Opening up to the Bigger Picture

     Being nonjudgmental is a key attitude in mindfulness, psychotherapy, actually all healthy relationships. To be nonjudgmental is to be open-minded, to intentionally cultivate a "beginner's mind" attitude even towards people, experiences & things we may strongly dislike. A basic component of being nonjudgmental is empathy.
     Carl Rogers, one of the founders of the humanistic (client-centered) approach to psychology, said this about empathy:
     "I believe [empathy] to be a process, rather than a state….
     1. It means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it.
     2. It involves being sensitive, moment to moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever they are experiencing.
     3. It means temporarily living in their life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments, sensing meanings of which they are scarcely aware, but not trying to uncover feelings of which they are totally unaware, since this would be too threatening.
     4. It includes communicating your sensings of their world as you look with fresh and unfrightened eyes at elements of which the individual is fearful. It means frequently checking with them as to the accuracy of your sensings, and being guided by the responses you receive.
     5. You are a confident companion to the person in his or her inner world. By pointing to the possible meaning in the flow of their experiencing you [can] help the person... to experience the meanings more fully…”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMi7uY83z-U&feature=emb_logo

      Many of us are extremely judgmental, in fact triggered, shut down & run from the words: 'God,' 'Buddha,' 'religious,' 'spiritual.' While this may have been entirely justified in our past, we now find ourselves defensively walled off from ultimate reality & depth of meaning - "the greater than my self", as well as clueless about getting there.
      So we suffer in isolation all the while sensing our need to connect with something greater. Until we heal this disconnect, ALL our relationships, even with our self, feel insubstantial, vague, undependable - we feel alone, lost, adrift, chronically dissatisfied, unable to get there from here.
     A few 'slender threads' to help extricate ourselves from this paradoxical, painfully frozen state:

     "... the meaning of life (is) that which supersedes one’s egocentric view of life - to find something that’s greater than I am; something that I can work for, outside my own egocentric structure. And I must safeguard my egocentric structure, in order to have a platform for that too. That’s the either and or that’s so difficult for the modern person.”
      Robert A. Johnson. “The Golden World. The Search for Meaning, Fulfillment, and Divine Beauty.” Sounds True, Audiobook, 2018.

     “By religious attitude I am not referring to following a path toward redemption or salvation or even necessarily to being a member of a religious institution. A religious attitude relates to the cultivation of an openness to wonder, awe, fear, and reverence with respect to the ‘other,’ those numinous forces that exist outside our conscious control. These powers have been called at various times fate, destiny, the hand of God, or (to use Robert Johnson’s term) slender threads.

     Over the years I discovered that virtually everyone that comes to analysis is in some way facing a religious crisis, a term I prefer to neurosis, and every analysis is in some way a religious dilemma.
     This is the essence of what I learned from Dr. Jung: listen to your interior intelligence, take it seriously, stay true to it, and – most important – approach it with a religious attitude. His psychological term for this is individuation – discovering the uniqueness of yourself, finding out what you are not and finding out what you are. Individuation relates to wholeness, but it is not some indiscriminate wholeness but rather your particular relationship to everything else. You get to the whole only by working with the particularity of your life, not by trying to evade or rise above the specificity of your life. This is the blending of heaven and earth. This is a truly religious life."
       Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

     "Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it’s important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn’t just ourselves that we’re discovering. We’re discovering the universe. When we discover the Buddha that we are, we discover that everything and everyone is Buddha. We discover that everything is awake and everyone is awake. Everything is equally precious and whole and good. When we regard thoughts and emotions with humor and openness, that’s how we perceive the universe. We’re not just talking about our individual liberation, but how to help the community we live in, how to help our families, our country, and the whole continent, not to mention the world and the galaxy and as far as we want to go.” Pema Chödrön

 

          "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
          Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
          It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us."           Marianne Williamson 

 

     In a remote Indian village home, Robert Johnson was asked:
     “‘We know our Indian scriptures and the sayings of our wise men. Please tell us some wisdom from your wise men.’
     This put me on the spot, and I searched my mind for something appropriate to say. Finally I remembered something from Meister Eckhart. ‘Well, one of our wise men says that the eye by which we see God is the same eye by which God sees us.’ …
     After several minutes, … ‘I don’t understand, what does this mean?’
     ‘Well, it means that God needs us as much as we need God.’
     The man fell over backward with a clump on the dirt floor. I couldn’t see (in the darkness) if he was laughing or if he was insulted and angry. When he sufficiently recovered and sat back up, he said, ‘Robert, we have never had such a thought as this.’ ”
       Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998.

