RWN RETRMNT? X SELF SIGNIFICANCE SYNDROME OF HUMANS
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Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake."wallace
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KY A wise Sage once said: “People often feel that God is forsaking them, but remember God has not forsaken anyone. His power is constantly in the fontanel, and He always does everything for you. Love Him before, after and while performing actions. He is the sole doer. So, watch Him. He gives you assurance and courage, “I am always with you, and I am not gone.” This is the light you perceive inside. Watch Him and pray, “Oh Father, how long will You keep me as your foolish child ? Like a fool I remain in this world and forget You. You are doing everything through me, and still I always think that I am doing everything, yet I am nothing but a manifestation of Your love and compassion. Meditation on the Self is the highest part of religion. Meditation is the true religion of man, meant for everyone. It isn’t the property of any ism. Hinduism, Christianity or Islam. It’s the ism of the Self, the Atmavad. One should meditate on one’s own Self. The goal is to experience deep inner calmness, the peace of the Self. So you should give more importance to meditation than to anything else in your life. Meditation increases your wealth, increases your physical strength, it puts old age far away and brings youth back to you. It helps you depend less and less on your senses, and more and more on your inner Self. Where does Love exist ? When we try to locate it, we find that it exist in the Self. All infinite currents of Love, here, there, everywhere, are directed to their source. The Self is the source of all the currents of Love. This is a journey where the starting point is the reaching point. And both of them are in the Self. This is the field of Love, the source of Love. That is ultimately the goal of Love,
FISH IS THE MOST ABUSED ANIMAL IN THE WORLD
So all answers & resolution “we” seek emerges from Stillness.
Come join us in the deep stillness of Being, from which all core answers emerge.
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A You can fairly well control your eyes and your smile, and thus conceal your feelings from some, but not from all.
But the illusory “me” thinks it is Something. It’s quite certain of it.
The last thing Something wants is to be Nothing. Even though it’s inevitable.
So in the apparent identified-with-me-mind ‘state,’ we keep “ourselves’ in a constant state of ‘becoming’ rather than simply Being.
We fill our lives with distractions - desires, worries, pleasures & pains, and the biggest self-deceit/wild-goose-chase of all, the search for ‘enlightenment - all to hide from the One Stillness and Emptiness we already Are.
All to ‘avoid the Void.’
But if we are willing to notice all the activities we use in distraction, pause, be still, and notice what we are avoiding feeling, the fragrance of Being might catch our awareness, and our willingness to be the Unknown might blossom.
Join us this Sunday, Aug 22 as we explore all the ways we avoid Being, which is our natural ‘state,’ and replace it with our story, the dream, the impermanent.
Are we willing to simply Be who we Are? Is it that utterly, irresistibly simple?
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BBTBR X ECB
A From Joy we have come, in Joy we live and have our being, and in that sacred Joy we will one day melt again."
Is the “conscience” part of the ego/false self-identity?
It’s a simple question, but one I’ve rarely seen discussed.
During meditation, and in every-day life, I will sometimes get “pangs of conscience” over past regrets which sprout guilt, shame and remorse. It also expands into seemingly endless thought-loops about unresolvable moral dilemmas, and moral questions which fundamentally have no answer but which nonetheless “feel” very “important”. This often results in a downward spiral during the meditation session, because it's like a trap that keeps getting tighter. There just does not seem to be any "green light" in my being to simply be able to let it go- for some reason it feels unacceptable because hey, it's your conscience and "you should never ignore your conscience!".
This is compounded by my religious/moral scrupulosity OCD. It seems that not just for myself, but for a lot of people, it’s easy enough to discount aimless thoughts, but once it seems to come from that “still small voice” aka your conscience, it feels imperative to put everything aside and listen to those voices, even if it’s the 10394032940th time you hear the same thing, it has absolutely nothing new to offer you, and everyone has told you to let it go and to move forward.
So my question is, can the conscience simply be a disguise for the ego-identity? Just another “higher” way for it to sneak in and sabotage your meditation practice and your life? Why does it seem so hard to resolve?
How, then, does meditation practice integrate the precepts into one’s consciousness? I mean, at some point, everything (including the precepts) need to be completely let go of for full stillness and emptiness to occur. I don’t know of anyone that’s morally perfect. However, some people are able to just let it go and move on, and others become obsessive and meticulous about it.
I have heard the advice of “don’t let the good be the enemy of the great” regarding this sort of thing, but unfortunately, that advice is simply not helpful in the least in these kinds of situations. Just knowing that does not improve anything.
