Spinoza....................

      Spinoza challenged the older philosopher's segregation of mental substance from material substance, arguing instead that mind and matter were not two separable substances but simply two different attributes, or aspects, of one and the same substance, which he called Deus, sive Natura, "God, or Nature."  This unitary substance would appear as matter, on the one hand, or as mind, on the other, depended upon the vantage we viewed it from. Just as, according to Spinoza, the vast and originating power that his contemporaries called "God" was nothing other than the creative dynamism and intelligence of Nature itself, so the human mind was simply the specific sensitivity and sentience of that part of nature we recognize as the human body.  Every material body or thing, for Spinoza, had its mental aspect—all things were ensouled.  The human body was the outward material aspect of the human mind, as the mind was nothing other than the internal, felt experience of the body.  "The mind and the body are one and the same thing. . ."

     It was such heretical assertions, articulated in numerous conversations with his contemporaries, that in his twenty-fourth year earned Spinoza the harshest possible reproach from the elders of the flourishing synagogue in Amsterdam: he was excommunicated, formally cursed, and banished from the Jewish community.  Spinoza accepted this exile without the least objection, remarking only that it left him freer to pursue his researches without distraction.

-David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

We ignore our connection................

 ....................................to our own detriment.

melting-pot ethos......

      America, which survived a gory civil war among political and geographical factions, has become so far one of history's few exceptions.  The ultimate rationale of America's unique Constitution led Americans eventually to define themselves by their shared values, not by their inconsequential appearances.  Eventually, most who were willing to give up their prior identities and assume a new American persona were accepted as Americans.  The United States has always cherished its universally applicable melting-pot ethos of e pluribus unum—of blending diverse peoples into one through assimilation, integration, and inter-marriage in the manner that diverse colonies united to become one nation.

-Victor Davis Hanson,  The Dying Citizen

practice is necessary.........................

 The archer allows many arrows to go far beyond the target, because he knows that he will learn the importance of bow, posture, string, and target only by repeating his gestures thousands of times and by not being afraid of making mistakes.

     And his true allies will never criticize him, because they know that practice is necessary, that it is the only way in which he can perfect his instinct, his hammer blow.

     And then comes the moment when he no longer has to think about what he is doing.  From then on, the archer becomes his bow, his arrow, and his target.

-Paulo Coehlo,  The Archer

in collaboration and tension................

 Pushing beyond Chrysippus's "no shoving" rule, he believed every human being was quite literally on the same team.  We are all tied together in cosmic sympathy, Posidonius believed, and none of us are entirely self-sufficient or autonomous.  Each of us has been given a role to play in this large body—one of us is a finger, another a skin cell, another a liver—and we exist in collaboration and tension with each other.  It was God, he thought, that ran through this organism as pneuma—a kind of soul of the universe.

-Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman,  Lives Of The Stoics:  The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

You can google pneuma here

Liberation...............................

The philosopher Decartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am."  He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error:  to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking.  The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind.  Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being "at one" and therefore at peace.  At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested—at one with Being.  Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking.  What an incredible liberation this is!

-Eckhart Tolle,  The Power Of Now:  A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment

A kind of sorcery.......................

"Lines prompting reading, dreaming minds not to see every thing by itself and separate, but to see the seams often unseen in the dark expanses across space and time. . . . A power not to wield, but to hold. To practice holding.”

-Ellie Rogers, via David Kanigan's wondrous blog

a pin's point in eternity...............

36.   In the universe Asia and Europe are but two small corners, all ocean's waters a drop, Athos a puny lump of earth, the vastness of time a pin's point in eternity.  All is petty, inconstant, and perishable.  All proceeds from the one source, springing either directly or derivatively from the universal sovereign Reason.  Even the lion's open jaws, the deadly poison, and all other things that do hurt, down to the bramble-bush and the slough, are by-products of something else that is itself noble and beautiful.   Do not think of them, then, as alien to That which you reverence, but remember the one origin that is common to them all.

-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations, Book Six

Brotherhood..............................

via

No mere aggregation.....................

     "Now there can be no organic architecture where the nature of synthetic materials or the nature of nature materials either is ignored or misunderstood.  How can there be?  Perfect correlation, integration, is life.  It is the first principle of any growth that the thing grown be no mere aggregation.  Integration as entity is first essential.  And integration means that no part of anything is of any great value in itself except as it be integrate part of the harmonious whole."

