“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”
― Rumi
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Happiness – Bertrand Russell
“The world is vast and our own powers are limited. If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible. The man who can forget his worries by means of a genuine interest in, say, the Council of Trent, or the life history of stars, will find that, when he returns from his excursion into the impersonal world, he has acquired a poise and calm which enable him to deal with his worries in the best way, and he will in the meantime have experienced a genuine even if temporary happiness.”
– Bertrand Russell
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Peace – Unknown
“Peace comes in pieces”.
– Unknown
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Seeds – Robert Louis Stevenson
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson
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Le Coeur – Pascal
“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.”
(The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.)
– Pascal
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Happening – Unknown
“Maybe this isn’t happening to you. Maybe it’s happening for you.”
– Unknown
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Spiritual Bypass – Jeff Foster
THE GREAT SPIRITUAL BYPASS
“The Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist John Welwood coined the wonderful phrase “spiritual bypassing”, which means, in his own words, “trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it.”
I so agree with John Welwood. I think one of the biggest shadow sides of spirituality in general is that it can make us lose touch with our humanity. We dream of the heavens and forget the earth. Which is ironic, since our deep humanity IS the source of our most profound spirituality, so we’re kind of shooting ourselves in the foot there.
In the name of peace, we go to war with ourselves. In the name of being non-violent, or at least seeing ourselves as non-violent, we repress, suppress, deny and hide aspects of ourselves that don’t conform to that ideal, that image. We bury our anger, our grief, our fear. We swallow words we need to speak, say yes when we mean no, avoid setting boundaries in order to be “compassionate” and “kind” and “unconditionally loving”, and not hurt others’ feelings. We stifle our passions, our creativity, our sensuality, our deep, raw, intense, messy humanity, in order to appear to be “still” and “silent” and “calm” and “non-reactive”. We smile when really we’re breaking apart inside, stay quiet and still when we feel like screaming. In other words, we ignore our buried trauma. We push away those painful, inconvenient, shameful and embarrassing parts of ourselves. We avoid the darkness and try to reach the light, and then call ourselves… “spiritual”!
But whatever we suppress and repress in ourselves doesn’t go away. However enlightened or peaceful or “deeply rooted in Pure Awareness” we pretend to be, those un-met, unprocessed, unseen and unenlightened energies stay rooted in our bodies, in our nervous systems, in our muscles, manifesting in our dreams and nightmares. The monster inside us doesn’t go away by singing mantras, contorting ourselves into yoga postures, praying to the guru or visiting ashrams. The monster only goes away once it’s met in a really embodied way. And to meet it we’re going to have to be brave and stop pretending. We’re going to have to stop being perfect and spiritual and unconditionally loving and wise and good and calm and neutral, and tell the truth of our actual human experience. We’re going to have to really meet our inner child. Feel the grief, the anger, the terror that’s lurking inside. Feel it and process it and validate it and give it expression in a healthy way. And then, and only then, the darkness inside us may turn out to be our greatest light-source. Our wounds may give us an insane amount of wisdom and courage. Our pains may help us find our passions. But we can’t skip over the trauma. We can’t skip to en-lightenment without en-lightening ALL our parts. Without making room for the sorrow, the joy, the tears and the laughter, the anger and the awe.
I have learnt this the hard way. I used to run from feelings. I used to be scared of them, judge others for having them. Now, feelings are my dearest friends and companions, and sources of joy and creativity. I used to believe enlightenment was a transcendent state, free from sadness, free from anger, free from doubt. But that was my mind telling me that. That was my spiritual ego, the part of me that wanted to be special, that wanted to escape, that wanted to be superior and safe. I came to realise that enlightenment, if there is any such thing, is a deeply vibrantly alive ocean, filled with beautiful waves of anger and sorrow and fear and doubt and joy and bliss, filled with all of humanity, filled with deep feeling, and no feeling is pushed away, and all feelings can be felt and can move through and can be expressed in a truthful and authentic way. I don’t need to pretend to be free, or pretend to be peaceful, or pretend to be wise, or pretend to be neutral, or pretend to be more evolved than anyone else, or pretend to be anything at all. Just being alive is enough – alive, and open, and curious, and playful, and deeply human, and committed to this path of ever-deepening adventure in the Unknown.
