No longer protected by the anthropocentric gods and goddesses, reason gone flat in its happy capacity to explain away the Mystery, not yet delivered into the hands of the superconscious--we start out blankly into that dark and gloomy night, which will very shortly swallow us up as surely as it once spat us forth.
The consolations are gone; the skull will grin at the banquet; it can no longer tranquilize itself with the trivial. From the depths, it cries out to gods no longer there, searches for meaning not yet disclosed, still to be incarnated. Its agony is worth a trillion happy magics and a million believing myths, and yet its only consolation is its unrelenting pain--a pain, a dread, an emptiness that feels beyond the comforts and distractions of the body, the persona, the ego, looks bravely into the face of the Void, and can no longer explain away either the Mystery or the Terror. It is a soul that is too much awake. It is a soul on the brink of the transpersonal.
One day, God — in all His infinite omniscience, infinite omnipotence, and infinite omnipresence — becomes infinitely bored. So, understandably, He decides that He wants to play a game. Now, if you have ever tried to play a game of chess against yourself, you know that it's not very much fun at all, you really need someone else to play against. So, God has an idea. He manifests the entire Kosmos, breaking himself up into an infinite number of pieces, casting Himself out into all creation. Spirit crystallizes into Soul, which crystallizes into Mind, which further crystallizes into Life and Matter, until finally, in a magnificent Big Bang, God completely forgets who He is. It's the most impossibly perfect game of all—a game of Kosmic hide-and-seek, and the only way to win is to evolve back through matter, life, mind, soul, and Spirit, until finally we remember who we always-already are. This is the story of involution and evolution, the story of your very existence, the story of each and every moment.
And every I will sing of the Self, and every We will resonate with worship of the Divine, and every It will radiate the light of a Spirit happy to be seen, with dialogue the abode of the Gods and perception the home of Grace, and gone the lonely loveless self, the god of its own perception, and gone the Godless destiny of time and separation.
The blessed, blessed Descent of the World Soul: in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we all will be changed.
Perhaps it will happen after all.
And perhaps it will not.
…As always we have to make a future that is given to us. And is my strongest conviction that the Descent of the all-pervading World Soul is facilitated, or hindered, precisely to the degree that we unpack this intuition adequately.
http://www.kenwilber.com/writings/read_pdf/100
Reflektioner från integrala tänkare
Moderator: Moderatorgruppen
A Wider Rotation
by Austin R. Pick
www.fudomouth.net
Of all places, lying sprawled on the driveway and smoking a mint cigarette, the summer night air holding me to the earth, asphalt warm against my back, I suddenly became aware of the almost imperceptible rotation of the planet. As I drew my hand from my mouth, thin liquidy trail of smoke drifting along the arc of my vision, the stars ceased to move above me in the slow-motion shuffle of a televised time-lapse, and I began to feel instead the reality of our measured, continuous roll thru the enveloping void of space. The stars were no longer “up,” but merely out there, and I began to feel also the bulk of the earth beneath me, its mass and its inexorable turning stretching me along the curve of its surface, flush with life. Nakedly plastered there on the front edge of our forward motion, as all points can be felt to be, I sensed that the stars were neither satellite nor static, but suspended in the slow dance of a wider spiral, turning too. Everything revolving, not as an axle spinning in the mud, no, but as a wheel turning, a fetus stirring in the womb, stretching and slowly uncurling, awakening in its own starbelly of cosmos. Everything evolving, ever changing, the universe born in a great burst and expanding outward, cooling and coalescing, flowering in an increasingly subtle diversity of forms, a rush of life. And in the embrace of this vision all the horrors of civilization, the heaps of bodies like broken promises, the glut of consumerism like adolescent infatuation, for a moment all suffering seemed to become almost comprehensible –trial and tribulation, growing pains– not beautiful, exactly, but equally impermanent. Scanning the stars and thus looking into the past, it occurred to me that when the stars gaze upon us they look into the future, and then all distance swallowed itself, all distinction slipped like a dropped veil and for a moment I became the uncurling body-mind of the Kosmos, awakening to myself, to the universe awakening thru me, becoming conscious thru all of us in every wriggling, seemingly insignificant moment, thru the imperceptible stirring of every heart, every cell, every winking neuron, unfurling and opening outward along all levels and all lines in the slow stutter of self-realization, leaving nothing unturned.
