Peace

Experiencing emptiness is also experiencing peace, and the potential of peace is its unfolding as harmony among all people, animals, plants, and things. The precepts formulate this harmony, showing how the absence of killing and stealing is the very condition of mercy and charity.

-Robert Aiken

First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.

-Thomas a Kempis

Materialism

The problem isn't materialism as such. Rather it is the underlying assumption that full satisfaction can arise from gratifying the senses alone. Unlike animals whose quest for happiness is restricted to survival and to the immediate gratification of sensory desires, we human beings have the capacity to experience happiness at a deeper level which, when achieved, can overwhelm unhappy experiences.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Up the Down Staircase and Mother Teresa

I met Mother Teresa in 1973 in Yemen where we lived and taught and was impressed then by the simple beauty of her spirit. I was her driver for a number of days while she visited the mission in that country. In the latest edition of TIMES Magazine (Sept. 3, 2007), the now famous “saint” is the cover story,” The Secret Life of Mother Teresa,” telling of her hidden life of inner darkness and despair. Mother Teresa apparently walked “up the down staircase” in two directions at once. In the outer world she was becoming famous as a modern-day 20th century saint. In her inner world she struggled to the end of her life with a sense of the absence of the divine Presence of Christ except for a brief five week period.

What are we to make of her experience? No one can ever adequately (judge) assess another’s inner experience, but we can perhaps learn something crucial for our own by deeply listening to what they experienced. In her seminal work Comfortable With Uncertainty Pema Chödrön speaks eloquently of the same experience and points to the invitation we are given in spiritual experience to step down into the dark experience of humanity so that we might taste deeply of all that human beings know of that depth. The way down into that immanent darkness is somehow the way “up” into transcendence. This is the paradox of kenosiswhich St. Paul describes in his letter to the Philippians. Yeshua takes the same pathway of “abandonment,” and yet in the end such a pathway becomes the means for experiencing transcendent reality. Inevitably this is the “sign of the cross” which stands at the heart of all Christian understanding. We are asked to walk this path, much to the objection of our egoic sense of what is right.

The Emerging Human

In his excellent book, On Becoming a Person, Dr. Carl Rogers spelled out some of the characteristics of the new, powerful person who is emerging in our culture today...and the vital, different set of values he both maintains and lives. "I stressed," he writes, "his hatred of phoniness, his opposition to all rigidly structured institutions, his desire for intimacy, closeness and community, his willingness to live by new and relatively moral and ethical standards, his searching quality, his openness to his own and others' feelings, his spontaneity, his activism and his determination to translate his ideals into reality. I am talking," he wrote, "about a relatively small number of people. But I believe that these people constitute the change agents of the future. When some part of a culture is decayed at the core, a small group with new views, new convictions, and a willingness to live in new ways, is a ferment that cannot be stopped."

Let's take a look at that new person emerging in our culture.

First - his hatred of phoniness. Our new powerful person sees through facades and tinsel...outmoded and ridiculous customs and beliefs. Free of the tyranny of things and the opinions of others, he and his family...she and her family...live in a kind of solid serenity where true values count; where the verities, things like truth and justice, the family and work, take on real meaning. It is in the avoidance of phoniness that real freedom may be found...and one can drop off the rat race with a great sigh of relief. There are no inner circles to which these people need apply for membership; they are the centers of their own circles.

This person is opposed to all rigidly structured, closed institutions. Such institutions are saying, by the fact that they are rigidly structured and closed, "We have the answers...we need look no further...this is it." The new, powerful person knows that at this early stage of our development, such thinking is infantile. We do not have all the answers...about anything. And just as the maturing person is in a stage of growth, of becoming - so is a vital institution. It uses what it has and what it knows as springboards into the future...and assiduously avoids becoming closed and rigidly structured. A good and viable institution, like a self-actualizing person, is always in a state of growth..of becoming.

He has a desire for intimacy...closeness and community, and a willingness to live by new and relatively moral and ethical standards. This person has a searching quality and an openness to his own and others' feelings. He is spontaneous, unafraid of what others will say of his enthusiasms and ideas...and is determined to translate his ideas and ideals into reality.

Of course these people must constitute a relatively small number of people...a true inner circle, the most important and influential club of human beings on earth. The qualifications for membership are tough: To meet them takes work, thought and study...a willingness to find oneself and be oneself. But the perquisites of membership are great indeed! One of them is freedom...another is joy.

Earl Nightingale

Metamorphosis?

"All we have learned of psychotherapy suggests that it is at the precise time when the individual feels as if his whole life is crashing down around him, that he is most likely to achieve an inner reorganisation constituting a quantum leap in his growth toward maturity. Our hope, our belief, is that it is precisely when society's future seems so beleaguered - when its problems seem almost staggering in complexity, when so many individuals seem alienated, and so many values seem to have deteriorated - that it is most likely to achieve a metamorphosis in society's growth toward maturity, toward more truly enhancing and fulfilling the human spirit than ever before. Thus we envision the possibility of an evolutionary leap to a trans-industrial society that not only has know-how, but also a deep inner knowledge of what is worth doing."