-Frank Lloyd Wright,   The Natural House

Amongst...............................

The perfect mystic is not a ecstatic devotee lost in contemplation of Oneness, nor a saintly recluse shunning all commerce with mankind, but "the true saint" goes in and out amongst the people and eats and sleeps with them and buys and sells in the market and marries and takes part in social intercourse, and never forgets God for a single moment.

-attributed to Abu Sa'id Abul Khayr

Nonself................................

     The first time I tasted peanut butter cookies, I was at Tassajera Zen Mountain Center in California, and I loved them!  I learned that to make peanut butter cookies, you mix the ingredients to prepare the batter, and then you put each cookie onto a cookie sheet using a spoon.  I imagined that the moment each cookie leaves the bowl of dough and is place onto the tray, it begins to think of itself as separate.  You, the creator of the cookies, know better, and you have a lot of compassion for them.  You know that they are originally all one, and that even now, the happiness of each cookie is still the happiness of all the other cookies.  But they have developed "discriminative perception," and suddenly they set up barriers between themselves.  When you put them in the oven, they begin to talk to each other"  "Get out of my way.  I want to be in the middle."  "I am brown and beautiful and you are ugly!"  "Can't you please spread a little in that direction?"  We have the tendency to behave this way also, and it causes a lot of suffering.  If we know how to touch our nondiscriminating mind, our happiness and the happiness of others will increase manifold.

     We all have the capacity of living with nondiscriminating wisdom, but we have to train ourselves to see in that way, to see that the flower is us, the mountain is us, our parents and our children are all us.  When we see that everyone and everything belongs to the same stream of life, our suffering will vanish.  Nonself is not a doctrine or a philosophy.  It is an insight that can help us live life more deeply, suffer less, and enjoy life more.  We need to live the insight of nonself.

-Thich Nhat Hanh,  The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching:  Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation

Know..................................

"No man is an island,  entire of itself;  every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;  if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were;  any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;  it tolls for thee. "
-John Donne,  Meditation XVII

Whole...................................

God, how I hate the names
of the body's chemicals and anatomy,
the frore and glum department
of its parts, each alone in the scattering
of the experts of Babel.
                                         The body
is a single creature, whole,
its life is one, never less than one, or more,
so is its world, and so
are the two bodies in their love for one another
one.  In ignorance of this
we talk ourselves to death.

-Wendell Berry
Sabbaths,  2005  XVI

The dice of God are always loaded....

     Thus is the universe alive.  All things are moral.  That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law.  We feel its inspiration;  out there in history we can see its fatal strength.  "It is in the world, and the world was made by it."  Justice is not postponed.  A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life.  {Hoi kyboi Dios aei eupiptousi}, - The dice of God are always loaded.  The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.  Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you.  Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.  What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears.  If you see smoke, there must be fire.  If you see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs is there behind.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, as excerpted from his essay, Compensation

Beyond................................

From the A Source of Inspiration blog............

                     How big is big, or even small?
                     A stone, rock, mountain, star.
        Universes beyond what we can comprehend.
                     How big is big or even small?
     We perceive so little, yet think we know so much.
             Until we understand we are One with All.
                     How big is big, or even small?
                     A stone, rock, mountain, star.

Small acts...................................

"We don't change markets, or populations, we change people. One person at a time, at a human level. And often, that change comes from small acts that move us, not from grand pronouncements."
-Seth Godin, as excerpted from here

Beyond............................

I confess that there is nothing to teach:
no religion, no science,
no body of information which
will lead your mind back to the Tao.
Today I speak in this fashion,
tomorrow in another, but
always the Integral Way is
beyond words and beyond mind.

Simply be aware of the oneness of things.

-Verse 8
Hua Hu Ching:  The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu
Brian Browne Walker

Beyond teaching.......................

“Abundance of knowledge does not teach men to be wise.”

“Much learning does not teach understanding.” 

“The awake share a common world, but the asleep turn aside into private worlds.” 

"Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeated all things."

-Heraclitus

Conflict............................

"In mathematics, an integer is a number that isn't divided into fractions.  Just so, a man of integrity isn't divided against himself.  He doesn't think one thing and say another - so he's not in conflict with his own principles."
-Arthur Gordon

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