My cigarette’s spire of ash collapses. The world returns, shiftless again beneath my feet in all its multifarious complexity, its bending shadows and quixotic beauty. That moment with the stars, despite its too easily simplified implications, seems not like a hallucination, but rather a direct experience of the obvious interconnectedness of all things, a tiny taste of Big Mind. And while I can never completely forget such a vision, even among the turbulent bumblings of the everyday, I do not believe that a new age is imminent, that history will end in a radiant cataclysm, or even that utopia is possible. But we are going somewhere, it seems, not simply around and around. And I do see that more integrated, holistic and reasonably sane lifeways are not only necessary, but actually attainable. If an individual can realize liberation, as all wisdom traditions insist, can’t human societies also be freed from the caustic abrasions of ignorance? Perhaps. The manifest world is a dualistic dance, and as our times incline toward the reduced view of scientific materialism, it seems to me that our role as beings interested in the quality of consciousness may be to restore the balance, and, with luck, to up the ante a little. We are wise to welcome any insights that expand our perception and challenge us to be more and more open. But although philosophies and theories can certainly help us to raise our expectations, when we become too preoccupied with puzzling over the big picture we can forget to turn inward, where our potentials are actualized and where, if the wisdom traditions have it right, our answers actually lie, curled in the beginnings of a bloom.
The planet hums in a mad profusion, rhythmed cycles of collapse and crystallization, death and birth, opposites ever articulating each other. Our minds hum too with the fluctuating constructs of tasks and trajectories, attachments and anxieties, a confusion of consciousness seeking sense. Amidst all this, sitting on the floor, I set aside some time to turn inward, not searching for salvation but stillness, a little space for starbelly. I turn inward, cultivating an openness of equanimity where I can observe these processes within me and gradually learn to accept them as they are, ever changing in flux and flow. Of course, my mind wanders again and again, running in myriad rivulets thru the canyons and tangled thickets of conditioned perception, the fortified habitations of fear and desire. In our world there are wildfires to be found everywhere, raging destructively, but meditation is a control burn, slowly scorching all untended lots and malignant plantation manors back down to basic being, burning off all brambles and clutching bracken. This process is sometimes painful, but in the glow of observation the dams and dwellings of habit begin to collapse, almost imperceptibly. And as the distinctions dissolve brick by brick, cell by cell, hidden well-springs emerge, creating new spaciousness for an inner ecology no longer so constricted by a narrow sense of self. Simply observing, allowing, this breath comes and goes, this heart beats in measured pulse, and I, while not exactly any of this, am all of this, somehow less and more. I am an aggregate, a rooted trunk overgrown with moss and lichen, ferns and fungus, my spine a column of ants, an attentive axis. My mind wanders still, mumbling a little thru everyday turbulence, but I’m finding that I’m no longer so stuck in the same old spin. Meditation is the cultivated awareness of a wider rotation, and I return to this center again and again, turning with the wheel. Of all places, lying silently on the rooftop and smoking a mint cigarette, with the clouds above me a palimpsest of mottled gray, I can hear the almost inaudible sound of the rain just before it begins to fall, a whisper suggesting that the stars themselves are falling, closing all distance.