- Willis Harman

Courtesy Nancy Robb

Knowing and Not-Knowing

He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool; avoid him.
He who knows not and knows that he knows not is a student; teach him.
He who knows and knows not that he knows is asleep; wake him.
He who knows and knows that he knows is a wise man; follow him.

The NetiNeti Manifesto

(The following manifesto {NetiNeti means "Not This/Not That" in Sanskrit} is posted on a link at Rabbi Rami's website, and I believe is compatible with the The Pledge of the World Christian.)

WE BELIEVE God transcends theology; that no idea about God can adequately encompass the reality of God. WE BELIEVE that revelation is not given to a people, but through a people to the world. WE BELIEVE that the truth in each scripture is common to all scriptures, calling us toward justice, compassion, humility, dignity, respect, love for both person and planet, and the transcending of self through service to others.

WE RECOGNIZE that filtering divine revelation through human hands allows fear, greed, anger, ignorance, and violence to masquerade as truth. WE RECOGNIZE that most of the evil plaguing our world is rooted in this masquerade, and the violent image of god that comes from it.

WE COMMIT ourselves to ending this evil by rejecting religious violence and the false god who sanctions it. WE COMMIT ourselves to separating timeless truth from time bound bias in our respective scriptures; affirming the former and moving beyond the later. WE COMMIT ourselves to teaching the God of justice, compassion, love, and respect Who speaks to us through all scriptures, and Who calls us to free ourselves from fear, greed, anger, ignorance, and violence.

WE CALL upon peoples of every faith to liberate the wisdom of God from the xenophobia of tribe and ego, and to free religion from fear and violence by distinguishing the holy from the merely sacred. WE CALL upon peoples of every faith to share their wisdom with the world

Rabbi Rami Shapiro

At our final Wisdom School of the summer in Collegeville, Minnesota at the Episcopal House of Prayer, the fifth, we were joined by Rabbi Rami Shapiro. It was an extraordinary event, and the beginning of a new relationship in the life of our common work together. This was our first school where representatives from two different sacred traditions were working together in deep friendship and compatibility. Rabbi Shapiro's work was directed toward the principle of the Divine Feminine, and used the ancient writings of the Hebrew texts as an entry way into the power of the feminine principle in the spiritual life. Words do not come close to the beauty of this exchange, and the sense that some new form of deep inner work is being created at this moment in time. For a flavor of this man and his work, see the site below. I want you all to get to know this man.

link

Mindfulness

I like to walk alone on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality.

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child--our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

-Thich Nhat Hanh, "Miracle of Mindfulness"

Emerson

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.
--Journals, 1820-36

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on the mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

--Essays
(Sound like Ken Wilbur's hoelons--GRO)

Beauty, in its largest and most profound sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All.

--Nature

The Spiritual Journey

The spiritual journey is a creative journey. It's about birth. It calls us past the boundaries of convention. It tests our willingness to see life in a new way and our courage to express it: for new ways of viewing life in the face of what is commonly accepted. We become new, and this ongoing birthing we bring new forms to life as well. Life itself has become a creative act, full of vitality and richness and passion.

Anne Hillman, from Dancing Animal Woman

Universal Responsibility

I believe that to meet the challenges of our times, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. Each of us must learn to work not just for oneself, one's own family or nation, but for the benefit of all humankind. Universal responsibility is the key to human survival. It is the best foundation for world peace.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Praxis

The spiritual weapon of self-purification, intangible as it seems, is the most potent means of revolutionizing one’s environment and loosening the external shackles. It works subtly and invisibly; it is an intense process though it might often seem a weary and long-drawn process. It is the straightest way to liberation, the surest and the quickest, and no effort can be too great for it. What it requires is faith—an unshakable mountainlike faith that flinches from nothing.

-Mohandas Gandhi

The Physics of Beauty

We are beginning to explore the physics of beauty. Philosophers and scientists have come together to name certain universal themes.

The universe tends toward complexity.
The universe is a web of relationship.
The universe tends toward symmetry.
The universe is rhythmic.
The universe tends toward self-organizing systems.
The universe depends on feedback and response.

Thus, the universe is “free” and unpredictable.
The themes of the universe may be the elements of beauty. Certainly, they are the elements of flowers.

—Sharman Apt Russell from Anatomy of a Rose

Enlightenment

Enlightenment is merely an impersonal happening. We give it the taint of personal achievement. Therefore the question arises, "What is an enlightened being like?" There is no such thing as an enlightened person. Enlightenment is merely another event. There is a flood, a fire, an earthquake; there is enlightenment, just as one happening in the whole process, all part of the phenomenal process.

-Ramesh Balsekar