Notes and articles tagged with “perception”
Filed under Notes on 7. September 2007 » [7]
We could say that every individual human being lives in a world of their own, so to speak. Some people live in a world where a tree is just unprocessed timber, others where a tree is a tree, and yet others where a tree is just some mysterious thing that grows out of the ground and comes alive in the wind. Some people live in a battlefield, others in a field of flowers; some live in rain and thunder, others in the sun.
Most people you will meet are to some degree lost in their own version of social conditioning and form identity; they see the world from the perspective of an ego. Some of these world views are nicer than others, but all have in common that they are built on a foundation of fear.
One reason why human communication is such a challenge, especially on the spiritual path, is that you tend to get drawn into other people’s worlds when interacting with them. If you live with someone who is intensely fearful, for example, someone who inhabits the ego’s world of war and terror, that fear will resonate with whatever remains of that fear in you. It may be years since you left that world, but it hasn’t quite left you yet. And so whenever you interact with someone who is basically quivering in the trenches, while you are in relative peace and quiet, it pulls you in and amplifies your own fear.
If you ever have the feeling that you are somehow scattered, as opposed to centered, if you know what I mean, this may be because you are in other people’s worlds. Playing a character in other people’s worlds. Either because they pull you in, or because you have an investment of some kind, like wanting to control or influence them. If you want to impress somebody for example, want someone to think highly of you, you’ve already entered into his or her world. If you have an attachment to the opinion of five different people, you’ve scattered yourself across six different worlds; yours and theirs.
Sounds strange? Probably does, but this is difficult to put into words. I recall Byron Katie talking about this as being in other people’s business; when you want to control what somebody thinks, which is to say when you want to impress someone, you are in their business. Your thoughts are your business, and other people’s thoughts are their business.
In this sense, you only need to be concerned with your own world. Inhabit a world of peace, and simply refuse to join others on the battlefield. This seems selfish at first glance, but in reality there is no greater service you can provide to another human being than to stay firmly put in your own world. Joining others in suffering may seem charitable and compassionate, but offering them the opportunity to join you in heaven is by far preferable to joining them in hell.
And although it helps to think of it as your own personal world of peace, for the sake of it being an effective pointer, there is nothing at all personal about it. We could say that there are two worlds, let’s call them heaven and hell, and most people are still experiencing some version of the latter. It is your purpose to reside in heaven, simple as that. Inhabiting a world of peace and beauty is the purpose of life, or at least that’s one way of putting it. And to this end, using the pointer of multiple personal worlds can be helpful, especially when you are interacting with other people to avoid being pulled out of your own world, so to speak.
Ultimately though, everyone is in heaven already. Only some are under the illusion that it is hell, and behave accordingly.
Filed under Notes on 16. August 2007 »
Earlier this week I got an email from a reader regarding the post External circumstances and inner peace, asking for clarification on some of the concepts having to do with seeing the world of form as only the surface level of being. And believe me, I can see how these ideas can get confusing. They sound far-fetched, and I don’t really have a logical understanding of them as such, but they work very well for me as pointers none the less.
Ultimately they are only words, of course, and no words or concepts can ever really capture the truth; they can only point beyond themselves. The concepts can be contradictory, illogical, weird, and still fulfill the function of pointing you towards that which cannot be put into words directly.
And so the key to being able to use them is to not get hung up on trying to make sense of the concepts on the level of thinking and reason, but rather allowing them to sink in and do their work. In many cases, something you read today that makes no sense to you whatsoever may later hit you in a sudden flash of insight. Truth is beyond reason, and yet blindingly simple and obvious when you see it.
Following is the question and then the answer I gave in the email:
"Whatever problems you have in your external situation at the moment, they are neither better nor worse than any other problems that have or can ever come up in your life. On the surface level, this problem is worse and more complicated than that problem, but the differences are only relative to that level. If the surface level is 1% and the problems on that level scale from 1-10, even a level 10 problem will never exceed 1% of the totality."