by Austin R. Pick
www.fudomouth.net
Of all places, lying sprawled on the driveway and smoking a mint cigarette, the summer night air holding me to the earth, asphalt warm against my back, I suddenly became aware of the almost imperceptible rotation of the planet. As I drew my hand from my mouth, thin liquidy trail of smoke drifting along the arc of my vision, the stars ceased to move above me in the slow-motion shuffle of a televised time-lapse, and I began to feel instead the reality of our measured, continuous roll thru the enveloping void of space. The stars were no longer “up,” but merely out there, and I began to feel also the bulk of the earth beneath me, its mass and its inexorable turning stretching me along the curve of its surface, flush with life. Nakedly plastered there on the front edge of our forward motion, as all points can be felt to be, I sensed that the stars were neither satellite nor static, but suspended in the slow dance of a wider spiral, turning too. Everything revolving, not as an axle spinning in the mud, no, but as a wheel turning, a fetus stirring in the womb, stretching and slowly uncurling, awakening in its own starbelly of cosmos. Everything evolving, ever changing, the universe born in a great burst and expanding outward, cooling and coalescing, flowering in an increasingly subtle diversity of forms, a rush of life. And in the embrace of this vision all the horrors of civilization, the heaps of bodies like broken promises, the glut of consumerism like adolescent infatuation, for a moment all suffering seemed to become almost comprehensible –trial and tribulation, growing pains– not beautiful, exactly, but equally impermanent. Scanning the stars and thus looking into the past, it occurred to me that when the stars gaze upon us they look into the future, and then all distance swallowed itself, all distinction slipped like a dropped veil and for a moment I became the uncurling body-mind of the Kosmos, awakening to myself, to the universe awakening thru me, becoming conscious thru all of us in every wriggling, seemingly insignificant moment, thru the imperceptible stirring of every heart, every cell, every winking neuron, unfurling and opening outward along all levels and all lines in the slow stutter of self-realization, leaving nothing unturned.
My cigarette’s spire of ash collapses. The world returns, shiftless again beneath my feet in all its multifarious complexity, its bending shadows and quixotic beauty. That moment with the stars, despite its too easily simplified implications, seems not like a hallucination, but rather a direct experience of the obvious interconnectedness of all things, a tiny taste of Big Mind. And while I can never completely forget such a vision, even among the turbulent bumblings of the everyday, I do not believe that a new age is imminent, that history will end in a radiant cataclysm, or even that utopia is possible. But we are going somewhere, it seems, not simply around and around. And I do see that more integrated, holistic and reasonably sane lifeways are not only necessary, but actually attainable. If an individual can realize liberation, as all wisdom traditions insist, can’t human societies also be freed from the caustic abrasions of ignorance? Perhaps. The manifest world is a dualistic dance, and as our times incline toward the reduced view of scientific materialism, it seems to me that our role as beings interested in the quality of consciousness may be to restore the balance, and, with luck, to up the ante a little. We are wise to welcome any insights that expand our perception and challenge us to be more and more open. But although philosophies and theories can certainly help us to raise our expectations, when we become too preoccupied with puzzling over the big picture we can forget to turn inward, where our potentials are actualized and where, if the wisdom traditions have it right, our answers actually lie, curled in the beginnings of a bloom.
The planet hums in a mad profusion, rhythmed cycles of collapse and crystallization, death and birth, opposites ever articulating each other. Our minds hum too with the fluctuating constructs of tasks and trajectories, attachments and anxieties, a confusion of consciousness seeking sense. Amidst all this, sitting on the floor, I set aside some time to turn inward, not searching for salvation but stillness, a little space for starbelly. I turn inward, cultivating an openness of equanimity where I can observe these processes within me and gradually learn to accept them as they are, ever changing in flux and flow. Of course, my mind wanders again and again, running in myriad rivulets thru the canyons and tangled thickets of conditioned perception, the fortified habitations of fear and desire. In our world there are wildfires to be found everywhere, raging destructively, but meditation is a control burn, slowly scorching all untended lots and malignant plantation manors back down to basic being, burning off all brambles and clutching bracken. This process is sometimes painful, but in the glow of observation the dams and dwellings of habit begin to collapse, almost imperceptibly. And as the distinctions dissolve brick by brick, cell by cell, hidden well-springs emerge, creating new spaciousness for an inner ecology no longer so constricted by a narrow sense of self. Simply observing, allowing, this breath comes and goes, this heart beats in measured pulse, and I, while not exactly any of this, am all of this, somehow less and more. I am an aggregate, a rooted trunk overgrown with moss and lichen, ferns and fungus, my spine a column of ants, an attentive axis. My mind wanders still, mumbling a little thru everyday turbulence, but I’m finding that I’m no longer so stuck in the same old spin. Meditation is the cultivated awareness of a wider rotation, and I return to this center again and again, turning with the wheel. Of all places, lying silently on the rooftop and smoking a mint cigarette, with the clouds above me a palimpsest of mottled gray, I can hear the almost inaudible sound of the rain just before it begins to fall, a whisper suggesting that the stars themselves are falling, closing all distance.
