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Vorige citaten:
Falling Below and Rising Above Thought
Eckhart Tolle
When you are very tired, you may become more peaceful, more relaxed, than in your usual state.
This is because thinking is subsiding, and so you can’t remember your mind-made problematic self anymore.
You are moving toward sleep.
When you drink alcohol or take certain drugs (provided they don’t trigger your pain-body), you may also feel more relaxed, more carefree, and perhaps more alive for a while.
You may start singing and dancing, which since ancient times are expressions of the joy of life.
Because you are less burdened by your mind, you can glimpse the joy of Being.
Perhaps this is the reason alcohol is also called “spirit.”
But there is a high price to pay: unconsciousness.
Instead of rising above thought, you have fallen below it.
A few more drinks, and you will have regressed to the vegetable realm.
Space consciousness has little to do with being “spaced out.”
Both states are beyond thought.
This they have in common.
The fundamental difference, however, is that in the former, you rise above thought; in the latter, you fall below it.
One is the next step in the evolution of human consciousness, the other a regression to a stage we left behind eons ago.
From:
Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
New York: Dutton, October 2005
P. 229
Notes
on In a Different Voice by Carol Gilligan
How do people make decisions about morality?
Gilligan
has found that men and women use fundamentally different approaches. And
since men have dominated the discussion of moral theory, women’s
perspective is often not taken seriously, and is considered to be less
developed and sophisticated.
Her findings are based on interviews.
The male approach to morality is that individuals have certain basic rights,
and that you have to respect the rights of others. So morality imposes
restrictions on what you can do.
The female approach to morality is that people have responsibilities towards
others. So morality is an imperative to care for others.
Gilligan summarizes this by saying that male morality has a “justice
orientation”, and that female morality has a “responsibilty
orientation”.
She also
outlines three stages in moral development. The first is a selfish stage,
the second is a belief in conventional morality, and the third is post-conventional.
This is a progression from selfish, to social, to principled morality.
Female children start out with a selfish orientation.
They then learn to care for others, and that selfishness is wrong.
So in their second, conventional, stage, women typically feel it is wrong
to act in their own interests, and that they should value instead the
interests of others. They equate concern for themselves with selfishness.
In the third, post-conventional stage, they learn that it is just as wrong
to ignore their own interests as it is to ignore the interests of others.
One way to this understanding comes through their concern with connecting
with others.
A connection, or relation, involves two people, and if either one is slighted,
it harms the relationship.
[...]
Carol Gilligan - In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development
Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development
The Dhammapada
1. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.
2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.
3. “He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.” Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred.
4. “He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.” Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.
5. Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.
6. There are those who do not realize that one day we all must die. But those who do realize this settle their quarrels.
7. Just as a storm throws down a weak tree, so does Mara overpower the man who lives for the pursuit of pleasures, who is uncontrolled in his senses, immoderate in eating, indolent, and dissipated. [1]
8. Just as a storm cannot prevail against a rocky mountain, so Mara can never overpower the man who lives meditating on the impurities, who is controlled in his senses, moderate in eating, and filled with faith and earnest effort. [2]
9. Whoever being depraved, devoid of self-control and truthfulness, should don the monk’s yellow robe, he surely is not worthy of the robe.
10. But whoever is purged of depravity, well-established in virtues and filled with self-control and truthfulness, he indeed is worthy of the yellow robe.
11. Those who mistake the unessential to be essential and the essential to be unessential, dwelling in wrong thoughts, never arrive at the essential.
12. Those who know the essential to be essential and the unessential to be unessential, dwelling in right thoughts, do arrive at the essential.
[...]
Footnotes:
1. Mara: the Tempter in Buddhism, represented in the scriptures as an evil-minded deity who tries to lead people from the path to liberation. The commentaries explain Mara as the lord of evil forces, as mental defilements and as death.
2.
The impurities (asubha): subjects of meditation, which focus on
the inherent repulsiveness of the body, recommended especially as powerful
antidotes to lust.
A New Earth: Awakening to Life’s Purpose
Eckhart Tolle
[...]
Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily means thought forms.
If evil has any reality—and it has a relative, not an absolute, reality—this is also its definition: complete identification with form—physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms.
This results in a total unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic oneness with every “other” as well as with the Source.
This forgetfulness is original sin, suffering, delusion.
When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create?
To find the answer to this, observe how humans relate to each other, read a history book, or watch the news on television tonight.
If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.
[...]
From:
Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
Dutton, 2005
P. 22The One Thing
An essay by Eckhart Tolle,
author of The Power of Now
De Eerste Stap
“Wij erkenden dat wij machteloos stonden tegenover de alcohol - dat ons leven stuurloos was geworden.”
Wie geeft er graag zijn totale nederlaag toe? Praktisch niemand, uiteraard. Ieder natuurlijk instinct verzet zich tegen het idee van persoonlijke machteloosheid.
