5/30/2008



"I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
But I give myself to it.
I have been circling for thousands of years,
And I still don't know:
Am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?"
Rainer-Maria Rilke

5/28/2008


"'Quicquid reciptur per modem recipientis reciptur.' What is received is received in the manner of the recipient. As a man is, so he sees.'"
Seneca

Wholeness has a temperature


We should:
"Determine with the Spirit,
Receive with the Mind,
Give with the Heart,
Hold with the body."
Grandmother Twylah Nitsch

5/22/2008

Disassociating time


Louis Mumford noticed that the clock creates the idea of moment to moment. He says clocks are metaphors which we are not educated to recognize. He realized that the clock’s product is seconds and minutes and has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. The clock, invented in the 14th century, made us time-keepers, then time-savers, and now time servers. In a world made up of seconds and minutes the authority of nature is superseded. With the invention of the clock eternity ceased to be the focus of human beings. Belief in God’s supremacy is weakened with every ticking second. Perhaps that was what the God that spoke to Moses on Sinai also meant by “graven images.”

5/17/2008

The Gift of Motionless Integrity


Integrity encompasses three concepts which are coherent to one another. One is probity (virtue, honesty;) one is completeness (roundness, wholeness;) and the third is sanctuary, or a sacred space. Our integrity is the place where our Spirit is present. It is a sacred place where all is complete and there is accurate truth which is knowledge of the existence of the Intelligence of Being. Integrity is the most powerful quality in the movement of chaos. Integrity moves the movements of power or harmony and holds the energy that teaches and heals, because Integrity is the only thing in the universe that is motionless.

The Radiance of the Source


"This pure Mind, which is the source of all things, shines forever with the radiance of its own perfection. Most people are not aware of it. They think that the Mind is just the faculty that sees, hears, feels, and knows. If we are blinded by our own sight, hearing, feeling, and knowing we will not perceive the radiance of the source."
(Zen Master Huang-po)

5/16/2008

The Talmud teaches


The Talmud teaches us that the child in the womb of his/her mother looks from one end of the world to the other and knows all the teachings, but the instance (s)he comes in contact with the air of the earth an angel strikes the child’s mouth and the child forgets almost everything except traces of the archetypal patterns of knowledge with which the human child can reacquire spiritual knowledge, the teachings, and can then do God’s service.

Ubuntu


"'Ubuntu.' It's a Bantu word which means you can't be human alone!" (Bishop Desmond Tutu.) Wikipedia also reports the concept of 'ubuntu' may be rendered roughly as "humanity toward others", "we are people because of other people", or "I am who I am because of who we all are."

Before we are born, we know


Children are born with a understanding of the world hardwired into their brains. Newborns genetically anticipate the basics of communication codes; have emotions, and are aware of their biological functions; and newborns hold an intuitive knowledge of the physical universe’s properties of solidity, inertia, and gravity. At birth there is just one world, the environment, permeated with power and assimilating humans, animals, plants, objects into a whole landscape. At birth we sense a unity to reality, a connection between all things. Individual objects are indistinguishable from the whole. Infants have innate knowledge of quantum virtues. Babies have genes for learning patterns like the codes of grammar. They understand the abstract (symbols and variables) of language, for instance, before they learn the meaning of words. Sensitivity to abstract patterns is a universal property of the human mind.
Jeffrey Mishlove, "The Roots of Consciousness"

5/15/2008

For the People


In this ever changing world. the philsophy of my People is fading. Where has RESPECT, WISDOM, BRAVERY, GENEROSITY, COMPASSION, FORTITUDE and HUMILITY gone? Faded to the new ways of this earth, the different songs, and ways of thinking. Now money is all consuming. Not the people, but money and material things. When someone passes on, it's what can I get, not compassion for the family of the deceased. It is not the color of one's skin, or how much money one has, but how and to what end do we walk on Mother Earth, and do for the People, not for ourselves.
Jack Burnette, Rosebud Reservation, Mission, South Dakota

5/14/2008

The animals know more than we do.


The animals know more than we do, they are the teachers and we are the students. The very wise have always known this. Our companion animals teach unconditional love, forgiveness and gratitude. The beasts of the wild take only what they need. The elders say a society can be judged by the way it treats its animals. Our "civilized" society has a long way to go. Those of us who have this understanding must lead the way.
Nancy O'Donohue
Animal Healer
www.LakeshoreHealing.com

5/13/2008

Recognize Beauty


Human Beings have the capacity to recognize beauty and to strive to create it as a gift to the Creator. Of all the ways humans have to celebrate the divine that is within, creativity is #1
Carrie Hopkins-Doubts -- Chapel HIll, North Carolina

5/12/2008

all meaningful contact


Wendell Berry: "the disease of modern character is specialization. …we cannot feed or clothe ourselves, or entertain ourselves, or communicate with each other, or be charitable or neighborly or loving, or even respect ourselves without recourse to a merchant or a corporation or a public service organization or an agency of the government or a style setter or an expert ..in this state of total consumerism, which is a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide for ourselves. -- all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken."