In a previous article you mentioned something similar with the 95/5 formula. I am not clear what qualifies as the 1% of the surface level, and what the rest of the 99% is? It's difficult for me to accept that the life that i experience 100% of the time is only 1% of my being. Please go into more detail about what the 99% is and what the 1% is. Is everything we experience on a daily basis filed under the 1% of our being and we shouldn't really mind what happens? Or are there things that we experience (relaxation, love, friendship) which occur on the surface but are filed under the 99% of importance? I'm really confused.
It's important to remember that even the surface is part of the totality, so I am in no way dismissing the importance of that 5% (or 1%, 0.001%, 10%, whatever). It's just a matter of depth. When you look at a human being and are only aware of the surface, what you see is only a collection of labels. Whereas when you look at a human being while aware of the totality, you see/sense much more. It's almost like the difference of meeting someone online vs. face to face; the former is a bundle of abstracted labels and information, while the latter is (potentially) a much deeper and richer experience.
Now, the mind cannot possibly make sense of what it means to be aware of the totality. It's impossible to try and figure it out, and the numbers are just a method of pointing towards something that doesn't really make any logical sense. It's not at all about the numbers, or about words or explanations for that matter.
To look at some other perspectives on this:
If you're in a relatively quiet environment, close your eyes for a moment and listen. Observe that there is silence, and then there are sounds that arise and dissolve out of that stillness. The more you are aware of the silence, the more you sense its depth and how the sounds that appear in it are relatively fleeting and insignificant. In fact, consciously being aware of the silence that underlies everything is a great pointer towards sensing the depth beyond the surface level.
Yet another way of looking at it is to use the sea metaphor. The totality is the entire sea, unimaginable stillness, depth and vastness, while the world of form is the continuous play of forms on the surface of the sea, the waves. Sometimes the waves are huge and restless, sometimes it's almost completely still, but whatever happens on the surface doesn't affect the stillness in the depths.
The whole deal with the numbers and all these pointers and tricks is to trigger shifts in awareness. Although I think it's a bad idea and not worth the health risks involved, you could probably do this to some extent with mind-altering drugs also.
Regarding what you mention with relaxation, love and friendship, I would suggest that in a way these can provide glimpses of what is beyond the surface. Remember also that everything is part of the 100%, and so everything is 100% important. So let's say an orange is a 100% important, but we only see the skin of it and believe that to be 100% important, overlooking the fruit inside.
I'm not sure how to explain it any better, but remember that you don't necessarily need to understand any of it on a conceptual level. In fact, trying to work it out on that level may hinder you in gaining the deeper level of understanding, the flash of insight where it everything makes sense on a much deeper level than the thinking-mind can comprehend.
Filed under Notes on 11. August 2007 »
See if this sounds familiar: “My life is problematic right now, but if ______ then I would be okay.” Mostly the blank space is filled with something to do with externally derived security, such as financial independence, a happy marriage, a solid career, a nicer house, and so on and so on. And no matter how often people get over that bump in the road, the initial feeling of safety and relaxation is soon replaced by the need for just this one more thing. And however many problems we manage to solve or stomp into the ground, it’s a game of endless whack-a-mole.
In essence, we are looking for home in our external situation; looking for inner peace in outer circumstances. And the reason for this is that we believe that inner peace, that elusive feeling of being safe, of having arrived, etc., can be derived somehow from the world of form. Furthermore we think that not only can it be derived from external circumstances, but that it depends on the external circumstances of our lives. In the conditioned and unconscious state most people still find themselves in, all they see is the world of form and so they simply cannot fathom where else to look. It is a case of only perceiving the surface level of life, and looking for fulfillment there while completely missing the vastness of depth beyond. It’s like picking up a single piece from a 1.000.000 piece puzzle, expecting it to show you the entire picture. You look real hard at it for years and years, tilt it this way and that, bang your head against it in frustration, and then pass on to the next generation that “yes, the picture is there, but you have to look really hard to see it.”