Likewise, the advice of "let it go during meditation practice, but examine it later at a more appropriate time" is even worse, because you know it's unresolvable, so you just ruminate about it during meditation, thinking about how you're going to eventually think about it later.
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A study of thousands of juvenile court decisions found that when the local football team loses a game on the weekend, the judges make harsher decisions on the Monday (and, to a lesser extent, for the rest of the week). Black defendants disproportionately bear the brunt of that increased harshness. A different study looked at 1.5 million judicial decisions over three decades and similarly found that judges are more severe on days that follow a loss by the local city’s football team than they are on days that follow a win
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misokinesia – meaning 'hatred of movements' – this strange phenomenon has been little studied by scientists, but has been noted in the research of a related condition, misophonia: a disorder where people become irritated upon hearing certain repetitious sounds.
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The clear night sky has a way of sparking a child’s sense of wonder. But few channel that early curiosity into an unyielding passion.
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SCHENCK
N Most forms of spirituality are based on some notion of life after death, either an afterlife or reincarnation. Both of these require something that exists apart from any material medium, which is to say, something supernatural. My rejection of such an afterlife, however, is not based solely on the naturalistic perspective, which rejects the supernatural. It is also based on my experience of spirituality.
Most forms of spirituality are based on some notion of life after death, either an afterlife or reincarnation. Both of these require something that exists apart from any material medium, which is to say, something supernatural. My rejection of such an afterlife, however, is not based solely on the naturalistic perspective, which rejects the supernatural. It is also based on my experience of spirituality.
In countless hours of meditation, I have observed the comings and goings of the mental phenomenon that I call myself. I have found no changeless essence amidst these comings and goings, only the ephemeral and contingent. Together, the scientific facts and these direct observations have convinced me that there is no changeless essence constant throughout a life, much less beyond life. We are a process of change composed of smaller processes and embedded in larger ones. Our death is the end of the process that we call our life, and that’s that.
There is, however, a certain sense of “immortality” that I have experienced in moments of deep stillness that I believe is also supported by Naturalism. If we are all similarly a part of the same great otherness, the same great process of life, then there is a sense in which all life is in essence the same. As an individual, death is the end of the narrative that I identify as “my” life, but life continues without “me.” That is a fact.
To take joy in and get a sense of meaning from this fact requires selflessness. It requires that we value others as much as we value ourselves. It requires that we can see ourselves in others and others in ourselves – including others who will be living in the distant future.
Each organism is an individual awareness, but awareness encompasses all sentient individuals. Each of us is a wave on the ocean of awareness. If we identify with our being a separate wave, we have to face the inevitability of the shore upon which we are doomed to break. If we identify with being part of the ocean, then we identify with that which will still be here long after any particular wave breaks. It is a rather unnatural thing to experience such selflessness – but even brief glimpses can take some of the sting out of the idea of death. (I presented this idea at length in an article titled, “Naturalism and the Idea of One Mind,”(1) so I won’t say more here.)
Besides this sense of immortality, there are other ways in which awareness of death and its finality enter my view of spirituality. Most directly is the simple idea that if this is the only life we are given and its duration is uncertain, does it not make sense to live it as completely as we can and find beauty in each moment we are given? We get so caught up in trivialities; mindfulness of death, our own and of those we care about, has a way of showing us what is trivial and what is important in life.
Mindfulness
When it comes down to it, my view of spirituality can be summed up as “mindfulness.” Mindfulness is the jewel of spirituality, everything else I have written on the subject is but a setting for this jewel.
So much has been written about mindfulness, yet one could read a hundred books on it and be no more mindful as a result. Being mindful is something that we simply have to do. I have contributed my share of writing on mindfulness, particularly a formal practice of mindfulness(2), and will not add to it here.
Mindfulness is not, however, something we should restrict to a formal practice, such as daily meditation. It is something we should bring to our every encounter with events and people.
It has been said that everything is beautiful in its own way, and I would add that everything is interesting in its own way. A mindful person is able to find this interesting aspect in events and people, and to take delight in it. To find ourselves bored in this endlessly interesting world is to lack this resource of mindfulness (and of course we all lack that resource much of the time). (3)
To love life and find it fascinating and beautiful – this is to honor the natural creation as the pious theist honors his or her God. Unlike the gods of many religions, Nature asks nothing of us. To love it is to love it freely.
To go back to the question I asked earlier: “does it not make sense to live it [life] as completely as we can and find beauty in each moment we are given?”, a naturalistic spirituality as I have presented it in the various articles I have posted here, is my affirmative answer to that question.
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