I’ve never heard of anybody who awakens in their comfort zone.
— Eckhart Tolle
“We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. “
― St. Clare of Assisi
Redefine your dualistic thinking. 7 ” Cs ” – of Delusion of Dualistic Dilemma
• It compares
• It competes
• It conflicts
• It conspires
• It condemns
• It cancels out any contrary evidence.
The above is negative emotionally and does not create a Can Do mentality or assist in redefining your projects … you must redefine and contemplate, plan -the opposite of contemplation is reaction are the above reactions -is it a good way of acting?
Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, note that animals are by definition Deep Listeners- When you enter an environment where there are birds, insects or animals, they are listening to you completely. You are received. Your presence may be the difference between life and death for the creatures of the environment. Listening is survival!
Ego
What resists change is ego
When I am in that darkness, I do not remember anything about anything human. —Angela of Foligno (1248–1309)
“Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” Kant
Prophets deconstruct the ego and the group, while priests are supposed to reconstruct them into divine union. Do they do this?
As God said in the inaugural vision to Jeremiah: “Your job is to take apart and demolish, and then start over building and planting anew”
(Jeremiah 1:10).
Truth-seeking is a hard business. You essentially have to understand, with deep conviction, things that you’ve been programmed to misunderstand.
— Naval Ravikant
“Things” like presence, awareness, reflection, deep thinking, connectedness, centeredness, purpose, pace, unbusyness, less stress, bliss, lightness, enough, simplicity, spiritual growth, oneness, awakening, mindfulness, intentionality, alignment, consciousness, balance, time affluence, developing strong relationships, and understanding our common humanity
Anam Soul Cara Friend
• “When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of inner landscape.”
- Anam Cara, p. 17
“Part of understanding the notion of Justice is to recognise the disproportions among which we live…it takes an awful lot of living with the powerless to really understand what it is like to be powerless, to have your voice, thoughts, ideas and concerns count for very little. We, who have been given much, whose voices can be heard, have a great duty and responsibility to make our voices heard with absolute integrity for those who are powerless.”
“We are looking for our own virtue, our own piety, our own goodness, and so live on and in our own poverty and weakness – today pleased and comforted with the seeming firmness and strength of our own pious tempers and fancying ourselves to be somewhat. Tomorrow, fallen into our own mire, we are dejected, but not humbled; we grieve, but it is only the grief of pride at the seeing our perfection not to be such as we had vainly imagined. And thus it will be, till the whole turn of our minds be so changed that we as fully see and know our inability to have any goodness of our own as to have a life of our own.”William Law
Rev . Lucy Winkett Sermon March 2020 -St James’s Piccadilly, London
Stay where you are. This means face yourself. You and I are asked to inhabit our own lives as they are, knowing that you are held and loved, forgiven and free-er than you can possibly imagine, even while your movement is confined.
As you are. Not as you wish you were, or as that person over there.
Stay where you are for the good of the whole.
This means spiritually as well as physically.
Because if we want to develop a spiritual practice that will better serve the world, it will be rooted in what might have to be quite a bracing acceptance of the unfinished creature that you are, the human being God has made and is re-making.
A real practical acceptance, not a flight into a fantasy version of yourself that you thought you should be by now.
I will be more able to love my neighbour as myself when I stop trying to flee into the empty distractions I surround myself with: they will be different for all of us but can include
over-busyness,
competitiveness,
anxious comparisons,
self-administered anaesthetics of all kinds;
Distractions thatlook like they will make me happy but in the end find me, like Ezekiel, sitting in the valley of the dry bones of my life, begging them to remember how to dance.
