nousrose

[nousrose]

How do the very same powers that condition us to see in a limited, distorted, and dualistic mode also cause us to connect with reality-as-it-is, free of all cognitive distortion? In other words, how do the same powers that bind us also liberate us? Briefly, the same powers of awareness that allow us to construct mental models of reality also allow us to see that they are mental models and not reality itself. When we see clearly that our stories are just stories, that is, conditioned frameworks of interpretation with no necessary relationship to reality itself, we begin to become free of them. When we stop looking for truth in our mental models and conditioned thoughts, their power begins to weaken and diminish. Then the 'great unconstructed domain', the avikalpa-bhumi, begins to open up, which means that you increasingly access direct experience of reality prior to all interpretation.

The Recognition Sutras

Christopher D. Wallis

[nousrose]

Tantra understands that life on earth and in the other conditional realms brings us mixed experiences to which we must apply a measure of dispassionate, patient acceptance and self-discipline. Fearful avoidance of what we think are negative experiences merely reinforces the very attitude - namely, the exclusive identification with a limited body-mind - that breeds negative experiences. Likewise, blind attachment to what we consider positive experiences merely creates another kind of karmic bind by which we persist in our state of unenlightenment. Significantly, Tantra asks us to go beyond the traditional stance of the cool, utterly detached observer of all our experiences. It recommends the more refined position of witnessing while at the same time understanding that observer and observed are not ultimately distinct. The Tantric approach is to see all life experiences as the play of the same One. Whether positive or negative, all experiences are embedded in absolute joy, the great delight (maha-sukha) of Reality. When we have understood that what we dread the most - be it loss of health, property, relationships, or life itself - is not occurring to us but within our larger being, we begin to see the tremendous humor of embodiment. This insight is truly liberating. The Tantric scriptures hammer on what may be the most important discovery of ancient spirituality, namely, that we are the world. The world is our true body.

Tantra: Path of Ecstasy

Georg Feuerstein

[nousrose]

When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer. It’s not obvious until you look at it, but when we believe our thoughts, in that instant, we begin to live in the world of dreams, where the mind conceptualizes an entire world that doesn’t actually exist anywhere but in the mind itself. At that moment, we begin to experience a sense of isolation, where we no longer feel connected to each other in a very rich and human way, but we find ourselves receding more and more into the world of our minds, into the world of our own creation.

Falling into Grace

Adyashanti

[nousrose]

He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence—they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all. And death was a kind of gesture, forever withholding water from the traveler vainly seeking to slake his thirst. But for the others, it was the fatal and tender gesture that erases and denies, smiling at gratitude as at rebellion.

A Happy Death

Albert Camus

[nousrose]

Both men and women are split in both their masculinity and their femininity. Both tend to project either idealized perfection or less than a human being onto the opposite sex. At the same time, they experience themselves as split, expecting more of themselves than they are and ashamed to be less than they seem. The root cause of the splitting is the failure to recognize the difference between the archetypal image and the human reality. When Nietzsche declared that God is dead, he was right in the sense that the projection onto a male god in the sky is dead. Still, the human beings' need for a loving, nurturing, organising Father-Mother who could hold their whole world in Her hand was not. With nothing but themselves to project onto, people flounder in their efforts to find someone or something sufficiently unreachable to carry the mystery of life itself. The arrow that carries the God-Goddess projection has to find a target. Too often that target is another bumbling being who seems to embody all that was and all that is too perfect to be. If there is mutual projection, god and goddess live in all-consuming bliss, until the human warts become visible. So mesmerising is the projection that long after human frailty and failure have smashed the ideal, the arrow still clings to the target. The arrow that went out was carrying the very soul. To fill the abyss that gapes when the projection dies, the projector has to claim within what was constellated without in the relationship. Sometimes the reclaiming allows for a real human relationship to be born from what was never real, nor ever could be real.

