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Monthly Archives: December 2009
A while ago, a reader sent me the following question: “Do you have any thoughts on discipline and freedom?” After exchanging a few emails to clarify more specifically what he was asking, he sent me the following:
I’m on a spiritual path and I pick up stuff from all sorts of places like the Sedona Method, I’m checking out A Course in Miracles and the Work of Byron Katie and non violent communication, and other sources, and sometimes with all the techniques and stuff my mind can get really jumbled and I wouldn’t know which to use or when, and it gets to be this mess in my mind, where all messes are made—haha. I think a reason I cling to the forms and techniques is I would achieve
Tagged with: discipline, freedom, willingness
Twenty-one years ago, I was feeling a bit sick much of the time, and so I decided to find a doctor who was interested in a more alternative approach to health, as I had just gotten interested in a more healthy lifestyle. Fortunately for me, C. Norman Shealy, founder of the American Holistic Medical Association, had his offices nearby, so I scheduled an appointment with him.
After a thorough examination that lasted over an hour, Norm and I sat down to chat. As we neared the end of our time together, he looked at me and said, “What do you believe in?” I had to ask him to repeat the question because, well, no… Read the rest →
Tagged with: A Course in Miracles, health
This article is one of five articles on forgiveness posted today by several different writers. At the end of this article is a list of links to the others. Forgiveness is an excellent topic for the holidays as, to me, Jesus exemplifies forgiveness more than any other spiritual teacher. And while we have no idea when he was actually born, thanks to history, we celebrate his birth in three more days.
I have a somewhat radical perspective with regard to forgiveness. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “I can forgive, but I’ll never forget.” Well, I’m sorry, but that isn’t even within a hundred miles of forgiveness. As long as there is any… Read the rest →
Tagged with: forgiveness, freedom, letting go
A sure sign that you are a member of The Half Awake (Half Asleep) Club is the almost inevitable pair of questions that the mind loves to ask:
What do I do with this… this… awakening thing that has happened to me?
and
What do I do now (in general)?
Ah, the poor mind. Even when it gets it, it still doesn’t get it. I’m going to call these questions the Half-Awake Dilemma.
There is nothing wrong with these questions, by the way. As long as one has any identification whatsoever with the world, the body, the ego, the persona, anything in the manifest world of form, the questions will arise. And given that so many of us… Read the rest →
Tagged with: half-awake, inquiry
But beauty, real beauty, ends where intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of a face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.
Photograph of Oscar Wilde taken in 1882 by Napoleon Sarony:
Tagged with: beauty, Oscar Wilde, thinking
By using the term “Half-Awake” I’ve probably given a somewhat false impression to many people. Saying half-awake almost implies that there are 3 states that a person can exist in:
Asleep
Half-Awake (or Half-Asleep)
Awake
However, as a few of you can attest, a schema such as this one would be grossly over-simplified and possibly inaccurate. Let me try to clarify a bit what I mean by half-awake and how it fits into what is experienced along the spiritual journey:
1. ASLEEP
The vast majority of humanity is sound asleep. When I say the vast majority, I mean to say 99.99% (and I may have left out a few 9′s). I… Read the rest →
Tagged with: half-awake, spiritual awakening
I strongly urge all of you to read Who Hears This Sound? Adyashanti On Waking Up From The Dream Of “Me” published a few years ago in The Sun magazine. Someone sent me a link to the article, and I found it to be one of the best and clearest presentations of Adyashanti’s teachings I’ve ever read. It is often hard to find succinct versions of a teacher’s ideas and thoughts, but the interviewer did a nice job of bringing greater clarity to an already fairly clear teaching. That’s one of the reasons I like Adya so much: he is extraordinarily clear for an awake guy.
Here are a few excerpts to read now… Read the rest →
Tagged with: Adyashanti, enlightenment, spiritual awakening
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