We commonly refer to our spiritual journey as a seeking or a searching. To do this is to be one step behind. Roots and Wings encourages using the word 'hunt.' What we are seeking is right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. Seeking and searching will go in circles around what is hidden in plain sight, because they use the predictable mind. Seeking is linear and rigid. Hunting is non-linear and flexible. Hunting is a requirement of survival. The quarry is hidden, but it is there. Hunting uses all the senses, including intuition, and experience. Hunting requires us to be unpredictable; to break our habits, to be instinctive (alert) and aware (conscious or knowing.) The good hunter prays before the hunt, talks to the quarry, is grateful when succeeding. And then the next day or week is out hunting again. The spiritual path never ends and is a life long path. Seeking and searching imply a beginning and an end. The hunt opens and closes. Nothing to seek, everything is here. The secret is, gentleness and flexibility bring the results that force and rigidity fail to achieve.
The descent to the Underworld is easy, night and day the gates of the shadowy Death stand open wide, but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air -- there the struggle, there the labor lies.
(From the Aeneid)

5/09/2008

The best I can do ...


"We have enough religions, but not enough real human beings." (HH Dalai Lama) Emerson said, 'what you do speaks so loudly I can't hear a word you are saying.’ So, it's not what I think or even what I say, but my behavior, what I actually do in the world, how I act toward my fellows that determines my humanness, whether or not I am a worthwhile, contributing human being. If I truly appreciate the blessings in my life and I'm of assistance to those less fortunate than myself (Karma Yoga – i.e. service) I'm moving in the right direction. Mi Takuye Oyasin, I am related to all living things, so say the Lakota, as did Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras and some quantum physicists. If all living things, including the earth itself, are my relations and I treat them with compassion and loving kindness I'm on my way to becoming a true human being. That is about the best I can do.
Fred L Miller

5/08/2008

Anonymous

I was raised in the Christian faith, but recently I've been drawn to traditions like Buddhism, which aren't so dualistic. I accept the Buddhist notion that suffering in life is inevitable; it's not just that we make mistakes and suffer, but it is part of the experience of life. My sense is that the achievement of the sacred, those who are able to do it, is probably the highest manifestation, accomplishment of human life. For most of us life is a journey and it is important that we treat each other well, that we treat the Earth well,and also that we care for ourselves. All that is very much a part of what it means to be a human being.

5/05/2008

No subject


Modern civilization is largely devoted to the pursuit of the cult of delusion. There is no general information about the nature of mind. It is hardly ever written about by writers or intellectuals, modern philosophers do not speak of it directly; the majority of scientists deny it could possibly be there at all. It plays no part in popular culture: no one sings about it, no one talks about it in plays, and it’s not on TV. We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.
Sogyal Rimpoche

5/02/2008

Dr. Ralph Pearce - Houston, Texas.


In the mid 1980's I worked in an emergency room in Covington, Louisiana, and a little old lady was brought in, middle of the night, in full cardiac arrest. Bad heart attack. I ran the resuscitation for her and ended up having to put a tube into her in order for her to breathe, and got her back and was really happy because that was a difficult resuscitation. The next day I got a call from my college roommate to thank me. It was his grandmother's life I saved. She lived another six years after that. That's the one I remember most clearly, because I wasn't going to give up even though I had no knowledge of who she was. I gave her another six years of life.


e.e. cummiings

“A lot of people think or believe or know they feel, but that’s thinking or believing or knowing: not feeling.  Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel.  Why?  Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel you’re nobody but yourself.  To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

5/01/2008

Mistaking the imaginary for the real

Once we realize that the world is our own projection, we will be free of it. Everything existing around us is painted on the screen of our consciousness. The picture we see may be ugly or beautiful, but in either case, we are not bound by it. It has not been forced upon us. We are trapped only because of our habit of mistaking the imaginary for the real.
Deeprak Chopra-"Unconditional Life" (paraphrased)

It is better to know where ...

It is better to know where we are going, and not why, than it is to know why we are going, and not where. The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why.
Rumi