Posts tagged "spiritual-life":

Street names; Dorab; Astravakra Gita

The current issue in the village is street names. We never decided on any. There are house numbers, and that's all we need for most issues.

Diary

I didn't decide yet whether to travel anywhere, but should make up my mind soon, if I want to get away before the high season starts; I'm also not sure how much I may be needed at home during the summer months.

Reality

The news media, like the rest of us, tries to get the pulse of what people are doing, how they are thinking, what they are dreaming, while simultaneously reinforcing those patterns. It's not completely true that we are living in a dystopia, and that everything we experience is fake: just that our notions of reality become necessarily distorted by our mental formations, our tendency to see reality in terms of a separation between I, the experiencer, and the world experienced (and then between the different "objects" of our seeing). It is not as if, were we to suffer sensory deprivation for an extended period, we would wake up to find the world beautiful beyond all imagination. It isn't as if our rediscovered appreciation for beauty would lead to any new awakening. That's just aspirational. Our minds would immediately enforce the same old patterns.

Fungi

Our guest showed us a film about fungi, a subject that is increasingly at the intersection between spirituality and environmentalism, as science learns about the way that fungi live and people become increasingly interested in the curative or psycho-active properties of some them.

happiness

Flight to Tel Aviv: I have been reading Sapiens, and reached almost the of the book now. I have just finished reading his discussion of happiness; in which he writes particularly of the Buddhist understanding of the concept. It is close to the one I find in Yoga philosophy, though I would phrase it differently. I think that happiness is the state normally found when consciousness rests in the present moment and is not in a condition of resistance to it. In other words, the mind is at peace. In a moment that we are caught off-guard by beauty, such as when one opens the curtains to behold a golden sunrise, the mind is "enraptured", if only for a moment, perhaps. Something comes between our thoughts of the past, our memories, regrets; and our plans hopes and desires for the future, so that we know peace, for a fleeting moment.

Dealing with others

I knew two persons in the Sivananda Centers, perhaps more, who related to others quite differently to most people I have known.

Mindfulness and Dreaming

The Guardian has a tag for Mindfulness. It’s https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/mindfulness. There are already 161 results. I just read an article, No tricks. No mantras. I just want to learn how to do nothing: my quest to stay still.

Reality versus our vision of it

So I was thinking that spiritual teachers so often see a version of reality that corresponds with their natures. Describing reality in one manner inevitably leads to the disparagement of alternative ways of describing it, which seem to have a different or opposite vision. It is not so different from the flaw in our everyday vision, according to which we define objects by their function or usefulness to us. In many languages gold or silver have come to mean “money”, while our word “salary” indicates a measure of salt.

Dharma as a spiritual practice that can maybe save the planet

The world, the universe, reality, can be said to exist both in diversity and in unity. In diversity it exists as a conglomeration of separate semi-autonomous parts. These semi-autonomous parts are governed by laws of self-preservation. But ultimately they depend upon and are absorbed back into the underlying unity from which they have arisen. The universe of things is intimately connected – no thing exists independently. It is joined not only by what we think of as physical “laws” that govern the way in which the parts interact with each other (gravity, magnetism, etc.) but also at a deeper level, in that all of these “things” are manifestations of the same underlying field of existence/consciousness. Each “thing” is not a partial but, in its essence, a full expression of the underlying field.