It is not true that love makes things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.

— George Eliot (from Felix Holt, the Radical)

When one is aligned with the purpose of service, acts that seem exceptionally courageous to others are a matter of course.

• When one experiences the world as abundant, then acts of generosity are natural, since there is no doubt about continued supply.
• When one sees other people as reflections of oneself, forgiveness becomes second nature, as one realizes “But for the grace of God, so go I.”
• When one appreciates the order, beauty, mystery, and connectedness of the universe, a deep joy and cheerfulness arises that nothing can shake.
• When one sees time as abundant and life as infinite, one develops superhuman patience.
• When one lets go of the limitations of reductionism, objectivity, and determinism, technologies become possible that the science of separation cannot countenance.
• When one lets go of the story of the discrete and separate self, amazing intuitive and perceptual capabilities emerge from lifelong latency.

— Charles Eisenstein

Nature’s way

Ean relaxes. He swims, eats, sleeps, absorbing everything the animals have shown him. Some things he understands. The more he understands the less he knows.

One morning, after a long night in drizzling rain, Ean makes his way to a shallow cave in nearby cliffs. As he clambers inside and turns around he’s stunned to see a large lioness there, asleep, purring. Snoring beside her is a handsome gazelle. Ean slumps, motionless, silent for ages. Rain pelts outside, storming beyond the quiet, dry, cave. The great cat’s purring deepens. Rain continues all day, into early evening.

As the red sun settles beyond lustrous, purple-blue seas, Lioness rumbles and yawns, shaking Ean and Gazelle awake. She stretches and roars softly. Gazelle touches his muzzle to Ean’s hand, sniffing his ear. “She won’t eat you.”

Lioness smiles, saunters forward and rests a massive paw on Ean’s thigh, brushing her whiskers against his face. Then she walks to the cave entrance, gazing over the plains.

“Everything isn’t as it looks, unless you’re understanding everything. I know it seems unusual to see Gazelle and me together like this… but we’re always together. Lions and gazelle share real life, and blood, so we have a profound bond.”

Gazelle interrupts with a snort. “Ean, the relationship between prey and predator is ancient. As Gazelle, one of my roles in life is actually to become prey. I’m born to it. Raised for it. Some gazelle are not eaten until very old, some when young, and others in their prime. Eventually, all of us are eaten somehow. That final chase is filled with sudden fear. We run fast as this is the moment we live and prepare for. Sometimes we elude the kill. And one day you sense the moment has arrrived. Pounding fear is present, because the chase is real. When the lion’s paw knocks you down, all you can do is go with it now — Be embraced. White teeth and warm mouth wrap around your neck, pressing down in the realization of one of life’s purposes – being food, and life, for another. Pressing fear transforms to love, and surrender to life itself, in the face of death.”

“Instead… the lion fixes attention one-pointedly, becoming completely focused on the prey. In doing so the lion achieves a deep love for the gazelle, almost becoming one with the prey. In this way the lion surrenders every fibre and sinew to the kill. The lion lets everything go and gives over completely. This is the ancient relationship of predator and prey where two become one. The form of sacrifice differs for each, but is equal. And one day the predator is also eaten.”

Both Lioness and Gazelle move to Ean and press their bodies against his.

He embraces them.

They turn and disappear into the night, to hunt and be hunted, as lions and gazelle have always done.

—(excerpt from ‘Real Heart, World of No Fear”, Stuart Camps 2008, © )

The Ancient Quest

O giant stars, born of eternal light,
O winged flames wherewith the void is sown,
As dreadful prophets of a God unknown,
Ye speak the law in light!

Had we but sight to see and comprehend,
Your countless fires were as a language plain
To tell us all that we have sought in vain;
The quest were at an end.

O younger worlds, whose tireless-pinioned flight
Climbs eagerly the sheer and topless deep!
O shrivelled planets that obscurely creep
On orbits sunk in night!

Alike ye falter in unceasing gloom
That shrouds the deathless Truth ye may not find;
Alike for ye the flaming suns are blind,
And light may not illume.

For Life whose God-ambitious eyes would see
The stellar-manifested truth sublime,
Must gaze with sight immutable as Time,
Large as Infinity.

