Dec 14, 2023 (davidprice-26453.medium.com)
You start dying slowly :
If you avoid to feel passion
And their turbulent emotions;
Those which make your eyes glisten
And your heart beat fast.
~ Pablo Neruda
*
…If the human race were to vanish from the face of the earth save for one halfway talented child that had received no education, this child would rediscover the entire course of evolution, it would be capable of producing everything once more, gods and demons, paradises, commandments, the Old and New Testament.
― Hermann Hesse
*
Recognizing the empty, nonexistent, insubstantial nature of the ego is meditation on absolute bodhicitta.
~Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
*
… The ego must constantly create enemies, because it must continue to perpetuate the belief in separation because that is how it stays alive in your mind. It must make an enemy out of life, out of others, and even yourself — in short, it must continue to generate illusions and continue to attack those illusions– but, [as ACIM teaches]: ‘Nothing real can be threatened; nothing unreal exists.’ THIS is the foundation upon which peace is built.
When there’s nothing to condemn, and no one to forgive, you are free. This is why ACIM states that only loving thoughts are true and everything else is a cry for help.
Can anyone really be justified in condemning someone’s plea for help? …But YOU who know the Truth have the opportunity to give them love and to see no error in them, and in doing so, you are acknowledging God in them and reminding them of the Truth that they have forgotten: That fear is an illusion, that love alone is real…
— Aaron Abke
Our civilization enshrines ego values that destroy the world. Some of us are trying to find a deeper, more substantial value to base our lives on, and we are confronted with a forest of illusions that confuse the issue. Our attempts at revising our vision of what is real and what isn’t is difficult because we’ve been trained to accept ego values as bedrock truth and regard its tragedies as unfortunate but inevitable.
Traditions that question our habits of mind that give value to unreal things like ego and ignore the fundamental reality of “bodhicitta,” seem exotic and fanciful. (Does English have a word for that quality of mind?)
Do we in the West know that we need an “awakening mind,” one dedicated to the liberation of all beings? Our concept of reality envisions us all as separate beings with separate agendas in how to deal with the given social and physical challenges we’re confronted with. The mystery and beauty of the whole, of which we are each a building block, is reduced to big or little practical tests. We’ve been seduced by ego illusions.
There’s no better way to lose your way and your soul in the bargain. We are meant to be co-builders of the World Soul, and our insistence on anything that perpetuates ego concerns creates a planet in distress. We wander into a small life that amounts to a cry for help, but very little help comes because we’re all lost. It’s the blind leading the blind.
We are a civilization crying for help, in spite of our heroic wars and domination of nature. We suffer from an excess of unreality.
We need more wonder and more questioning, and less self justification, and we instinctively know it. As a remedy, we attach ourselves to some guru or authority who is probably hiding their own self interest, their own “shadow,” and we stay lost. It’s amazing how messy life gets when we don’t know ourselves.
If we base our lives on separate self interest we make our lives a constant battle against enemies who want to destroy us. We wander into a swamp of monsters, most of them imaginary. If we do recognize the essential unreality of the ego we may start to get a glimpse of the unreality of our civilization. Beauty, mystery and God may be identical.
Written by David Price
I write about creativity, loving, language learning and psycho/spirituality. I’m a longtime painter and reader.