Het is echt vreselijk te moeten toegeven dat we - het glas binnen handbereik - onze geesten misvormd hebben en dat we zodanig in de ban raakten van een destructieve drankzucht dat alleen een daad van de Voorzienigheid deze van ons weg kan nemen.
Geen enkel ander bankroet is hiermee te vergelijken. Alcohol wordt nu de schraperige schuldeiser, die al ons zelfvertrouwen en elke wil om zijn eisen te weerstaan, opslorpt.
Als dit harde feit eenmaal is aanvaard, is het bankroet van ons menselijk bestaan compleet.
Als we echter bij Anonieme Alcoholisten (AA) komen, krijgen we al gauw een heel andere kijk op deze absolute vernedering.
We merken dat we alleen door een totale nederlaag in staat zijn onze Eerste Stappen te zetten naar bevrijding en kracht.
De aanvaarding van onze persoonlijke machteloosheid wordt uiteindelijk de basis waarop we een nieuw, gelukkig en zinvol leven kunnen bouwen.
We weten dat er weinig terecht komt van een alcoholist die zich bij AA aansluit, als hij niet eerst zijn verwoestende zwakheid en alle gevolgen ervan heeft aanvaard.
Zolang hij zichzelf niet nederig maakt, zal zijn nuchterheid - als die al bestond - zeer onzeker zijn.
Het ware geluk zal hij nooit vinden. Dit is een van de feiten uit het bestaan van AA die boven alle twijfel verheven zijn, omdat ze op een rijke ervaring steunen.
Het principe dat we geen blijvende kracht zullen vinden voordat we onze volledige nederlaag hebben toegegeven, vormt de voornaamste wortel waaruit onze hele gemeenschap is ontsproten en voortbloeit.
[...]
III. De Keizerin
Drang Overgave en moederschap (‘zich openstellen en laten doordringen...’).
Doel Geboorte (‘...en door de verbinding van binnen en buiten iets nieuws scheppen’).
Motief Moeder Natuur.
Licht De positieve kanten van de wereldse moeder: liefde, vertrouwen, groei, aanraking, versmelting, vervulling.
Schaduw Stiefmoeder of de vernietigende moeder: begeerte, hebzucht, jaloezie, genotzucht, traagheid, onbeweeglijkheid.
Kwaliteit Lichamelijkheid, zinnelijkheid, weelderigheid, zekerheid, geborgenheid, het nieuwe onthullen.
Bestudeer de Correspondenties van III. De Keizerin.
Luister
naar Ken Wilber:
Love
at ego, soul and Self (mp3-file, 3:21)
Lees over het dikke-ik
www.formlessmountain.com/audio1/audio.html
Why
the West Has No Science of Consciousness:
A Buddhist View
B. Alan Wallace
Introduction
In his classic work Science and Civilization in China Joseph Needham
explored the historical reasons why China, for all its long civilization,
never developed science as we understand it in the modern West, namely
a quantitative, technologically driven science of the outer, physical
world.
In this paper I shall first outline some of the reasons why Western civilization has never developed a science of consciousness.
I shall then argue that the Indic tradition has made major strides in developing such a science, and that the contemplative refinement of attention, and the subsequent utilization of such attention in exploring the mind firsthand plays a crucial role in such an endeavor.
Such training of the mind is vital for investigating the nature of consciousness, and it is also an important prerequisite to transforming consciousness in the pursuit of mental health and genuine well-being.
While India has a rich contemplative tradition for the first-person exploration of states of consciousness, it never developed the sciences of the brain and behavior that we have in the modern West.
So the integration of the first-person methodologies of India with the third-person methodologies of the cognitive sciences may lead to a richer understanding of consciousness than either Indian or Western civilization has discovered on its own.
[...]
Read
the whole paper.
What
is Integral Spirituality?
The Role of Spirituality
in the Modern
and
Postmodern World
Presentation
for the Inaugural Gathering of
Integral Spiritual Center, Denver, CO
June 24-26, 2005
Ken
Wilber
First
Draft, June 2005
[...]
Anybody familiar with the monastic traditions, East and West, from Zen to Benedictine, will recognize those souls who might be quite spiritually advanced in Underhill’s sense (very advanced in contemplative illumination and unification) and yet might still have a very conformist and conventional mentality—sometimes shockingly xenophobic and ethnocentric—and this goes, unfortunately, for many Tibetan and Japanese meditation masters.
Very advanced in meditative states training, their structures are amber-to-orange, and thus their available interpretive repertoire is loaded by the Lower-Left quadrant with very ethnocentric and parochial ideas that pass for timeless Buddha-dharma.
(E.g., the Dalai Lama believes homosexuality is a sin, anal sex is a sin, oral sex is bad karma, etc.—when everybody knows that oral sex is not bad karma, only bad oral sex is bad karma... But these are appallingly typical mythic-amber beliefs.)