We cannot bypass our trauma because then we are bypassing life itself, and life won’t let us bypass it anyway. Our trauma, when faced, will heal us, break us open to more life, make us more compassionate, more authentic. When not faced, it will drain us, make us act out unconsciously, it will hurt us and the ones we love, it will make us addicted, it will make us sick, it will destroy relationships and make us false beings. So we can’t bypass our hurt and angry places in the name of spirituality, because we want to be true, real, authentic. We want to heal, and be Whole. True spirituality calls us to face everything. Everything inside of us that needs to be faced. It calls us to face our hot, sticky, dark, embarrassing, angry, scared, shaky and sexy and fiery places. It calls us to speak up, even if we are terrified and feel like we want to vomit. It calls us to finally express what’s inside us, even if we lose all our friends. It calls us to be deeply human as much as we are Pure Awareness, deeply humble as much as we are divine, earthy and messy and imperfect as much as we are absolute and transcendent.
We don’t get to be perfect, but we get to be real… and that is the greatest prize of all.
– Jeff Foster
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Sweetest Peach – Unknown
“You might the sweetest peach on the tree, but some people just don’t like peaches.”
– Unknown
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Story – Unknown
“Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.”
– Unknown
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Boiling Water – Russian Proverb
“The same boiling water that hardens the egg softens the potato.”
– Russian Proverb
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My soul – Rumi
“Come back my soul,
How much longer will
You linger in the garden of deceit?
I have sent you a hundred messages
I have shown you a hundred ways
Either you never read them
Or you ignore my advice.
Come back my soul, do not waste
Time with the cold-hearted
They do not know your worth.
Why do you seek water
When you are the stream?
Have you forgotten?
You are the king’s falcon,
You are a ray of the Beloved,
A divine wonder!”
– Rumi
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Same person – Unknown
“You will never find the same person twice. Not even in the same person.”
– Unknown
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Ignorance – Unknown
“Your ignorance about something is not an argument against it.”
– Unknown
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Happy life – Bertrand Russell
“Whatever we may wish to think, we are creatures of Earth our life is part of the life of the Earth; and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are as essential to it as spring and summer, and rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more than to the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted through the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter.
I have seen a boy of two years old, who had been kept in London, taken out for the first time to walk in green country. The season was winter, and everything was wet and muddy. To the adult eye there was nothing to cause delight, but in the boy there sprang up a strange ecstasy; he kneeled in the wet ground and put his face in the grass, and gave utterance to half-articulate cries of delight. The joy that he was experiencing was primitive, simple and massive. The organic need that was being satisfied is so profound that those in whom it is starved are seldom completely sane.
Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling and drink as a good examples, have in them no element of this contact with Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what. Such pleasures bring nothing that can truly be called joy. Those, on the other hand, that bring us into contact with the life of the Earth have something in them profoundly satisfying; when they cease, the happiness that they have brought remains, although their intensity while they existed may have been less than that of more exciting dissipations.
The two-year-old boy whom I spoke of a moment ago displayed the most primitive possible form of union with the life of Earth. But in a higher form the same thing is to be found in poetry. What makes Shakespeare’s lyrics supreme is that they are filled with this same joy that made the two-year- old embrace the grass. Consider “Hark, hark, the lark”, or “Come unto these yellow sands”; you will find in these poems the civilized expression of the same emotion that in our two-year-old could only find utterance in inarticulate cries.
Or, again, consider the difference between love and mere sex attraction. Love is an experience in which our whole being is renewed and refreshed as is that of plants by rain after drought. In sex intercourse without love there is nothing of this. When the momentary pleasure is ended, there is fatigue, disgust, and a sense that life is hollow. Love is part of the life of Earth; sex without love is not. The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth. It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the desert. A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.“
— Bertrand Russell
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Language – Alan Watts
“Our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
– Alan Watts