a foun­da­tion of the spir­i­tual life is to not essen­tial­ize the spirit as an entity in itself. the spirit is not an entity, and it does not reside, in some mys­te­ri­ous way, within our bod­ies. nor can the spirit be found some­where else out­side of us. it is com­mon to think that we can ori­ent our­selves towards the spirit by look­ing inwards, but the spirit is not in me nor in you, the spirit is between you and me. buber likened the spirit to the air we breath, it is always within us and at the same time it is in the world in which it par­tic­i­pates. remove one or the other and life comes to an end. spirit is what emerges in the between of an i and thou, it is a cre­ation of the rela­tion­ship. god is not to be found in our tem­ples, we find our tem­ples in god. god is not in the litur­gies by which we offer our wor­ship to him, our worship-liturgies are in god. that is to say: the find­ing of the god we believe in, pre­cedes the litur­gies we uti­lize in order to wor­ship him. only after we have cho­sen our god –be the Read the Rest…

when we med­i­tate, or dur­ing some prayers, we will some­times close our eyes. the assump­tion is that lim­it­ing our men­tal and phys­i­cal expo­sure to the stim­u­la­tion of objects and other con­tents in our sur­round­ings, will aid in the often dif­fi­cult task of con­cen­tra­tion and mind­ful­ness. the idea is to priv­i­lege the within by pre­vent­ing the out­side from encroach­ing. but what­ever we have within, is the same as what is out­side. if the out­side wasn’t within us, it wouldn’t be in the out­side in the first place. we use our inside world in order to cre­ate the out­side world, and then we carry it deep within us wher­ever we go and what­ever we do. the out­side world is a reflec­tion of our inner world, and there­fore it can­not be med­i­tated away, it must be given away. the free­dom of the within utterly depends on the social trans­for­ma­tion of the with­out. to be able to free our within we must rad­i­cally trans­form our with­out. one of the con­se­quences of the dual­is­tic error of mak­ing a dis­tinc­tion between the inner and the outer is man­i­fested in the way we often inter­pret the con­cept of mate­ri­al­ism. we con­trast to mate­ri­al­ism the con­cept of the Read the Rest…

Here’s an inter­est­ing 2010 inter­view with Ram Dass on the process of let­ting go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LxB-4_MGbc   “Your soul wit­nesses your feel­ings, your desires, your fear­less­ness. Stay  in the wit­ness, not iden­ti­fy­ing with the desires or atti­tudes or those things. You can sit by and watch the show. Watch the show of your incar­na­tion and just sit back from your ego and your other thoughts. I like to sit back with my guru who is like a soul-friend. And I would sug­gest you have a soul friend, one that is going to be lov­ing and pas­sion­ate and peace­ful and wise.” instead of desire the car, maybe the car will go and instead of the car maybe desire a guru or a good spir­i­tual friend, some­one to keep you on line towards God.”

Anger and Vengeance from the “JuBuSto” Per­spec­tive Ronald Pies MD   In my last post­ing, I dis­cussed my ongo­ing project, “The Three-Petalled Rose,” and its foun­da­tional premise that Judaism, Bud­dhism, and Sto­icism have many fea­tures, in com­mon. I coined the some­what clunky term, “JuBuSto” as a con­den­sa­tion of these three great tra­di­tions. In the last post­ing, I sug­gested that com­pas­sion is at the core of Judaism, Bud­dhism, and Sto­icism. I’d now like to sug­gest that the elim­i­na­tion of anger and vengeance is also a shared “JuBuSto” value. Bud­dhism under­stands anger (vya­pada) as the result of our nat­ural human ten­dency to “iden­tify” with exter­nal events and their asso­ci­ated emo­tions.  For exam­ple, some­body cuts you off in traf­fic, and you feel your heart pound­ing and your head throb­bing. If some­one were to ask you how you feel at that moment, you would prob­a­bly say, “I am angry!” But Bud­dhism teaches us that, by link­ing “I” and “angry” with a form of the verb “to be,” you are basi­cally say­ing that you and the anger are one.   The Bud­dhist teacher, B. Alan Wal­lace (in Tibetan Bud­dhism from the Ground Up) sug­gests that if you “attend” to the anger rather than iden­ti­fy­ing with it, Read the Rest…

In his upcom­ing book An Unknown World: Notes on the Mean­ing of the Earth, Jacob Needle­man dis­cusses “an entirely new kind of rela­tion­ship between con­scious­ness and nature, between con­scious­ness and the earth, between con­scious­ness and the human body here, now, in our lives. What Descartes is show­ing us is some­thing dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent from how he has been inter­preted: He is show­ing us that in the capac­ity of the mind to con­cen­trate its atten­tion toward itself in pure thought—in that capac­ity there is a cen­tral ele­ment of Man that is not merely sep­a­rate from nature, but beyond nature! Beyond earth! What Descartes is offer­ing is not more or less than the idea of the holy spirit expressed not in reli­gious lan­guage, but in the lan­guage of the inde­pen­dent human mind, the aspect of man that is, in incep­tion, in its embry­onic form, beyond the cre­ated world of nature, beyond the earth.” Read more at  http://jacobneedleman.com/blog/

