"Knowledge comes from acquiring and grasping facts. Wisdom comes from reflecting on and digesting experiences, learning their lessons, gaining insights and developing guiding life-principles. The 11th century poet and Jewish philosopher Ibn Gabriol says: "In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence, the second listening, the third remembering, the fourth practicing, the fifth - teaching others."
--Surya Das

Not fooled

"Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused."
--African saying

"The One Thing You Must Do"

"There is one thing in this world that you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about; but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life. It's as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human beings come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don't do it, it's as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It's a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It's a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on. You say, "But look, I'm using the dagger. It's not lying idle." Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds? For a penny, an iron nail could be bought to serve the purpose. You say, "But I spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and all the rest." But consider why you do those things.  They are all branches of yourself.  Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give your life to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don't, you will be exactly like the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You'll be wasting valuable keenness and foolishly ignoring your dignity and your purpose".

Jalal al-Din Rumi, 13th century Persian Poet & Sufi Philosopher , Translation by Coleman Barks      

His Holiness the Dalai Lama has defined spirituality in the following way:  "Spirituality addresses qualities of the human spirit that include love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, a sense of responsiblity, which bring happiness to self and others.  It as well includes a basic concern for the well-being of others.  And it has an emphasis on contemplative practices cultivating ethics, stability, and prosocial mental qualities."

Cloud Atlas

"Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present...and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future."
- From Cloud Atlas - an epic and moving story

When we experience this universe we live within as a field of reality, understand the waves and the troughs of different dreams that weave the world we know, then there is no longer the need to manipulate . . . right
relationship means right relationship with the elements, the land, the sacred directions . . . The seed of pure mind is within all people. It is always there. It is not made impure. Our actions may be impure and set up a
stream of reactions, but always we can come again to that seed of pure mind and right relationship . . . it is
time now for people to choose. The first step is to see the power of your own consciousness . . . The common kernel is care for all beings, good relationship, cycles ofreciprocity, generosity, giving of oneself, being an empty bowl so you can know what is.
-Dhyani Ywahoo

"We see that any single event...now has global repercussions. and this call for a completely different comportment than anything before.  We can't do just one thing.  We can't act in just one place.

Whatever we do in one place, at one time, will have repercussions to all other times and all other places."

Ervin Laszlo

Love and Wisdom

"Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows." --Nisargadatta Maharaj

"Emptiness is two things at once:

the absence of self and the presence of the Divine.

Thus as self decreases, the Divine increases."

-- Sister Bernadette Roberts

Leadership - An Inner Journey

"A leader is a person who has an unusual degree of power to project on other people his or her shadow or his or her light. A leader is a person who has an unusual degree of power to create the conditions under which other people must live and move and have their being-conditions that can either be as illuminating as heaven or as shadowy as hell. A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside him or her self, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.

   The problem is that people rise to leadership in our society by a tendency towards extroversion, which means a tendency to ignore what is going on inside themselves. Leaders rise to power in our society by operating very competently and effectively in the external world, sometimes at the cost of internal awareness.

     I've looked at some training programs for leaders. I'm discouraged by how often they focus on the development of skills to manipulate the external world rather than the skills necessary to go inward and make the inner journey."

--Parker Palmer

See, Young Hunters

“A poor man takes the songs in his hands, / And sets them near the place where the sun sets. / See, young hunters, run to them, / Take them in your hands / And place them ... under the sunset.

”This is a song for a Papago puberty rite.  It makes more sense when one learns that Creator comes from “under the sunset” in their mythology.  The word “songs” refers to all the myth and ethos stories, because in oral traditions these stories are easier to remember when they are chanted.  A “poor man” is a revered elder.

Corporations are not People

Civilized

Embrace life

El Agua

Speaking the truth

Attentional Focus

"Our will, our volition, our karma, constitutes the essential core of the active part of mental experience. It is the most important, if not the only important, active part of consciousness. We generally think of will as being expressed in the behaviors we exhibit: whether we choose this path or that one, whether we make this decision or that. Even when will is viewed introspectively, we often conceptualize it in terms of an externally pursued goal. But I think the truly important manifestation of will, the one from which our decisions and behaviors flow, is the choice we make about the quality and direction of attentional focus. Mindful or unmindful, wise or unwise-no choice we make is more basic, or important than this one."