Not that Westerners necessarily fare any better: the typical Western teacher has a structure that houses its own dysfunction commonly known as “boomeritis” or “pluralitis,” which is green pluralism opened to rampant red narcissism (the “me” generation).
Because these structure-stages (amber, orange, green, turquoise, etc.) cannot be seen with any amount of meditation, they are invisible pathologies lodged in the heart of Buddha-dharma in the West.
(American Buddhist teachers just shake their heads at mention of this, and recommend more meditation, which further intensifies the problem in most cases. We will return to this unfortunate scenario later.
In the meantime, Asian meditation teachers, with a LL-quadrant that is heavily amber, or mythic-membership, and hence “non-egoic” in the sense of PRE-individualistic, and therefore used to having students simply obey them unhesitatingly and in a conformist-stage fashion, don’t quite know what to do with individualistic-stage Westerners, whose LL-quadrant is loaded at orange-to-green.
Herein lies a four-decade tale of quadrant-clash—but more than that, of AQAL clash.
At Integral Institute, we are preparing overviews of this AQAL clash, not with a view to blame but a view to begin integral spiritual practice with as little hidden dysfunction as possible.)
[...]
Many American Buddhists of this generation were, as Boomers, pioneering the green-pluralistic wave of development, which in itself is actually a rather extraordinary achievement.
Some of them also took up meditative practices, and could indeed attain very genuine and profound meditative states (because all of the states are available at pretty much every stage).
But, as always, these meditative states will be interpreted according to the stage one is at.
And thus, meditative states were quickly used to support the green-level pluralistic worldview.
At this point, there is not necessarily any dysfunction in the AQAL matrix in this particular case.
But there are two potential problems here.
The first is that many of the great contemplative texts, sutras, and tantras were written in the cognitive line from at least the turquoise and often indigo or violet levels.
So indigo texts were being translated downward into green texts simply because both of them could be supported by similar meditative states and attainments.
As we have seen, I can come out of a nondual state of awareness, and if I am green, I will interpret Nonduality in green terms; if I am indigo, then in indigo terms.
The same state can be used to support any number of stages.
But the second problem is that, I can use those meditative states to support green, and because green pluralism can support and activate red narcissism, the entire meditative corpus can be used to support and prop up green/red personality structures.
Hence, Boomeritis Buddhism. This is the translation downward of Buddhist texts into dysfunctional green or pathological pluralism.
And the use
of Buddhism to support and encourage “the narcissism of feelings”
(as well as pathological pluralism) is one of the truly difficult situations
now fairly rampant as Dharma struggles to be rooted in the West, and extremely
high meditative-state training is being used to prop up dysfunctional
structures, or DLD.
When nondual
states in particular—which, to the extent they can be described,
are a type of “all in one, one in all, one in one, all in all”
(e.g., Hwa Yen’s four principles, Tozan’s five ranks)—are
translated into words, they can sound very like the pluralistic wave itself,
of “everything is mutually interpenetrating,” with the odd result
that Ati props up Ego.
And the real problem is, none of this can be seen with the tools of Buddhism.
Buddhism
specializes in zone-1 techniques, but this is a
zone-2 illness.
It simply cannot be seen or detected in a Buddhist state of mind.
As the self-sense grows and develops from red egocentrism to amber conformity to orange rationalism to green pluralism to turquoise integralism to indigo and higher, something can go wrong at any of those stages—there are potential pathologies at any and all of those stages.
But if you
can’t see the stages, you can’t see the pathologies.
American Buddhists, bless every one of them (and us), have no idea these zone-2 stages exist;
they have no idea that individuals are interpreting their meditative experiences from a particular stage;
they have no idea that any of these stages can be dysfunctional and that this dysfunction will not necessarily disrupt meditative-state training;
they have no idea that this pathology is therefore invisible on their radar screens but is actually infecting the entire system.
And thus
this invisible pathology has crept into American Buddhism because it cannot
be seen—a silent virus in the operating system that can and often
does crash the entire system.
Stay tuned. So far, the virus is winning, but we shall see.
But important as this is, it is simply indicative of a larger point:
if any system is based on specializing in one of the 8 methodologies, then I might not be able to see any dysfunctions in the other 7 dimensions of my own being.
An integrally-informed approach can help with exactly this difficult situation, and an AQAL-graph analysis can help the system begin to self-correct and self-organize in a more comprehensive and inclusive fashion.
This would certainly apply to any Integral Spirituality.
[...]
From:
Ken Wilber
What is Integral Spirituality?
The Role of Spirituality
in the Modern and Postmodern World
Presentation for the Inaugural Gathering of
Integral Spiritual Center, Denver, CO
June 24-26, 2005
First Draft, June 2005
Pp. 60-61, 67-69
Read Wilber’s essay.
Visit www.integralspiritualcenter.org.