We’ve been conditioned to think that the surface is all there is, that the world of form is life itself in completion, and a side effect of that is the essence of human suffering, the problem behind all our problems; namely, our identification with form. When we are identified with form, our appetite for more forms is bottomless. It is a philosophy that assumes we are incomplete, and yet doesn’t have any real idea about what completion is. A feeling of lack and incompleteness is at the core of the illusion of form identity, and so merely feeding the appetite for more is an exercise in futility. On that level, there will never be enough. We can never find permanent satisfaction on the level of form, mostly because the satisfaction of our needs on that level is illusory. Any externally derived sense of safety is an illusion; we think for a moment that there really is permanence to be found in the world, until something changes or the feeling wears off. It’s like thinking that a really big hamburger is all you need to never be hungry again. Naive, sure, but this is what our conditioning is like.
Whatever problems you have in your external situation at the moment, they are neither better nor worse than any other problems that have or can ever come up in your life. On the surface level, this problem is worse and more complicated than that problem, but the differences are only relative to that level. If the surface level is 1% and the problems on that level scale from 1-10, even a level 10 problem will never exceed 1% of the totality.
When you perceive the surface level of life in context with the totality, it becomes very clear that nothing on that level can ever fulfill you. And with that comes the recognition that nothing that can ever happen on that level is all that serious. There are challenges, and when they are seen for what they are, instead of being turned into problems by the form-identified mind, you can deal with them easily and without effort. Challenges arise continuously on the surface level of life, but these only become an issue when the surface level is seen as all there is.
So whatever your current external situation looks like at the moment, realize that it will keep changing, shifting, doing its thing, and that none of it has anything much to do with your sense of fulfillment or inner peace.
Paraphrasing J. Krishnamurti, freedom from the world is not minding what happens.
Filed under Notes on 2. August 2007 » [1]
A big part of the reason why we get lost in the world of form again and again, get caught up in the stream of thinking and occupy all our attention with the things and happenings of the world, is that we believe on some level that there is something in it of lasting value. If we didn’t think the world could save us, if we didn’t believe so deeply that there is permanent security to be found in the world of form, we would not give it so much of our attention.
For example; when there is something on the horizon in your life situation that you either want desperately to avoid or to acquire, in essence if there is a possibility of a future event with high stakes of some kind, a situation of gain or loss, the mind goes hyper with trying to do something about it. If there is something you want to avoid, the mind will either focus on it almost constantly, reasoning that remembering it gives you a certain level of control over the situation; or the mind will resort to boredom, which is little more than a tactic to cover up thoughts you want to avoid rising to the surface.
Behind the stream of compulsive thinking that goes on in most people’s minds, day in and day out, is a deep seated belief that the thinking is a way of staying in control. That if you were to stop, everything would collapse around you and all your problems would grow out of control. Also in this belief is that by maintaining the stream of thinking, you are somehow more likely to arrive, or make it. Because the conditioned mind-made self is based entirely on identification with form, which always comes down to thought forms, it thrives on thinking. On a day-to-day level, this is reflected in thought patterns that revolve around staying competitive. Thinking that you gain an advantage by thinking a lot, preparing everything in advance, trying to solve every possible future situation you are likely to encounter, etc. — this form identified entity, the ego, believes that your survival depends entirely on the world of form being arranged in a certain way. To this entity, the world of form is all there is. And in this way, a situation of potential gain and loss becomes a matter of life and death. This delusion is then reflected in everything you do as long as you are identified with the ego.
When you realize that who you are is not the mind-made sense of self, your sense of proportion changes dramatically. The world of form will start to seem relatively insignificant compared to the vastness of being, or whatever you wish to call it. The world of form becomes like a small piece of driftwood floating in the middle of the Atlantic ocean; beautiful and interesting, but relatively insignificant compared to the vastness of the open sea all around it.
With this realization, the mind goes quiet. Because when the world is seen in relation to the formless, nothing that happens in it can matter all that much. It is still honored and given some attention, but the fear that drove compulsive thinking and future-projection isn’t there anymore.