Leaving My Father's House

Marion Woodman

[nousrose]

Outside the Western tradition, the Taoists of ancient China saw no gap between is and ought. Right action was whatever comes from a clear view of the situation. They did not follow moralists – in their day, Confucians – in wanting to fetter human beings with rules or principles. For Taoists, the good life is only the natural life lived skilfully. It has no particular purpose. It has nothing to do with the will, and it does not consist in trying to realise any ideal. Everything we do can be done more or less well; but if we act well it is not because we translate our intentions into deeds. It is because we deal skilfully with whatever needs to be done. The good life means living according to our natures and circumstances. There is nothing that says that it is bound to be the same for everybody, or that it must conform with ‘morality’. In Taoist thought, the good life comes spontaneously; but spontaneity is far from simply acting on the impulses that occur to us. In Western traditions such as Romanticism, spontaneity is linked with subjectivity. In Taoism it means acting dispassionately, on the basis of an objective view of the situation at hand. The common man cannot see things objectively, because his mind is clouded by anxiety about achieving his goals. Seeing clearly means not projecting our goals into the world; acting spontaneously means acting according to the needs of the situation. Western moralists will ask what is the purpose of such action, but for Taoists the good life has no purpose. It is like swimming in a whirlpool, responding to the currents as they come and go. ‘I enter with the inflow, and emerge with the outflow, follow the Way of the water, and do not impose my selfishness upon it. This is how I stay afloat in it,’ says the Chuang-Tzu. In this view, ethics is simply a practical skill, like fishing or swimming. The core of ethics is not choice or conscious awareness, but the knack of knowing what to do. It is a skill that comes with practice and an empty mind.

Straw Dogs

John Gray

[nousrose]

The ability to act according to one's conscience depends on the degree to which one has transcended the limits of one's society and has become a citizen of the world. The average individual does not permit himself to be aware of thoughts or feelings which are incompatible with the patterns of his culture, and hence he is forced to repress them. Formally speaking, then, what is unconscious and what is conscious depends on the structure of society and on the patterns of feeling and thought it produces. As to the contents of the unconscious, no generalization is possible. But one statement can be made: it always represents the whole man, with all his potentialities for darkness and light; it always contains the basis for the different answers which man is capable of giving to the question which existence poses. In the extreme case of the most regressive cultures, bent on returning to animal existence, this very wish is predominant and conscious, while all strivings to emerge from this level are repressed. In a culture which has moved from the regressive to the spiritual-progressive goal, the forces representing the dark are unconscious. But man, in any culture, has all the potentialities within himself; he is the archaic man, the beast of prey, the cannibal, the idolater, and he is the being with a capacity for reason, for love, for justice. The content of the unconscious, then, is neither the good nor the evil, the rational nor the irrational; it is both; it is all that is human. The unconscious is the whole man minus that part of him which corresponds to his society. Consciousness represents social man, the accidental limitations set by the historical situation into which an individual is thrown. Unconsciousness represents universal man, the whole man, rooted in the cosmos; it represents the plant in him, the animal in him, the spirit in him; it represents his past, down to the dawn of human existence, and it represents his future up to the day when man will have become fully human, and when nature will be humanized as man will be "naturalized." To become aware of one's unconscious means to get in touch with one's full humanity and to do away with barriers which society erects within each man and, consequently, between each man and his fellow man. To attain this aim fully is difficult and a rare occurrence; to approximate it is in the grasp of everybody, as it constitutes the emancipation of man from the socially conditioned alienation from himself and humankind.

Beyond the Chains of Illusion

Erich Fromm

[nousrose]

Knowledge in the abstract is merely a titillation of the intellect, an inconsequential stimulation of a segment of our total humanness. To fulfill itself, knowledge must find expression in the body. More than that, it must transmute the body by the power of its truth. And it is truth, not knowledge, which is replete with power. The power associated with knowledge is manipulative power, such as political leverage or overpowering influence. The power inherent in truth, however, is transformative in the deepest sense. It is capable of remaking the person in the light of truth. What truth? Or should we be speaking of truths? To hold true, truth must be singular. Always. A multiplicity of truths is a contradiction in terms. The custom of speaking of many truths arose out of the loss of truth and its substitution by countless facts. But facts are not truth. Only wisdom is truth-bearing and therefore liberating. Truth is reality without conceptual blinders.

The Deeper Dimension of Yoga

Georg Feuerstein

[nousrose]

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead. Paradoxically enough, inflation is a regression of consciousness into unconsciousness. This always happens when consciousness takes too many unconscious contents upon itself and loses the faculty of discrimination, the sine qua non of all consciousness.

Psychology and Alchemy

Carl Jung

[nousrose]

As an object of desire, that which we long for causes suffering, but as an object of mindfulness it can lead to awakening. The trick, as far as Buddhism is concerned, is to accept the fact that no experience can ever be as complete as we would wish, that no object can ever satisfy completely. In the right-handed path, the Buddha’s followers turned away from the pursuit of sensory pleasure, but in the left-handed path, they allowed themselves to come face-to-face with the gap that desire always comes up against, as well as any pleasure that it might bring. Allowing ourselves into desire’s abyss turns out to be the key to a more complete enjoyment of its fruits. By experiencing desire in its totality: gratifying and frustrating, sweet and bitter, pleasant and painful, successful and yet coming up short, we can use it to awaken our minds. The dualities that desire seems to take for granted can be resolved through a willingness to drop into the gap between them. Even living in the world of the senses, we can be free.

