“Love is the experience that others are not others. Beauty is the experience that objects are not objects.“
–Rupert Spira
Rupert Spira (born March 13, 1960) is an English spiritual teacher, philosopher and author of the Direct Path based in Oxford, UK. Wikipedia
BY CRAIG HAMILTON | DEC 3, 2020 | 2 COMMENTS (craighamiltonglobal.com)
Many spiritual practices advocate focusing your attention on the body in order to liberate your awareness from the mind. While these approaches are valuable, they probably won’t open you to the deeper dimensions of meditation practice: becoming aware of consciousness itself. In this 5-minute Q&A, Craig explores the practice of liberating yourself from the mind and the body in order to experience the infinite mystery beyond both.
Below the video player is an MP3 version of the talk and an edited transcript, if you’d prefer to engage the content in that way.
Want to download the mp3 version? Click here.
Question:
The idea of the infinite feels like a mental construct. So, to get out of the mind, is the body a good stand in for the self the mind doesn’t know and will never know?
Answer:
That’s a good question.
(Participant) says, the idea of the infinite feels like a mental construct. First, the idea of the infinite is a mental construct. That’s exactly right. Any idea is a mental construct.
But the infinite is not a mental construct. A lot of work has been done with getting out of the fixation on thought. If you put your attention on your body, on the one hand, yes, that can take you out of your mind and there are a lot of traditional practices that kind of work that way. We’re all so lost in the stream of the monkey mind, let’s just pay attention to the breath. Or let’s just put our attention on our body. When we do that for a little while, what happens? The mind calms down and we feel centered in the body. From a relative point of view, putting our attention on the body certainly is a way out of the mind.
Taking your attention off your mind and having it somewhere else for a while could open a doorway to a deeper consciousness. So, it’s not a bad thing to do and certainly spiritual teachers ask us to do that.
But what if instead of trying to focus anywhere in particular, we allowed ourselves to simply not put our attention anywhere on anything? When you can’t put it on your thoughts, and you can’t put it on your feelings, and you can’t put it on your sensations, then where else can it go? That’s the mystery. Then it’s a direct invitation to become aware of consciousness itself, which is infinite and is not a concept.
I would say it’s not a bad thing to do. But in terms of practicing meditation in the context of direct awakening, I suggest that you challenge yourself to not let it rest on the body and then see what opens up. If you just focus on your body, often you just feel nice and warm and relaxed; and you won’t be challenged to go further into something more profound.
Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract.” The first step is an ontological statement of being beginning with the syllogism: “Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is all there is.” The second step is the sense testimony (what the senses tell us about anything). The third step is the argument between the absolute abstract nature of truth from the first step and the relative specific truth of experience from the second step. The fourth step is filtering out the conclusions you have arrived at in the third step. The fifth step is your overall conclusion.
The Ukraine Emergency Translation Group meets every Friday at 11 a.m. Pacific time via Zoom. We call it the Ukraine Emergency Translation Group but we welcome Translations about anything. Here are sense testimonies (2nd steps) we translated and their corresponding conclusions: (5th steps) this week.
2) People get sick and die
5) Truth of people is ONE Infinite, Eternal timeless and dimensionless LIFE ENERGY.
2) Body can control person.
5) Whole, complete, perfect conscious beingness is all there is.
2) Since I come from God, I must be exceptional.
5) I, being, am universal, original, inseparable and unexceptional perception.
All Translators are welcome to join us on Fridays at 11 a.m. Pacific time. The link is: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83608167293?pwd=cFRsckVibXMwTGJ0KzhaV0R2cWJtdz09
For information about Translation or other Prosperos classes go to: https://www.theprosperos.org/teaching
Some comments from group members about this group:
“I like the group interaction and different perspectives. Also, at least for me, it gives me a sense of accountability and keeps the practice fresh in my mind. ” –Sarah Flynn
“This group has freed me up to have more fun with my Translations.”
–Mike Zonta
Infinite Potential • Dec 1, 2022 Watch The Film https://www.infinitepotential.com/opt… In the early 1970’s, David Peat took a sabbatical year with Roger Penrose, but shortly after overheard a lecture by David Bohm and was instantly hooked. He made it his business to meet with and talk to Bohm, and soon after the two men became collaborators, sharing an interest in the nature of Consciousness. Then in 1987, they co-penned the book Science Order and Creativity.