On Integral Service
From Chapter 3 of the book, “Patterns in Clouds and Other Nonsense:
A Primer for Integral Life Practice in Psychotherapy”
By David M. Zeitler
I have often said that we all have a little bit of high-chair in us when we go out to eat. Yes, that’s right—the experience of dining out necessarily encapsulates, and therefore draws out, the experience of being fed by mommy as an infant or toddler. Dining out is an iteration of the dynamic first experienced as the giant boob of continued existence, the core value of Magenta. In both cases, you are looking up at an adult, to whom you dictate orders. Hopefully you will get better at this, but adults will also grunt while ordering, from time to time. Also, you are hungry, but feeling relatively safe. Therein lies the evolutionary dynamic that is replayed – for what is significant to the infant is fundamental to the developed adult. Until, that is, the fundamental is not being met. At that point, unless you are consciously engaged in a practice such as fasting, you will regress, and you will be sitting in your metaphorical high chair. And as a professional server, I witnessed this condition more often than I believed could be possible. Fully grown adults, unaware of their regression, blind to being carried away by the fundamental needs that have been ignored through coffee or stress or flat out unconsciousness.
(.. läst fortsättningen: http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/post/323?page=1 han beskriver, ur ett integralt perspektiv, vilka utmaningar an möts av som servitör)
(för begreppsförklaringar vad "Magenta" respektive andra begrepp innebär, titta här: http://holons-news.com/altitudes.html )
From Chapter 3 of the book, “Patterns in Clouds and Other Nonsense:
A Primer for Integral Life Practice in Psychotherapy”
By David M. Zeitler
I have often said that we all have a little bit of high-chair in us when we go out to eat. Yes, that’s right—the experience of dining out necessarily encapsulates, and therefore draws out, the experience of being fed by mommy as an infant or toddler. Dining out is an iteration of the dynamic first experienced as the giant boob of continued existence, the core value of Magenta. In both cases, you are looking up at an adult, to whom you dictate orders. Hopefully you will get better at this, but adults will also grunt while ordering, from time to time. Also, you are hungry, but feeling relatively safe. Therein lies the evolutionary dynamic that is replayed – for what is significant to the infant is fundamental to the developed adult. Until, that is, the fundamental is not being met. At that point, unless you are consciously engaged in a practice such as fasting, you will regress, and you will be sitting in your metaphorical high chair. And as a professional server, I witnessed this condition more often than I believed could be possible. Fully grown adults, unaware of their regression, blind to being carried away by the fundamental needs that have been ignored through coffee or stress or flat out unconsciousness.
(.. läst fortsättningen: http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/post/323?page=1 han beskriver, ur ett integralt perspektiv, vilka utmaningar an möts av som servitör)
(för begreppsförklaringar vad "Magenta" respektive andra begrepp innebär, titta här: http://holons-news.com/altitudes.html )
-
What Gives?
- Inlägg: 495
- Blev medlem: 05 aug 2006 19:30
Återgå till "Tankar och känslor"
Vilka är online
Användare som besöker denna kategori: 36 och 0 gäster