— Clark Ashton Smith, born this day in 1893

In his forty-eight years Smith has been a variety of things—a journalist, a fruit picker and packer, a wood chopper, a typist, a cement-mixer, a gardener, a hard-rock miner, mucker and windlasser. Though his verse may occasionally sound as if Smith lived in an ivory tower, this is far indeed from the facts. —from a bio by August Derleth

Quanta in the brain

A review and update of a controversial 20-year-old theory of consciousness published in Physics of Life Reviews claims that consciousness derives from deeper level, finer scale activities inside brain neurons. The recent discovery of quantum vibrations in "microtubules" inside brain neurons corroborates this theory, according to review authors Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose. They suggest that EEG rhythms (brain waves) also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations, and that from a practical standpoint, treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions.

Does this sound like esoteric minutiae? Here is why it is important to me:
A “standard scientific view” of the relationship between mind and brain is that the brain’s neural circuits are the cause of all that we experience as conscious awareness. Further, the brain is modeled as a Turing machine, an idealized class of computing devices which also includes the transistor-circuit computers with which we’re all familiar. Hence maybe it doesn’t matter what kind of engine does the computing; our consciousness is embedded in the software

There are other capabilities of the mind, however, that have never been reproduced in a computer, and I think we have no idea how to do so. Intuition, premonitions, synchronicities, telepathy are all widely reported, but scientific skeptics claim that these abilities are impossible in principle. Quantum mechanics adds another dimension to brain capabilities. Quantum systems may be entangled at a distance, and across time into the past and the future. It is much easier to imagine a basis for pre-cognition and telepathy if our brains are quantum machines.

“The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?” ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review. “This opens a potential Pandora’s Box, but our theory accommodates both these views, suggesting consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules, protein polymers inside brain neurons, which both govern neuronal and synaptic function, and connect brain processes to self-organizing processes in the fine scale, ‘proto-conscious’ quantum structure of reality.”

— read more from Science Daily

Mysticism keeps us sane

Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism; they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.... The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism — the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.

— G. K. Chesterton

Bhutan and the Gross National Happiness index

The Tibetan kingdom of Bhutan has burst upon the global scene, not only as an elite tourist destination, but as a champion in the quest for human happiness and sustainable economics, its leaders making international headlines as they invite other nations to wake up and get on board with the pursuit of Gross National Happiness.

GNH, as the Bhutanese call it, was conceived of by the country’s fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who, in the mid-1970s, realized Bhutan could no longer remain hidden from the rest of the world like a real-life Shangri-La, but would need to modernize or risk being erased entirely. How could this be done without wrecking Bhutan’s diverse and precious natural resources, subjecting its people to unfettered capitalism, or prostituting its complex and rich Tibetan Buddhist culture to tourism? His answer was Gross National Happiness, and he is famously quoted as saying, “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.”

— read more from Orion Magazine

Sat nam

…means “I am truth”. I have never deeply understood how truth relates to Kundilini practice, or to my own discipline.

Maybe truth is enough. Certainly it is an all-consuming practice, if pursued consistently. There is very little of which I am certain. Are my pronouncements appropriately modest, or do I grandstand where most I doubt the ground on which I stand? A commitment to truth is a practice of staying closer to my own immediate experience in everything I say, and to regard theory and generalization of all sort with appropriate skepticism. A commitment to truth demands that I watch what I tell myself, as well, that I examine my own motives in all that I do and I say, not to pretend that I am acting from a high purpose when perhaps I may only be doing what is convenient for me...

Countless times, truth has kept me from getting into trouble in relationships. Many more times, truth has led to anger and hard feelings. I have a propensity to judge others, and when I combine this with truth I get into trouble. Perhaps it is just what I need to prod me to deal with my judgmental side.

— Josh Mitteldorf

The Flushing Remonstrance, 1657

Given the circumstances and the era, the Flushing Remonstrance was a striking document for a variety of reasons. First, its concept of religious freedom was more generous than any at the time. Europe had been wracked by religious conflict since the Reformation; perceived wisdom across many European states, including England, was that religious uniformity was the correct path to take. Even the two contemporary documents often noted in the history of American religious freedom — the 1649 Maryland Toleration Act and the 1663 Rhode Island Royal Charter—restricted their toleration to Christians only.   The Flushing Remonstrance, on the other hand, extended the “law of love, peace and liberty” to “Jews, Turks and Egyptians,” and further stated that “our desire is not to offend one of his little ones, in whatsoever form, name or title he appears in, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker, but shall be glad to see anything of God in any of them.”

...For their efforts, Feake and the other magistrates who signed the document were all imprisoned…

— read more from Wei Zhu