One Common Mind

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.  -Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series

""Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you're right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth." -Gandhi

"Keeping Quiet"

By Pablo Neruda,

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,

let's not speak in any language;

let's stop for a second,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines;

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea

would not harm whales

and the man gathering salt

would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,

wars with gas, wars with fire,

victories with no survivors,

would put on clean clothes

and walk about with their brothers

in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused

with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about; . . .

If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead in winter

and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve

and you keep quiet and I will go.

--Pablo Neruda, "Keeping Quiet'

Howard Zinn

"If you look for the truth outside yourself, it gets farther and farther away.  Today, walking alone, I meet him everywhere I step.  He is the same as me, yet I am not him.  Only if you understand it in this way will you merge with the way things are."

-- Tung Shan

Let your thoughts precede you

"The Western tradition represents body because it's always looking at things out here at arm's length. It's using microscopes, it using all kinds of tools to look at things, to take them apart. That's changing, but this has been the understanding. The Eastern approach uses Spirit - you meditate, you breath, you apprehend the nature of the Universe through your Spirit. I think the Native American tradition, at least the one that I understand and grew up in represents Mind. Because, as I say, you let your thoughts precede you. You let your thoughts flow into that circumstance to understand it."

-- Paula Underwood Spensor Oneida tradition.

Proverb

Nor does truth

"It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life 

and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice 

than 'try to be a little kinder.' "

~ Aldous Huxley

"No revolution in outer things is possible without prior revolution in one's inner way of being. Whatever change you aspire to in your affairs must be preceded by a change in heart, an active deepening and strengthening of your resolve to meet every event with equanimity, detachment, and innocent goodwill. When this spiritual poise is achieved within, magnificent things are possible without."

--The Book of Changes, Chapter 40 (version by Brian Browne Walker)

Sacred Space

"To have a sacred place is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room or a certain hour of the day or so, where you do not know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody or what they owe you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be...This is the place of creative incubation. At first, you may find nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen."

--Joseph Campbell

Beginners

“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
Carl Sagan

Milky Way Monument

The Man Watching
by Rilke - translated by Robert Bly

 I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Hopeful

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives."
- Howard Zinn

 The word "genius" in its Latin originality means simply, "the spirit of a place." The genius of an individual lies in the inhabitation of their peculiar and particular spirit in conversation with the world. Genius is something that is itself and no other thing. The task is simple and takes a life pilgrimage to attain - to inhabit our life fully, just as we find it, and in that inhabitation, let everything ripen to the next stage of the conversation. We do this because that is how we make meaning and how we make everything real.
David Whyte, from "Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work As a Pilgrimage of Identity"

"Seeing the tremendous importance of science and recognizing its inevitable dominance in the modern world fundamentally changed my attitude to it from curiosity to a kind of urgent engagement. .... I wanted to understand science because it gave me a new area to explore in my personal quest to understand the nature of reality. I also wanted to learn about it because I recognized in it a compelling way to communicate insights gleaned from my own spiritual tradition."

- The Dalai Lama, in The Universe in a Single Atom  

A young monk came to live in the monastery where Ajahn Chah was practicing. The people who lived in the town outside the monastery were holding a series of festivals in which they sang and danced all night long. When the monks would rise at three thirty in the morning to begin their meditation, the parties from the night before would still be going strong. At last, one morning the young monk cried out to Ajahn Chah, 'Venerable One, the noise is interrupting my practice - I can't meditate with all this noise!; 'The noise isn't bothering you, ' Ajahn responded. 'You are bothering the noise.' As Lushtak put it to me, 'Silence is not a function of what we think of as silence. It's when my reaction is quiet. What's silent is my protest against the way things are.'

Ajahn Chah

John Fire 0n Being Civilized