The challenge, then, is to maintain that perspective. And this is easier said than done, particularly when there are so many things competing for your attention. But with every realization, your level of awareness will rise and you will become more firmly rooted in that place where you see the world for what it is.
There are some useful pointers and practices that can be used to directly bring about this shift in perspective, and in particular I am fond of using what I’ve called the 95/5. Basically it is a sort of mantra that says the world of form is only ever 5% of your total awareness, and the 95% is formless, empty space. It’s not something that can be summed up with numbers, of course, but they can help to reset your sense of perspective.
As a reminder of this, the desktop wallpaper on my computer has a visual representation of the proportions, with a colored stripe taking up 5% of an otherwise black canvas. You can download it here if you want, in size 1440 by 900 pixels.
Filed under Notes on 8. July 2007 »
There is a saying I’ve quoted before that goes: “There are two ways of being unhappy; not getting what you want, and getting what you want.” And although we are conditioned to believe that if we only get what we want — just this one thing and then I’ll be fine — we’ll be happy, finally and fully contented, it never seems to work out that way. It’s easy to make it seem that it does, and we do a great job of maintaining the illusion through movies, television, magazines and other forms of media, worshipping that proverbial golden calf of our age; the image of making it.
The belief in how the world of form can provide us with lasting security and salvation is very deeply rooted, which is why we cling to it no matter how many opportunities we are given to see beyond the illusion of it. It’s the reasoning that goes, “I know money and fame won’t make me happy, but I’d rather be rich, famous and unhappy than just plain unhappy.” Meaning that on one level you see the truth, but still deeper down there is the belief that you would feel more secure if you only had a little bit more.
What is commonly thought to be the formula for happiness, written in stone in the cult of society, is that getting what you want increases your overall level of contentment. Which would mean that those who get everything they want are continuously happy and fulfilled. Fairly simple, and very familiar, but if we let go of the fantasy for a moment and actually question it, we see that it is also utterly false.
The thing is, always getting what you want on the external level is potentially a path to more misery and suffering than anyone would suspect. We think that not having your wishes fulfilled brings suffering, and that is certainly how it seems on the surface, but when we look deeper we see that the suffering brought on by material excess is of a much deeper variety. Always having your wishes fulfilled leads you to rely on the world of form for your fulfillment. We all have as part of our conditioning the seeds of worldly desire, and having this desire fulfilled and catered to only works to increase the need for more. The nature of desire is that it cannot be fulfilled, and so no matter how much you gain, the void will only seem to get bigger and bigger.
The reason for why the suffering of excess is so much deeper than that of lack is that the more you have on the external level, the more it pulls you in. When you have very little, more of your attention is retained within, the only place fulfillment can be found, whereas when you have a lot, you are much more likely to be distracted and occupied exclusively with the external world. When we only pay attention to the surface, the glittering 1% that makes up the world of form, we lose touch with the other 99% of life which is to be found in that which is beyond form. It is a kind of spiritual starvation, and those who are sensitive to it will often feel exhausted and lifeless after a while of being lost on the surface.
Ultimately it is not a matter of the particular forms around us or whether or not we get what we want, but rather the level of our attachment to it. Due to the nature of our conditioning, those who have all their worldly wishes fulfilled are at a disadvantage when it comes to this, but then again the deep form of suffering they encounter brings with it a tremendous potential for awakening. And it is usually at the extremes of lack and excess that the suffering is the most intense. Being somewhere in the middle like most of us are, the pressure of either material lack or excess never really gets intense enough in either direction to make us suffer properly. There are nibbles of promise here and there, enough to keep us clinging to the illusion but not enough so that it starts eating its own tail.