Open to Desire

Mark Epstein

[nousrose]

The scenes in our life resemble pictures in a rough mosaic; they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful. That is why to attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and why, though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving as the only road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have been living the whole time ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in expectation of which they lived.

Essays and Aphorisms

Arthur Schopenhauer

[nousrose]

When things fall apart and we're on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that's really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable. Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly. The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don't disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security. From this point of view, the only time we ever know what's really going on is when the rug's been pulled out and we can't find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep.

When Things Fall Apart

Pema Chödrön

[nousrose]

The spiritual haughtiness and disgust of every human being who has suffered deeply - how deeply human beings can suffer almost determines their order of rank - the harrowing certainty, with which he is wholly permeated and coloured, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than even the cleverest and wisest can know, that he is familiar with, and was once 'at home' in, many distant, terrible worlds of which "you know nothing!'...this spiritual, silent haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect of knowledge, of the 'initiated', of the almost sacrificed, finds all forms of disguise necessary to protect itself against contact with importunate and pitying hands and in general against everything which is not its equal in suffering. Profound suffering ennobles; it separates. One of the most subtle forms of disguise is Epicureanism and a certain ostentatious bravery of taste which takes suffering frivolously and arms itself against everything sorrowful and profound. There are 'cheerful people' who employ cheerfulness because they are misunderstood on account of it - they want to be misunderstood. There are 'men of science' who employ science because it produces a cheerful appearance and because scientificality gives the impression a person is superficial - they want to give a false impression. There are free insolent spirits who would like to conceal and deny that they are broken, proud, incurable hearts (the cynicism of Hamlet - the case of Galiani); and sometimes folly itself is the mask for an unhappy, all too certain knowledge. From which it follows that it is part of a more refined humanity to have reverence 'for the mask' and not to practice psychology and inquisitiveness in the wrong place.

Beyond Good and Evil

Friedrich Nietzsche

[nousrose]

To be initiated into a mystery psychologically is to have a mystical experience that changes you. You are no longer who you were before. You have undergone something that sets you apart from those who have not had the experience. Often, an initiation involves an element of isolation, of facing fear, or undergoing an ordeal. But perhaps just as often, the initiatory experience comes as a gift of grace, when mystery and profound beauty come together in a numinous moment of which we are a part. The new initiate feels archetypally twice-born: into life at birth, and now through a mystery, into a new state of being or new consciousness.

Crossing to Avalon

Jean Shinoda Bolen

[nousrose]

What is denied inwardly will come to us as fate. As we can only be partially conscious at best, much of the fate we would deny or decry, we have unconsciously elected. This is why patterns occur so often in one's life, even though one is rationally obliged to admit that no one else made him or her choose that person, that path, or that behaviour. We are reminded again of the wisdom of the classical imagination, which intuited this paradox. The gods set things in motion, but the choices are ours. The sum of those choices and their consequences, which may ripple through generations to come, is the story of our life.

Creating a Life

James Hollis

[nousrose]

People do not realize just how much they are putting at risk when they don't accept what life presents them with, the questions and tasks that life sets them. When they resolve to spare themselves the pain and suffering, they owe to their nature. In so doing, they refuse to pay life's dues and for this very reason, life then often leads them astray. If we don't accept our own destiny, a different kind of suffering takes its place: a neurosis develops, and I believe that that life which we have to live is not as bad as a neurosis. If I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality. A neurosis is a much greater curse! In general, a neurosis is a replacement for an evasion, an unconscious desire to cheat life, to avoid something. One cannot do more than live what one really is. And we are all made up of opposites and conflicting tendencies. After much reflection, I have come to the conclusion that it is better to live what one really is and accept the difficulties that arise as a result because avoidance is much worse.

Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C.G. Jung

Aniela Jaffé

[nousrose]

What seems to be singularly human is not consciousness or free will but inner conflict - the contending impulses that divide us from ourselves. No other animal seeks the satisfaction of its desires and at the same time curses them as evil; spends its life terrified of death while being ready to die in order to preserve an image of itself; kills its own species for the sake of dreams. Not self-awareness but the split in the self is what makes us human.

The Soul of the Marionette

John Gray