Excerpt from the book: “Path without destination – The long walk of a gentle hero” by Satish Kumar

“One morning I got up early and walked into the forest.  It was dawn.  There was dew on the grass and leaves.  I came to a tall tree with large overhanging branches, sat down cross-legged under the tree, and closed my eyes.  I looked into my body and saw a dark tunnel, a deep hollow inside.  I went into it, drawn inwards.

Instead of smelling outside, my nose was smelling the inner happenings and my ears were hearing the sounds inside.  I could hear the sounds and voices of the ego pushing me in different directions.  But I sat quietly.  Slowly the battle calmed down, it slowly faded away.  Gradually peace came.

I saw the events of my life as one thread, the same thread which united the whole universe and which was each person.  I saw a struggle without conflict, a pain without misery.  I saw a love so great that it had to remain hidden.  I felt myself part of my mother and father, and in all the people through whom I had been expressed. I was being reborn.  I felt like a child, like an innocent person, just living and growing, engaged in the journey from action to nonaction, from struggle without to struggle within.  Life was an eternal journey, a journey to the center , the source, searching for the soul.

Everything became meditation.  I felt a sense of divinity.  This newness brought a surrender, a surrender where nothing mattered, where everything was accepted.  It was beyond happiness, beyond pleasure.  I experienced the zero level of existence, the void, the beauty of the void and the beauty of nothingness: shunyata.

I opened my eyes.  I saw a snake about three yards long curled around the trunk of the tree beside me.  I sat still. The snake disappeared into a hole among the roots.  I must have sat there for six hours, for when I returned it was after then o’clock.”

This book was passed on to me by a friend and once I finish reading it I too will pass it on to:

someone…

A collection of texts marrying nondual wisdom and psychotherapy.  A valuable book for those interested in being more fully in life and being more fully present with the people and situations that make it up.

With texts by:

John Prendergast, Kenneth Bradford, Judith Blackstone, Dorothy Hunt, Peter & Penny Fenner, Kaisa Puhakka, David Loy, and Mariana Caplan

Highly recommend this book

by Ezra Bayda

OUR ASPIRATION, OUR CALLING, our desire for a genuine life,

is to see the truth of who we really are; that the nature of our Being is

connectedness and love, not the illusion of a separate self to which our suffering clings.

It is from this awareness that Life can flow through us; the Unconditioned

manifesting freely as our conditioned body.

And what is the path?

To learn to reside in whatever life presents.  To learn to attend to all those things

that block the flow of a more open life; and to see them as the very path to

awakening all the constructs, the identities, the holding back, the protections, all

the fears, the self-judgments, the blame; all that separates us from letting life be.

And what is the path?

To turn away from constantly seeking comfort and from trying to avoid pain.

To open to the willingness to just be, in this very moment, exactly as it is.

No longer so ready to be caught in the relentlessly spinning mind.  Life is about

awakening to the true Self: no one special to be, nowhere to go, just Being.

We are so much more than just this body, just this personal drama.

As we cling to our fear, and our shame, and our suffering, we forsake the gratitude

of living from our natural being.  So where, in this very moment, do we cling to our views?

Softening around the mind’s incessant judgement, we can awaken the heart that

seeks to be awakened.

And when the veil of separation rises, Life simply unfolds as it will.

No longer caught in the self-centered dream, we can give ourselves to other, like a

white bird in the snow.

Time is fleeting.

Don’t hold back.

Appreciate this precious life.

An excerpt from the book Meeting the Shadow.  The text is by Michael Ventura.

“Which is the major difference between the expectations of a marriage and a relationship.  My experience of a relationship is two people more or less compulsively playing musical chairs with each other’s selected inner archetypes.  My tough street kid is romancing your honky-tonk angel.  I am your homeless waif and you are my loving mother.  I am your lost father and you are my doting daughter.  I am your worshiper and you are my goddess.  I am your god and you are my priestess.  I am your client and you are my analyst.  I am your intensity and you are my ground.  These are some of the garish of the patterns.  Animus, anima, bopping on a seesaw

These hold up well enough while the archetypal pairings behave.  But when the little boy inside him is looking for the mommy inside her and finds instead on this particular night a sharp-toothed analyst dissecting his guts.  When the little girl inside her is looking for the daddy inside him, and fids instead a pagan worshiper who wants a goddess to lay with, which induces her to become a little girl playacting a goddess to please the daddy who’s really a lecherous worshipper and…little girls can’t come.  Or if a woman is attracted to a macho-man who is secretly looking to be mothered: when a man’s sexual self is in the service of an interior little boy it’s not surprising that he can’t get it up or comes to quick.  Or they’re really not there at all, they’re masturbating, really, men in their little-boy psyches for whom the real woman is just a stand-in; while the woman who happens to be in the same bed, an extension of teir masturbation, is wondering why even though the moves are pretty good she doesn’t really feel slept with.  And why he turns away so quickly when it’s done.