For those that are in the middle, being pushed around by the world but not enough in either direction to make a lasting impression, vigilance is needed to maintain perspective. As an experiment, observe what it feels like when you get what you want, and when you don’t get what you want. What may surprise you is that the feeling can often be inverse to what you would expect; gaining something on the level of form can sometimes feel empty, tense and even vaguely stressful, while being let down by the world can feel peaceful and good. This is usually covered up with conditioned responses and mental commentary, and breaking through it simply by paying attention could significantly alter your relationship to the world, realizing that your feeling of contentment has nothing at all to do with gain or loss on the level of form.
Filed under Notes on 31. May 2007 »
Our primordial identification with form, and as such a very common obstacle in spiritual practice, is identification with the body. The idea that I am this body and you are that body, both completely separate from everything else. Then on top of that come the labels we attach to the body, a physical description, judgment in comparison with other bodies, and of course our name, which, lumped together along with an endlessly complicated string of more concepts and labels, makes up who we think of as ourselves.
Breaking this identification with the body is difficult — simple in and of itself, but difficult because of the momentum of the idea that “this body is who I am.” It is the very foundation of our conditioning, deep seated and stubborn, and most people would probably find it absurd to even question it. “Of course this is who you are, just look in a mirror,” they might say.
The illusion starts to fade away when your level of awareness rises, and the more you go into stillness the deeper the recognition that who you are is beyond the body. So it’s not really necessary to address the issue on this level, as simply becoming still quietly resolves all doubts and form-based conflict, but using inquiry and pointers can be helpful and speed up the process.
The other day I came across a quote by Nisargadatta Maharaj, from the book I Am That, which is a useful pointer towards realizing who you are beyond the body. He was talking about how you are not anything that takes form, whether it be a thought, an experience, the body, etc., and that who you are is the witness to all of these. Everything happens and you are simply there to witness it, “look[ing] at everything as from a distance.”
Looking at everything from a distance is a way of detaching from the body and the world of form. Stepping back, observing how everything happens, how the body moves, how thoughts come and go. The idea of distance brings a bit of space between you and the world, between you and form, and points to a way of experiencing the world of form without being bound to it. Wearing the world like a loose garment, as St. Francis put it.
The idea of looking at everything from a distance is a sort of mantra: an idea that you return to over and over again, every time causing a tiny little shift in perception. Eventually, all this nudging at the foundations of the conditioning will cause it to crumble. And when you create space between you and the world of form, between you and the body for example, you will find yourself increasingly able to simply relax into it, abiding in peace within and looking out at the world from a distance.
Filed under Notes on 22. May 2007 »
I haven’t had much experience with using mantras, but lately I’ve been using a particular pointer I like as a mantra almost inadvertently. Not in the manner of repeating it over and over again to replace mental noise, but it is something I find helpful to repeat frequently over the course of a day, once every 15 minutes or so. It simply says: “I want nothing for myself.”
Contemplating this, the possibility of wanting nothing for myself, is a way of breaking the old conditioned habit of always being in the mode of asking “what’s in it for me?” I suspect that my conditioning is unusually heavy on this particular dysfunction, and so experiencing the shift into wanting to be of service, of wanting to give rather than wanting to take, or have, brings an incredible sense of relief.
The reason why it gives me such relief is that the habitual mode of perceiving, of always having an underlying motivation of wanting something for myself, is a major part of the egoic function. It is the backbone of the survival mechanism, always churning away trying to spot opportunities to extract some kind of gain from the world of form. Wanting something for ‘myself’ implies wanting something for my personal self, which is the ego. And because this way of thinking is based on the assumption that I am a separate entity in a world of competing entities, there is a built-in sense of tension that goes with it.
Now, it is important to know that the pointer, or mantra, is not saying that you should give away all your belongings and never acquire anything ever again. It’s fine to prefer red apples to green ones, or whatever, and it’s also fine to want this sweater or that book, etc. The function of it is to break the habitual pattern of thinking by reducing your self-importance so to speak. If I recall correctly, Jesus is to have said “deny thyself.” And what I take it to mean is basically the same as “want nothing for yourself,” namely to starve the ego of importance, not give it any reality and simply allow it to fade away.
