Change

The nature of our world is transitory-always has been, always will be. Change occurs every second. Breathe it in, then breathe it out. But despite the interconnectedness of everything, we still have a say on how we handle the weave of the fabric. We can let the status quo confine us to a narrow thread, or we can cut through that fabric to see our true nature. Our lessons cannot be learned if the sun is shining every day. And on rainy days, we might share our umbrella with another.

Michael Shillingford

Mindfulness

The essence of mindfulness is to see, to understand, and to find freedom within everything that feels intractable and clouded by confusion. Mindfulness is a present-moment experience, concerned with embracing and understanding the entirety of each moment with tenderness, warmth, and interest. In the light of this engaged attention, we discover it is impossible to hate or fear anything we truly understand, including the judgemental mind. We begin to see that the greatest barrier to compassion and freedom is not the pain or adversity we meet in our lives but the ongoing tendency to criticize and fear the simple truths of the moment. Instead of just wanting the judgemental mind to go away, we could begin to ask what it is teaching us. Liberate the tendency to judge yourself as being above, below or the same as others. By penetrating deeply into judgement, you will live at peace.

Christian Feldman

Judgemental thoughts

In the Sufi tradition it is suggested that our thoughts should pass through three gates. At the first gate, we ask of our thoughts, "Is it true?" If so, we let the thought pass through to the second gate where we ask, "Is it necessary or useful?" If this also is so, we let the thought continue to the third gate where we ask, "Is the thought rooted in love and kindness?" Judgemental thoughts, which are neither true, helpful, nor kind, falter at the gates.

Christina Feldman in "Shabala Sun"

Blindness

A friend of mine, Clay Houston, has sent me this powerful reflection on blindness that affects our interior sight within space-time.

A blind man "believes" in light: the rest of us see it with our eyes. "Faith" is the hi-jacking of causes and conditions, a non-reality. Existence is verbs. Delusion is nouns. Suffering comes, in part, from discrimination, judgment. This is always linked to thought. The human mind breaks up the normal chain of being into suffering by worshiping permanence, which does not exist. If a man believes in permanence, he deceives himself. All reality, everything, is built of compounded entities. All entities are impermanent.. Everything is changing: it is the rate of decay that deceives. All entities are interdependent. Ethic follows this Wisdom. Thus says this Most Noble Senator.

What is Needed

This piece of deep reflection comes from David Stringer who has been attending to his mother's terminal illness in Lubbock, Texas.

No longer do I search for the meaning
of life. No longer do I explain myself.
No longer to explain another. Why seek
to explain something in terms of something
else? Context has become tiring; explanations
shallow. History provides pictures, but not
the light of heaven. What something means,
its significance or importance lives peripherally
to what matters. So, at best, they are rational
lies, at worst our lost self.

What I want is some one to tempt me
into being, into an authentic City of God.
Less dogma, less doctrine – even less beliefs.
These are born from a lessening of soul. Lost
is recognition of our impoverished thirst. Look!
The human City is an eclipsed City, an eclipsed
Kingdom. Please, won’t someone live with me
into the threshold between the human and divine?
Anything less shortens the breath of Truth. Someone
press me to look into the homeless eye; press me
to feel the hunger that is soul-less, the suffering
that is unafraid of death and can stare into the eye
of whatever the gods have the courage to see.

No longer to live on the periphery, for that is nowhere.
The Center is everywhere, awaiting an awakened eye.
We need not hurry anywhere. The All is within reach;
only open to the wisdom of Being. All holy thought
is nearer than the calmest of seas, nearer than the Big
Brown Pelican carried on the thermals, than the dolphin
gamboling between the trough and crest of the next wave.


4 September 2009
Lubbock, TX

Spiritual Ecologies

This summer I have been privileged to visit and experience two distinctly different (some would say “opposite”) ecologies almost back to back in time. First, Jackie and I were in the Davis Mountains of West Texas—the wild desert beauty of that stunning landscape. And then we were for a week on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu where I experienced the “tropical paradise” of that lush land. Both are beautiful, both are unique, both have flora and fauna exquisitely adapted to the particularities of the local geography. One can, of course, compare and contrast each, but it would be a mistake to use the yardstick of one ecology to measure the “truth” of the other. Each has to be seen in its own right, its own fullness, its own amazing interdependent complexity.

The Davis Mountains are a rugged volcanic landscape filled with amazing cactus flowers and even ferns (yes, back in the valleys). Hawaii was another rugged volcanic landscape filled with ferns and flowers of an entirely different order unknown in West Texas. The whole system in each locale “worked” to the advantage of the entire ecological systems—and so it is spiritually.

We live, we grow up in, we benefit from a “spiritual ecology” adapted to a unique time and place in the history of humanity. Most who are reading this grew up within the spiritual ecology of the Christian tradition (with its many Islands of uniqueness, like Hawaii)… but reflecting a particular adaptation to the overall Life of the Spirit as it is expressed on this human planet. But there are other ecologies that seem exotic and “odd” to us… and yet which are perfectly normal and adapted to the particularities of a people, time, place, and history from which they benefit and which they serve.

If one ecology is not overly disturbed, if new invasive species are not set lose to over-run the delicate balances, then that ecology stays strong and healthy. But if there are too many “tourists” (experience junkies), who flock to view the exotic sights and sounds, unaware of the balances and delicacies, then what happens is a degradation of the whole system… something else emerges that begins to look like a hybrid that is neither one thing nor the other. Sometimes that new hybrid can adapt and become useful, but often it either overwhelms the whole, or unbalances the parts.

We each live in delicate spiritual ecologies. We can “visit” other realms and benefit from those visitations, finding delicious new aspects that will compliment our own understanding. But when we return to our own “land,” we can then see through new eyes into the beauties and balances into which we are inextricably interwoven.