          “We have calcium in our bones,
          iron in our veins,
          carbon in our souls,
          and nitrogen in our brains.
          93 percent stardust,
          with souls made of flames,
          we are all just stars
          that have people names.”                 Nikita Gill

          "To be truly happy in this world
          is a revolutionary act
          because true happiness depends upon a revolution in ourselves.
          It is a radical change of view that liberates us
          so that we know who we are most deeply
          and can acknowledge our enormous ability to love."       Sharon Salzberg

          “We are
          the scientists,
          trying to
          make sense of
          the stars
          inside us.”                Christopher Poindexter

Sculpture by Paige Bradley

 

Heart of Knowing

     We're all too familiar with getting headaches, illnesses & countless other problems from 'overthinking'. As a species, we've pushed rationality well past reasonable limits - to hyper-rationality! BALANCE is desperately needed. We must re-acquaint ourselves with & make regular use of ALL our ways of perceiving & knowing.
     Wolff's book below is imho a wonderful nudge towards not just sanity, but a much fuller life:

     “Suddenly, a new thought burst in on me: maybe I could sense water. In my mind I made a sort of list: seeing water, hearing water, smelling water. I might smell water, or even hear it if it was dripping on a leaf perhaps. I looked around.
     ‘Do not talk,’ Ahmeed said – I knew he meant ‘Do not think.’ ‘Water inside heart,’ he said next, with a gesture of his hand on his heart. I knew he meant I should sense inside – not with my mind, but from the inside.
     It is sad to have to use so many words to say something so simple.
     As soon as I stopped thinking, planning, deciding, analyzing – using my mind, in short – I felt as if I was pushed in a certain direction. I walked a few steps and immediately saw a big leaf with perhaps a half a cup of water in it.
     I must have stood there for a full minute, in awe. Not in awe of anything in particular, simply in awe.
     When I leaned over to drink from the leaf, I saw water with feathery ripples, I was a few mosquito larvae wriggling on the surface, I saw the veins of the leaf through the water, some bubbles, a piece of dirt. Reaching out, I put a finger in the water, then saw that one of the wriggling mosquito larvae had been trapped in a tiny bubble on my finger. How beautiful, how perfect. I did not put the finger with the water droplet in my mouth, but looked back at the leaf.
     My perception opened further. I no longer saw water – what I felt with my whole being was a leaf-with-water-in-it, attached to a plant that grew in soil surrounded by uncounted other plants, all part of the same blanket of living things covering the soil, which was also part of a larger living skin around the earth. And nothing was separate; all was one, the same thing: water-leaf-plant-trees-soil-animals-earth-air-sunlight and little wisps of wind. The all-ness was everywhere, and I was part of it.
     I cannot explain what went on inside me, but I knew that I had learned something unbelievably wonderful. I felt more alive than I had ever felt before.
    All of me was filled with being.
    What this other sense is, I do not know. For me it is very real. I think of it as a sense of knowing. It probably is a quality we all have to a greater or lesser degree. For me it works when I can get out of my mind, when I can experience without having to understand, or name, or position, or judge, or categorize.
     It is a quality that has to be used or it fades away; just as one has to exercise muscles, so too knowing must be exercised.
     I am saying this after the fact, trying to describe something that does not fit into our Western concepts, and therefore there are no words. At the time I did not think anything. I was learning how to put my mind aside and use some other sense to know.
     Standing over a leaf with a little water in it, somewhere in the jungles of Malaysia, I did not think in words. I did not think. I bathed in that overwhelming sense of oneness. I felt as if a light was lit deep inside me. I knew I was radiating something – love, perhaps – for this incredible world, this rich, varied, and totally interconnected world of creations that, at the same time, gave love to me. And with the love, I also felt a very deep sense of belonging.”
      Robert Wolff. “Original Wisdom. Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing.” Inner Traditions, 2001. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

     “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly;
      what is essential is invisible to the eye.”                         Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince”

 

      "The emergence and blossoming of understanding, love and intelligence has nothing to do with any tradition, no matter how ancient or impressive - it has nothing to do with time. It happens completely on its own when a human being questions, wonders, listens and looks without getting stuck in fear, pleasure and pain. When self concern is quiet, in abeyance, heaven and earth are open. The mystery, the essence of life is not separate from the silent openness of simple listening." Toni Packer

 

Natural Evolution of Understanding

     “Children come into the world with that sense of celebration and delight in the awesomeness of life. Then we eat of that wonderful, terrible fruit depicted in the story of the Garden of Eden, and our lives become divided. In childhood we have innocent wholeness, which then is transformed into informed separateness. If one is lucky, a second transformation occurs later in life, a transformation into informed wholeness. A proverb puts it this way: in life our task is to go from unconscious perfection to conscious imperfection and then to conscious perfection.
     As we grow up, most of us retain an intuition that heavenly wholeness exists somewhere, however harsh our lives may be. The boundary between the two worlds seems to be particularly thin during adolescence, a condition that does not occur again until we reach the age of forty-five or fifty. Then there is a chance to experience the Golden World again. Unfortunately, adults often dismiss such experiences as ‘only a dream’ or ‘childish talk.’ We tell our children to grow up and face the realities of life. As a result, many people give up on even finding wholeness.”
     Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998.