We are living in an emergent new Empire of Scientism in the form of a scientocracy. Such an Empire will transform us into components in the networks that run it. At first we will enter a phase of techbondage and then our species will be altered by transhumanism. This new world order of global governance will be based on automaticity. The automatic world order will be totalitarian.
Our autonomy on a national, local and personal level is being assimilated into automatic processes. These processes are converging and concentrating on a transnational level beyond democratic restraint at our expense under the pretence of our convenience. Using simple but profound ideas of the loop, our humanity is being squeezed. We are becoming automatons as other robotic and cyborgian automatons proliferate around us.
The system of global governance is like a symphony orchestra with each focusing on their roles. This symphony is the swansong of homo sapiens. As automaticity increases autonomy decreases until we wither away as independent, organic beings.
Looking at the long imperial history of plantation, we can witness the process that underlies ‘progress’ towards global governance. The study, language and practice of controlling plants has driven models of imperial development. We will soon live in a planetary plantation as we experience implantation. The objective of the Plantation of the Automatons is the utter control and management of human consciousness as part of a system in which those who are allowed survive are mere conscious agents.
1172 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 11, 2022
(Goodreads.com)
Living With Ghosts Sep 24, 2021 Register for the next screening here: https://www.livingwithghostsmovie.com… LIVING WITH GHOSTS, winner of BEST DOCUMENTARY and BEST FEATURE FILM in the 2022 film festival circuit, records the first-ever publicly-funded attempt to make contact with deceased individuals to determine if such contact can and should be used to reduce severe grief symptoms.
(Recommended by John Atwater, H.W.)
The Cycle of Birth
Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel!
The tradition of Advent is indeed captivating to anyone who lives in the Judeo-Christian world. Often thought of as a New Testament idea it is grounded in the Old Testaments. It represents archetypically being freed from Egypt by the Messiah more popular called the Christ. At Advent we are preparing for the coming of the Christ to free us. It is the beginning of sacred cycle of birth and death represented by Judeo-Christian practice. Egypt represents the land of the ego and materiality in archetype study, conversely Israel represents the place of freedom where consciousness of a higher state of existence reins. In Israel we are free to know our sense of God free from the ego needs and wants represented by our sojourn in Egypt. We have crossed the hot sands and spent our time in the desert, which represents our subconscious mind. For to go to Israel (Nirvana, land of the milk and honey, i.e., heaven), we must be free of the habits and ego needs found in the subconscious mind.
Christian or not is of little importance in the understanding of Advent and the part is plays in our lives. Advent is an event of consciousness and freedom. Christ-Messiah is looked at as savior and this aspect of consciousness is one of saving and freeing us to be with the father/causer in heaven. To enter the kingdom of heaven, into a communion with our sense of Deity, God, and Truth we cannot enter as sinners (those who do not understand the laws placed by God, through various prophets). The birth of the Messiah brings new law, new understanding of the nature of reality, of God, and ultimately Truth unfolding as consciousness.
Preparation is always needed before we enter a sacred space of consciousness. And these next four weeks are that time of preparation. We begin this preparation by understanding what and where we have sinned misunderstood the laws of God or the nature of reality. We have placed false gods on the alter of our covenant (sacred agreement with our higher consciousness or God) with God. Polluting the sacred space of our communion is because we think what we see, hear, and sense is the Truth or real God. We place this false sense as our God. However, we know that the law of reality is that there is but one, one God, one Truth. In the Nature of Reality, we are one and only one. We are not cloven as the beast, but one in our understanding of our divinity and expression of consciousness.
As we begin our preparation we realize our fear, hopelessness, and sinning, will be put to rest by the coming Messiah (symbolic of the light of understanding). We light our candles each week to show the way and to represent what we must gather to ourselves in this coming of Consciousness.
Suzanne Deakins, HW, M
Portland, Oregon
Then & Now Dec 1, 2022 Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018
Fossil fuels, fisheries and farming: the world’s most destructive industries are protected – and subsidised – by governments
Wed 30 Nov 2022 01.00 EST (TheGuardian.com)
In every conflict over the living world, something is being protected. And most of the time, it’s the wrong thing.
The world’s most destructive industries are fiercely protected by governments. The three sectors that appear to be most responsible for the collapse of ecosystems and erasure of wildlife are fossil fuels, fisheries and farming. In 2021, governments directly subsidised oil and gas production to the tune of $64bn (£53bn), and spent a further $531bn (£443bn) on keeping fossil fuel prices low. The latest figures for fisheries, from 2018, suggest that global subsidies for the sector amount to $35bn a year, over 80% of which go to large-scale industrial fishing. Most are paid to “enhance capacity”: in other words to help the industry, as marine ecosystems collapse, catch more fish.
