebelliousness is to grab even more with impunity, but how about being really radical and questioning how much we need? Conventional wisdom may be that retribution displays strength and can summarily bring an end to conflicts, but how about taking a leap and challenging ourselves to a whole new meaning of resolution based on mutuality and caring? The easy way may be to turn away and distract ourselves form the distress and suffering of others, but how about being daring enough to pay attention? Our conditioning may tell us we don’t need anybody, but how about taking a real look at life and noticing that we are all entwined in a fabric of interdependence, then being willing to risk acting accordingly?