When I contemplate wanting nothing for myself, I start to see the world in a different light. Everything becomes clear, because things and situations are no longer being seen through the layers of egoic bias and distortion, and everything seems to flow more smoothly. All your problems and dilemmas simply dissolve when you’re not thinking about what you want for yourself, and you may even begin to lose interest in personal gain — the pleasure of something is then seen as paling in comparison to the joy of nothing.
Give it a try and, whenever you remember, repeat the mantra “I want nothing for myself.” Contemplate it, meditate on it, allow it to work its way into your daily awareness and see what happens.
Filed under Articles on 29. April 2007 »
In the world of form there is pleasure and there is pain. Everything in the world is subject to polarities, and so we could say that all things already contain their opposite; you cannot have good without bad, and every high has a corresponding low. In the very nature of gaining something lies the possibility of losing it, and we know this intuitively. And so if we look closer, we see that pleasure and pain are really one and the same: they are the two polarities of suffering
Filed under Notes on 21. April 2007 »
The essence of the delusion that we talk about here, the source of all suffering and the subject of all spiritual teachings, is the mind’s identification with form. The conditioned belief that who you are is a human body plus a bundle of labels that together make up the mind-made sense of self. And much of what we are doing when going through some form of spiritual practice is to realize this as illusion, to break free of it and gain perspective on the duality that is ‘me and myself’.
We could say that it all goes towards realizing that the mind-made sense of self is an illusion, so that we can find underneath it the one true self that had been obscured. This identification with the one true self is enlightenment, the state of peace, joy, stillness, and unconditional love that so many people are looking for. And so the purpose of spiritual teaching is to point towards that state, and to provide words and practices that are designed to trigger that realization, the shift in identification from form to the formless.
I remember hearing stories of St. Francis, and how he used to refer to his body as ‘it’. Saying it is hungry, and it is tired, instead of I’m this, and I’m that, which is the custom in our culture. And simply making this change in the way you refer to your body, replacing ‘I’m’ with ‘it’, can be a subtle way of breaking the conditioning and thus dissolving the identification with form.
A similar practice, and what the title of this note refers to, is thinking of yourself as an invisible observer instead of a person in a body. You then see yourself as an invisible entity, a ghost if you will, hovering above this particular human body all day long — looking through its eyes but simultaneously being aware that who you are is beyond the body, being in the world but not of it. The body is of the world, and so are all the thoughts, concepts, and labels that you’ve associated with it, but who you are is not of the world. And this little exercise is a pointer to that identity shift.
Another aspect of this, particularly useful if there are certain situations you are afraid of or want to avoid (think social rejection, financial ruin, etc.), is to look at the situation from the perspective of an invisible observer. You can ask yourself, “what would this situation look like if I were only there as an invisible observer?,” effectively removing your self from the mental image of the situation. If this pointer works for you, it allows you to see what the world looks like unburdened by all the conceptual baggage of the conditioned sense of self. Or at least give you a hint of what life can be like without this self, and what the world looks like without the distorting element of ego.
What would you do, and where would you go, if you could be there as an invisible observer? As an example we can take all the classic ‘self-confidence’ related issues and situations, such as asking someone out on a date, changing jobs, starting a business — whatever it is, imagine what the situation might look like if you could be there as an invisible observer. Without the fear of failure and rejection, situations that are usually seen as heavily problematic and daunting can even take on an air of playfulness. And you then see how all of life can be experienced in this playful manner, free of the heaviness that comes with being identified with, and trapped in, the mind-made sense of self.
The exercise of imagining yourself to be an invisible observer is only an intermediary stage, of course, but as you apply these kinds of pointers more and more, the shift in identity from form to the formless, from something to nothing, noise to stillness, will settle in as your natural state of being. What may begin as a silly little mental image of yourself as a ghost-like entity that hovers above and beyond the physical body, can point you towards that state of feeling deeply that you are not anything on the level of form. Which is the state of freedom, and a state of having an intuitive sense of being in the world but not of the world.