On the other hand, teachers fuck pupils with excitement, analysts fuck clients with abandon, and people seeing each other, in bed, as gods and goddesses light up the sky – bu the psyche is a multiple and a shifting entity, and none of these compatible parirings hold stable for long.  The archetypal mismatches soon begin, and then it’s a disaster of confrontations that can take years not even to sort out (it would be worth years to get it all sorter out) but simply to exhaust itself and fail.  And then the cycle starts all over again with someone else.

My experience of a marriage is that all these same modes are present, but instinctively or consciously it becomes a case of two people running down each other’s inner archetypes, tackling them, seducing them, cajoling them, waiting them out making them talk, ‘fessing up to them, running from them, raping them, falling in love with some, hating others, getting to know some, making friends with some, hanging some in the closet on each other’s hooks — hooks on which hang fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, other loves, idols, fantasies, maybe even past lives, and true mythological consciousnesses that sometimes come to life within one with such force that we feel a thread that goes back thousands of years, even to other realms of being.

All of this is what we “marry” in the other, a process that goes on while we manage to earn a living, go to the movies, watch television, go to the doctor, walk on the Palisades, drive to Texas, follow the election, try to stop drinking, eat too much Haagen-Dazs.”

The beginning of the second chapter stars with this sentence:

“The ignorant man is not the unlearned but he who does not know himself and the learned man is stupid when he relies on boks, on knowledge and on authority to give him understanding.”

This small book by Jiddu Krishnamurti goes straight to the roots of our society, or our societal and personal beliefs, it shakes those roots of the dirt they have gathered (not moss but thick dirt), examines them and then Jiddu provides his opinion.  Here are some excerpts from this book which I highly recommend:

“The exclusive cultivation of technique has produced scientists, mathematicians, bridge builders, space conquerors; but do they understand the total process of life?  Can any specialist experience life as a whole?  Only when he ceases to be a specialist.”

—-

“The man who knows how to split the atom but has no love in his heart becomes a monster.”

—-

“We choose a vocation according to our capacities; but will the following of a vocation leaad us out of conflict and confusion?  Some form of technical training seems necessary; but when we have become engineers, physicians, accountants – then what?  Is the practice of a profession the fulfilment of life?”

—-

“The right kind of education, while encouraging the learning of a technique, should accomplish something which is of far greater importance: it should help man to experience the integrated process of life.  It is this experiencing that wil put capacity and technique in their right place.”

—-

“If we are fully aware of what is, we shall understand it and so be free of it; but to be aware of what we are, we must stop struggling after something which we are not.”

“Ideals have no place in education for they prevent the comprehension of the present.  Surely, we can be aware of what is only when we do not escape into the future.  To look to the future, to strain after an ideal, indicates sluggishness of mind and a desire to avoid the present.”

—-

Education in the true sense is helping the individual to be mature and free, to flower greatly in love and goodness.  That is what we should be interested in, and not in shaping the child according to some idealistic pattern.”

—-

“Only love can bring about the understanding of another”

—-

“There can be no integration as long as one is pursuing an ideal pattern of action; and most teachers who are idealists have put away love, they have dry minds and hard hearts  To study a child, one has to be alert, watchful, self-aware, and this demands far greater intelligence and affection than to encourage him to follow and ideal.”

—-

“Ideals are an actual hindrance to our understanding of the child and to the child’s understanding of himself.”

“Ideals are a convenient escape, and the teacher who follows them is incapacble of understanding his students and dealing with them intelligently; for him, the future ideal, the what should be, is far more important then the present child.  The pursuit of an ideal excludes love, and without love no human problem can be solved.”

—-

“Freedom can never come through discipline, through resistance; freedom is not a goal, an end to be achieved.  Freedom is at the beginning, not at the end, it is not to be found in some distant ideal.”

—-

“Most parents and teachers are afraid of discontent because it is disturbing to all forms of security, and so they encourage the young to overcome it through safe jobs, inheritance, marriage and the consolation of religious dogmas.  Elders, knowing only too well the many ways of blunting the mind and the heart, proceed to make the child as dull as they are by impressing upon him the authorities, traditions and beliefs which they themselves have accepted.”

