Tag: death
The Emptiness of Fullness
“Emptiness is the ground of everything. Thanks to emptiness, everything is possible.” —Nagarjuna, 2nd century Buddhist philosopher “Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your very essence emerged from emptiness.” —Wayne Dyer, 21st-century populist philosopher My wife and I recently watched Broadchurch, an ITV crime-mystery series. It was captivating, well-acted (Olivia Coleman, as always, was amazing), and surprisingly insightful. Each episode hinted at a different, possible suspect and lured us into believing our assumptions Read More
The Hard Truth of Mental Illness
Crawl into this experience. Feel it. You have a mentally ill brother who has been tormented by his disease for over 50 years. He has suffered from delusions and voices his whole life.
He claims he knows Deep Throat. He is convinced that the FBI has implanted listening devices in his brain and in his teeth. He believes his parents are clones, and he is not sure who is real and who isn’t.
The Fragility of Freshness
“If you can’t smell the fragrance, don’t come into the garden of love.” –Rumi “Let me not die while I am still alive.” –Hasidic prayer Knowing when to cut your avocado is a tricky task. One day too early and the fruit inside is too hard. One day too late, and it turns brown and mushy. Finding optimal freshness is a challenge with fruit and with life. I hate it when my strawberries get Read More
Ethereal Threads and Cosmic Fabric
“Creative interpretation of the world: Art. Personal beliefs trumping objective facts: Lunacy.” —Brian Greene. When you are swimming upstream in a powerful current, it’s not only hard to think about anything other than surviving, it’s also difficult to raise your head up to look around. This river we are swimming in has a mighty flow, and we are hanging on by a thread—perhaps an ethereal thread or a vibrating string as you will see later. Read More
Pain and Empathy
Pain may not be your friend, but it may be your partner. And pain may be the path to empathy.
Stages and States
I just completed an on-line course through MindValley Institute entitled “Beyond Seeking” taught by Ken Wilber, whom I mentioned in my last post. The course triggered so many ideas that I wanted to filter them through my lens and write a post. So here it is. As the title of this post indicates, throughout our lives, we can experience many stages and many states. In my last post, Spiritual Awakening, I constructed scales for Wilber’s Read More