Filed under Notes on 8. March 2007 » [2]
Sometimes I read a few pages in A Course in Miracles with my morning coffee, and today I came upon an interesting truth about the nature of future projection. Nothing new, perhaps, but then there is nothing ever really new in this anyway. What it talked about was how our compulsion to try and control everything, especially the future, is really a defense mechanism. And it did seem fairly obvious in hindsight: when we attempt to control the future we are always trying to secure our safety and comfort, or in other words we are trying to figure out ways of defending ourselves against a future threat. Here is what it said:
“Who would defend himself unless he thought he were attacked, that the attack were real, and that his own defense could save himself? And herein lies the folly of defense; it gives illusions full reality, and then attempts to handle them as real. It adds illusions to illusions, thus making correction doubly difficult. And it is this you do when you attempt to plan the future, activate the past, or organize the present as you wish.”
Being afraid of what might happen in the future, and thinking that you need to make plans and figure everything out to ensure your safety, you are acting as if you were being threatened, as if you were under attack. With whatever action you take to defend yourself, you strengthen the illusion that you are being threatened and that there is something to defend. This could be as little as needing to be right in an argument, defending your position — and it also comes in when we attempt to inflate our sense of self in some way. Like trying to look good in the eyes of others, whether by showing off in a nice car or casually dropping names at a dinner party. These attempts at ego inflation are, under the surface, nothing more than desperate acts of defense against an illusory threat.
Of course, the belief that there is something to defend stems first and foremost from identification with form. All forms are inherently subject to impermanence — things change, crumble, disappear, move around — and ultimately all of it is beyond your control. Which is why the illusion that you can control it, and need to for your survival, is so frightening. A human being who is completely identified with form is like someone having a nightmare: resting in the safety of a warm and comfortable bed but shaking with terror, believing that he is in the middle of a battle field, dodging bullets and running for his life.
The reason why we are so desperate to control things is because we think we are in that battle field, and that we need to keep thinking and figuring things out to stay alive. And the threat is part of a story we tell ourselves, a story that has its roots in the illusion that we are something. When we see that we are not something, but rather nothing, in the sense that what we are is not a worldly object or a collection of thought forms, we can see that there is nothing to defend. And in seeing that, we can drop our defenses and relax.
Filed under Notes on 21. January 2007 » [1]
In addition to the longer articles published once or twice a week here on Everyday Wonderland, I’m going to start writing smaller posts that will be filed under a new section called ‘Notes.’ I plan on doing a few of these a week, mostly focusing on discussion about quotations and passages from books I'm particularly fond of, or just something I happen to come across online.
In this first note, I want to discuss a verse from the second chapter of Tao Te Ching that talks about the polarity of judgment; a fundamental aspect of the ego that is very easy to overlook.
“When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.”
The power of these words from Lao-tzu, as in so many other cases when dealing with spiritual texts, can easily be missed when they are not allowed past the analysis of rational thinking. He’s not telling us that we shouldn’t appreciate beauty, or that we should renounce all our preferences, but rather that it is important to see the polarity of good and bad only as relatively important. To see that while we may feel that roses are more beautiful than weeds, the true beauty of both goes beyond our judgment of good and bad.
The key is to honor our preferences, while appreciating that true beauty and true goodness, otherwise referred to as ‘the absolute’, are much deeper than our mental judgment of good/bad, beautiful/ugly. And the amazing thing is that, when we see that our judgment is only ever relatively true, everything becomes more beautiful to us as a result.
Filed under Articles on 18. January 2007 » [3]
Most people will be familiar with the ebb and flow of interest and motivation, and how frustrating it can be to swing from one thing to the other without ever really committing to anything. This can apply to casual interests and hobbies, consumer goods, career options, places, situations, and even friendships
Everyday Wonderland is a weblog on the subject of spiritual awakening, creativity, enthusiasm, inspiration, and generally everything having to do with the higher levels of human consciousness. The author is Helgi Páll Einarsson, 24 years old and currently living in Iceland. He likes books in the morning, making things, and taking long walks.