—-

“To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the patter of our desires.”

—-

“Individual enlightenment does affect large groups of people, but only if one is not eager for results.  If one thinks in terms of gain and effect, right transformation of oneself is not possible.”

—-

“To understand ourselves, we must be aware of our relationship, not only with people, but also with property, with ideas and with nature.”

—-

“Relationship based on sensation can never be a means of release from the self; yet most of our relationships are based on sensation, they are the outcome of our desire for personal advantage, for comfort, for psychological security.”

“Relationship is a mirror in which the self and all its activities can be seen; and it is only when the ways of the self are understood in the reactions of relationship that there is creative release from the self.”

—-

“We may find a remporary release by joining groups, by studying methods of social and economic reform, by enacting legislation, or by praying; but do what we will, without self-knowledge and the love that is inherent in it, our problems will ever expand and multiply.”

—-

“Ignorance is lack of knowledge of the ways of the self, and this ignorance cannot be dissipated by superficial activities and reforms; it can be dissipated only by one’s constant awareness of the movements and responses of the self in all its relationships.”

—-

“The urge to conform, which is the desire for security, breeds fear and brings to the fore the political and religious authorities, the leaders and heroes who encourage subservience and by whom we are subtly or grossly dominated; but not to conform is only a reaction against authority, and in no way helps us to become integrated human beings.  Reaction is endless, it only leads to further reaction.”

—-

“To be free from all fear, we must be awake to its darkening influence, and only constant watchfulness can reveal its many causes.”

“Authority is created by our desire to be right, to be secure, to be comfortabel, to have no conscious conflicts or disturbances…”

“To have peace, one must employ peaceful means; for if the means are violent, how can the end be peaceful?  If the end is freedom, the beginning must be free, for the end and the beginning are one.  There can be self-knowledge and intelligence only when there is freedom at the very outset; and the freedom is denied by the acceptance of authority.”

This book is an autobiographical account of several extraodinary, record-breaking, record-setting, long-distance, open-water, swims that Lynne Cox performed.

The book was very motivational for me not only because I myself enjoy swimming but because I relate to the physical and mental trials she went through and the goals and ideals she pushed for.  It reminded me of the book “The Cups of Tea” (2006) by Greg Mortenson in that both authors are passionate about Life, non-attached to monetary gains, and fixated on bettering the human condition pushing their own body to get there.

In terms of content and writing; the book absorbed me and I read it in only a few days.  I was especially drawn in at the beginning and my interest was fully sustained throughout 3/4 of the book winding down closer to the end.  This happened because the author goes into a lot of detail about the process of getting her swim across the Bering Strait (introducing countless people, Soviets and Americans) and for her antarctic swim.  I felt something shift in her storytelling, becoming a lot more about the political aspect than about her own life and her relationships – which is something that interests me more than politics.

Despite finding myself skipping lines during those final section I was still very much interested in the story and the book did not lose me.

I highly recommend this book for anyone, particularly for those interested in looking at Life from the perspective of someone who pushed human physical limits.

Enjoy and for more information on the author go to: Lynne Cox

Just finished reading this very good book!

Given to me as a christmas gift because it was one of their favorite books, recommendations have rarely gone wrong for me when they are someones’ favorite, this is a science-fiction book set in space.

The general theme is pretty standard, aliens that need to get killed through interstellar battle, but, as always, it is how the writer treats the details that makes the difference and Scott Card sets up a very interesting plot. I found myself getting very involved in the personalities and their psychology, their inside battle and how that reflected in their lives.  So very interesting.

I highly recommend this book!

Posting on this nice small book I have just finished reading.  Very imaginative, very beautiful book, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The ending felt a little too fast, it was hard for my body to believe that there was so much stuff going on in one second and then in a flash every bad thing disappears and every single thing is right and fine and perfect.  It felt like the author finished in a rush.  Very strange, still not sure what to make of that.

Other than that, recommended!

Thanks Ashley!

I have to admit that I have been getting books way faster than I have been reading them.
At the moment I am with 4 new books.
“The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran – an all-time favorite book of mine which I had to re-buy because my copies always misteriously disappear.
“Body-centered Psychotherapy – The Hakomi Method” by Ron Kurtz -”Hakomi is a method for helping people change their way of being in the world through working with core material and changing core beliefs”.