Amidst the daz­zling exha­la­tion of explod­ing super­novae and the pas­sion­ate in-breath of black holes, galax­ies whirl wildly while God, vastly smil­ing, spins on one cen­tripetal toe at the cen­ter of all, shout­ing, “WTF is going on?!” I pro­claim the igno­rance of God. This procla­ma­tion of God’s igno­rance is an act of faith. I am  com­forted by the propo­si­tion that the uni­verse is out of con­trol. God sim­ply watches the ran­dom glory of spon­ta­neous evo­lu­tion in per­pet­ual won­der, with no idea where it comes from or where it’s going. No God whom I could pos­si­bly wor­ship is in the con­trol busi­ness. I do not live in a robot uni­verse. As God’s great­est gift to me is the gift of free will, so God’s great­est gift to nature is chaos, the frac­tal poetry of chance, the ran­dom beauty of evo­lu­tion­ary self-design. The notion that Bib­li­cal prophets pre­dicted the future is a com­mon mis­un­der­stand­ing. The Hebrew word naviʾ, a loan word from the Akka­dian nabū, orig­i­nally meant to call, to sum­mon, not to pre­dict. The Hebrew prophet saw where present trends might take their peo­ple, and called them to ethical/spiritual trans­for­ma­tion now. The prophet’s call was not a time-line, but a cry for the turn­ing Read the Rest…

In the Old Tes­ta­ment story, when Isaac was called by God, he answered, “Hineni.” Trans­lated from the Hebrew, hineni means, “Here I am, for you called me.” In the Bible, the word hineni is used when God per­son­ally calls on some­one to do some­thing dif­fi­cult and impor­tant. “Here I am,” Abra­ham responds to God’s call; “Here I am,” replies Moses. It’s such a sim­ple state­ment and yet, it’s one of the most pow­er­ful things a human being can say. Here I am: ready, will­ing and able. Ready, Will­ing and Able This is how angels show up in our lives: ready, will­ing and able to help. Here I am, they tell us, through signs and syn­chronic­ity. Here I am, for you called me. When they show up, we feel blessed, reassured—and seen; and that’s some­thing every­one needs. The expe­ri­ence of God’s pres­ence is brac­ing and affirm­ing. It lets us know: you mat­ter to me. That’s why the angels are will­ing to send sign after sign until we get the mes­sage. We are that impor­tant to God. Our pres­ence to our­selves can be just as pow­er­ful. Though in the past, we’ve made promises to our­selves — to make health­ier choices for our body; to show Read the Rest…

Read­ing, I think, is a fun­da­men­tally spir­i­tual expe­ri­ence. The phe­nom­e­nol­o­gist Georges Poulet once remarked that, when we read, another person’s “I” enters into our own souls. Think about it: when we read the word “I” on a printed page, that silent mono­syl­la­ble res­onates within our own being. That is, this is the only way (out­side of purely gram­mat­i­cal and lin­guis­tic con­sid­er­a­tions) the word “I” sounds within our souls while not simul­ta­ne­ously mean­ing our­selves. This is a kind of inti­macy we habit­u­ally over­look, but one which can carry with it pro­found impli­ca­tions. In a let­ter to the Domini­can priest Jean-Marie Per­rin, the 20th cen­tury French philoso­pher Simone Weil describes a way in which one exam­ple of the reli­gious writ­ing of early mod­ern Eng­land ini­ti­ated for her a kind of reli­gious expe­ri­ence: There was a young Eng­lish Catholic…from whom I gained my first idea of the super­nat­ural power of the sacra­ments because of the truly angelic radi­ance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to com­mu­nion. Chance—for I always pre­fer say­ing chance rather than Providence—made of him a mes­sen­ger to me. For he told me of the exis­tence of those Eng­lish poets of the sev­en­teenth cen­tury who are named meta­phys­i­cal. Read the Rest…

2/14/03 THE HEART OF PHILOSOPHY Pref­ace to the J.P. Tarcher Edi­tion   It is some­thing that appears in the eyes, in the face, in the whole tonus of the body. It is unmis­tak­able: an awak­en­ing idea has been received; a ques­tion of the heart has been opened.  And when this hap­pens in even one stu­dent, I remem­ber the mean­ing of   my work as a teacher of phi­los­o­phy. Great ideas about the pur­pose of human life, about good and evil, about truth, the mind  and the cos­mos, have the power to bring us to an inner stop, to a space within our­selves in which our obses­sive habit of “answer­ing” falls away. In that empty space an entirely new expe­ri­ence of one­self appears. Some­thing, some­one has for a moment awak­ened in us and is look­ing out through our eyes and speak­ing with our voice, while our poor tense body begins to soften into a relaxed dig­nity. And at the same time, a new kind of rela­tion­ship between peo­ple becomes pos­si­ble. We begin to think together, to explore our expe­ri­ence together, to step back from our cul­tur­ally con­di­tioned opin­ions which we have until now clung to as though they defined us. These opin­ions, Read the Rest…

“What makes the bed of a Torah scholar? Noth­ing is found under it except san­dals in the sum­mer and shoes in the rainy season…By con­trast, the bed of an unlearned per­son looks like a store­room packed with odds and ends.” –Bava Batra 57b Many of us deal with clut­ter in our homes—from yard-sale knick-knacks to unpacked boxes to Aunt Fay’s old, unused china in the attic. Some believe that clut­ter is the sign of a dis­or­ga­nized life; oth­ers cel­e­brate clut­ter as part of what Rabbi Irwin Kula has called (in a dif­fer­ent con­text) “the sacred messi­ness of life.” My wife and I are con­stantly strug­gling to reduce clut­ter in our house—though I con­fess, she is more ardent in this pur­suit than I. My study, for exam­ple, is clut­tered with pens, hi-liters, over­flow­ing book­shelves, manila fold­ers, and a thou­sand CDs I rarely play any­more. As for what’s beneath our bed: that, at least, is rel­a­tively free of clut­ter, except for a few shoe boxes. The quo­ta­tion above appears in a sec­tion of the Tal­mud called Bava Batra, which means “The Last Gate”. This trac­tate (book) deals pri­mar­ily with our rights and respon­si­bil­i­ties as prop­erty own­ers. How­ever, as in most of the Tal­mud, the Read the Rest…