Every year, governments spend $500bn on farm subsidies, the great majority of which pay no regard to environmental protection. Even the payments that claim to do so often inflict more harm than good. For example, many of the European Union’s pillar two “green” subsidies sustain livestock farming on land that would be better used for ecological restoration. Over half the European farm budget is spent on propping up animal farming, which is arguably the world’s most ecologically destructive industry.
Pasture-fed meat production destroys five times as much forest as palm oil does. It now threatens some of the richest habitats on Earth, among which are forests in Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Myanmar. Meat production could swallow 3m square kilometres of the world’s most biodiverse places in 35 years. That’s almost the size of India. In Australia, 94% of the deforestation in the catchment area of the Great Barrier Reef – a major cause of coral loss – is associated with beef production. Yet most of these catastrophes are delivered with the help of public money.
The more destructive the business, the more likely it is to enjoy political protection. A study published this month claims that chicken factories being built in Herefordshire and Shropshire are likely to destroy far more jobs than they create, wrecking tourism through the river pollution, air pollution, smell and scenic blight they cause. But none of the planning applications for these factories has been obliged to provide an economic impact analysis. Planning officers, the paper found, are highly dismissive of the hospitality industry, treating it as “non-serious and trivial”. By comparison, the paper found, “attitudes to farming were very different; described as serious, ‘proper’ (male) work”. The “tough”, “masculine” industries driving Earth systems towards collapse are pampered and protected by governments, while less destructive sectors must fend for themselves.
While there is no shortage of public money for the destruction of life on Earth, budgets for its protection always fall short. According to the UN, $536bn a year will be needed to protect the living world – far less than the amount being paid to destroy it – yet almost all this funding is missing. Some has been promised, scarcely any has materialised. So much for public money for public goods.
The political protection of destructive industries is woven into the fabric of politics, not least because of the pollution paradox (“the more damaging the commercial enterprise, the more money it must spend on politics to ensure it’s not regulated out of existence. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by the most damaging commercial enterprises.”) Earth systems, by contrast, are treated as an afterthought, an ornament: nice to have, but dispensable when their protection conflicts with the necessity of extraction. In reality, the irreducible essential is a habitable planet.
In 2010, at a biodiversity summit in Nagoya, Japan, governments set themselves 20 goals, to be met by 2020. None has been achieved. As they prepare for the biodiversity Cop15 summit in Montreal next week, governments are investing not in the defence of the living world but in greenwash.
The headline objective is to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. But what governments mean by protection often bears little resemblance to what ecologists mean.
Take the UK, for example. On paper, it has one of the highest proportions of protected land in the rich world, at 28%. It could easily raise this proportion to 30% and claim to have fulfilled its obligations. But it is also one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth. How can this be? Because most of our “protected” areas are nothing of the kind.
One analysis suggests that only 5% of our land meets the international definition of a protected area. Even these scraps are at risk, as scarcely anyone is left to enforce the law: the regulators have been stripped to the bone and beyond. At sea, most of our marine protected areas are nothing but lines on the map: trawlers still rip them apart.
All this is likely to become much worse. If the retained EU law bill goes ahead, the entire basis of legal protection in the UK could be torn down. Even by the standards of this government, the mindless vandalism involved is gobsmacking. To prove that Brexit means Brexit, 570 environmental laws must be deleted or replaced by the end of next year. There will be no public consultation, no scope for presenting evidence and, in all likelihood, no opportunity for parliamentary debate. It is logistically impossible to replace so much legislation in such a short period, so the most likely outcome is deletion. If so, it’s game over for rivers, soil, air quality, groundwater, wildlife and habitats in the UK, and game on for cheats and con artists. The whole country will, in effect, become a freeport.
Never underestimate the destructive instincts of the Conservative party, prepared to ruin everything for the sake of an idea. Never underestimate its appetite for chaos and dysfunction.
The protected industries driving us towards destruction will take everything if they are not checked. We face a brutal contest for control over land and sea: between those who seek to convert our life support systems into profit, and those who seek to defend, restore and, where possible, return them to the indigenous people dispossessed by capitalism’s fire front. These are never just technical or scientific issues. They cannot be resolved by management alone. They are deeply political. We can protect the living world or we can protect the companies destroying it. We cannot do both.