    Adults too often become & remain stuck in anger, resentment & cynicism towards people, religions, even life in general. Past traumas cause us to build defensive walls around our mind/emotions/body. All of us, to varying degrees, have been traumatized by those claiming to represent various religions. This hardens/toughens us, but then we're less than fully alive and can't explain why our life no longer shines. This is unnecessary, needless, optional, 'discretionary' suffering that we can heal. BUT to do so, alone or with guidance, we must go through our heavy defenses, to re-discover & re-unite with our own spacious depth. We CAN soften & gradually unlock OUR OWN chains. HOWEVER, aversion & intolerance towards: self-reflection, meditation, religion, spirituality, love, intimacy, etc can keep us deadlocked for life.
    Below, Rick Archer's (RA) excellent interview with Christian mystic, Cynthia Bourgeault PhD (CB):

     RA “You mentioned that you were kind of turned off from Christianity originally because it seemed so rigid, doctrinaire, stifling, and so on. I would say that this has been the problem with every religion, that there’s an inner core to every religion that its founder was likely living as a daily reality, and that over time, that core, that deeper dimension is lost, and so the religion becomes like a dead body without the spirit that animates a live body. So there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the outer forms of religion, but without their foundation and inner experience, they become calcified and problematic in so many ways.”
     CB “Exactly. And I think that Thomas Keating very, very correctly intuited that meditation or contemplation was the sap, was the flowing fluid that would restore the body of Christianity out of its calcification and back to life. And I think he’s a hundred percent correct in that. And that the practice just opens up capacities to comprehend the Gospel - which is a non-dual teaching - in a non-dual way. And without it, you don’t have a prayer. So his sense that somehow we had made this so high and so mighty that nobody was doing it was just absolutely locking Christianity at its lowest level of expression. And every religious tradition will have a lowest level of expression. It’s always going to happen. But when you have only your lowest level of expression, you don’t have a living religion any more.
     RA “When people get onto a spiritual practice, and really begin to make some progress, they begin to realize not only the truth of their own religion if they have one, it begins to make sense to them for the first time, but they begin to look at other religions and say, ‘Oh yeah, they were saying the same thing, just stated in a slightly different way, in a different culture and so on.”
     CB “Exactly, exactly. And until that happens, I think you really have to break through to the place where you see that every religious path, all the great sacred traditions are absolutely precious and necessary and irreplaceable like colors in the rainbow. If you lost one of them, the ability to understand what’s in the invisible light spectrum of God would be diminished.
     And I’ve also found for a lot of people, that they will leave Christianity (for example, just because it’s still for many of us our religion of upbringing), they’ll leave with a lot of wounds, go to another path, embrace it, and become very, very adept at that path. But you find that until they can come back and heal the wounds that they’ve had in their religion of origin, it’s going to limit their progress on the path they’ve chosen. They always hit a stuck place that’s not going to be resolved within that path. It’s going to be resolved by going back to where the issue was in their Christianity, working through that so they’re genuinely forgiving of the hurt that happened. And then they’re liberated. Then they can be a Buddhist, or a Sufi again, but the rigidity always enters at the same level.”
     Cynthia Bourgeault - Oct 23, 2017 Batgap interview: https://batgap.com/cynthia-bourgeault/

     Below, the same topic from a slightly different perspective, using different terminology:

     “Over the years I discovered that virtually everyone that comes to (Jungian) analysis is in some way facing a religious crisis, a term I prefer to neurosis, and every analysis is in some way a religious dilemma.
     This is the essence of what I learned from Dr. Jung: listen to your interior intelligence, take it seriously, stay true to it, and – most important – approach it with a religious attitude. His psychological term for this is individuation – discovering the uniqueness of yourself, finding out what you are not and finding out what you are. Individuation relates to wholeness, but it is not some indiscriminate wholeness but rather your particular relationship to everything else. You get to the whole only by working with the particularity of your life, not by trying to evade or rise above the specificity of your life. This is the blending of heaven and earth. This is a truly religious life.
     Of course, Jung didn’t invent this; it is as old as humankind. … but Jung presented it in a very practical way and in a language for modern times. After I learned from Dr. Jung the process of approaching daily life with a truly religious attitude, then I could begin to see how the great symbol systems of the world’s religions were saying similar things. I had grown up with Christian symbols and rituals all my life, but they had become empty; it is ironic that work with my dreams (and, later, living among Hindus in India) would teach me what those symbols and rituals were really about. Only when I could understand, for example, that the virgin birth was about a birth of new consciousness in me did that story begin to have profound meaning for me.
     Dr. Jung linked religious experience to the numinosum, a word for dynamic effects not caused by an act of human will, and he distinguished between religion and creed. A creed is a codified and dogmatized form of an original religious experience of the numinosum. Dr. Jung believed that all of the prophets for all the world’s religions experienced the numinosum, what I call the Golden World, and over time creeds were developed to help channel the energy and to explain such experiences to the uninitiated. Replacing the immediate experience of the Golden World with an institutionalized set of symbols and rituals has a valuable purpose in defending people against religious experience that might be overwhelming. Direct experiences of the Golden World are glorious but also painful and dangerous, and some people shouldn’t try to contain these energies on their own. The church, synagogue, temple, or mosque mediates between the numinosum and the everyday; it is a good place to reconcile the Golden World and the earthly world.
     Dr. Jung always tried to return patients to the religious systems in which they had experience, if that was possible. … I wasn’t pushing any form of religion, but I was very sensitive to the importance of the religious function in each person.”

     Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998.

    Life's too short to remain stuck. With courage and guidance, we can regain our zest for life - at any age!