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Thought of the Week Archives
January 2000
January 3
In his essay [�The Perennial Philosophy,� Aldous] Huxley describes
four central claims of the perennial philosophy: the world and all its
creatures are expressions of an underlying divine reality; by appropriate
training humans can come to known this reality; and they can recognize
their unity with this divine ground. Finally, this recognition of the
divine ground as our true nature is the highest goal of human existence.
According to the perennial philosophy the fundamental nature or substrate
of reality is spirit or consciousness, also known as Brahman, Tao, or
God. This fundamental reality is beyond all qualities, descriptions and
concepts. In �The Great Chain of Being,� Ken Wilber points out that this
fundamental reality also manifests or projects itself as the universe.
This universe is said to be organized or layered in an ontological hierarchy,
or better, holoarchy. This holoarchy of being that constitutes the great
chain ranges from matter through increasingly subtle realms of mind, soul
and spirit. Different traditions use different terms to describe it, but
the general assumptions are the same.
In a materialistic culture human beings usually identify only with
the physical and mental levels of the great chain. Through appropriate
training, however, we can expand our sense of identity to include the
spiritual realm and this movement constitutes development.
Roger Walsh, Ph.D. and Frances Vaughn, Ph.D.
Paths Beyond Ego: The Transpersonal Vision
January 10
... We tend to see the past as a huge receptacle of all the things
that have gone wrong for us, the background that will never leave us,
the times that were better than the present, and the security that we
no longer have. The future, on the other hand, is seen as an enormous,
forboding void in which all sorts of tragic and wonderful things can happen,
full of deadlines and expectations -- all of which take away our experience
of the present.
In fact, the most dysfunctional aspect of our culture's view of time
is that we are either dwelling on the past or worrying about the future;
the present doesn't really seem to exist at all. The challenge of time
and stress seems to come from this lack of the present in our lives. Procrastination,
being too busy, never having enough time for ourselves, worry about deadlines,
fatigue, inability to concentrate, frustration with a lack of efficiency,
and fear about the future all arise from our inability to live in the
present.
The more you expand the present moment, the more you experience the
past and the future as being quite minor. By becoming absorbed in whatever
you're doing (including, by the way, making assessments of past experiences
and planning for the future), you'll be better able to meet the challenge
of living stress-free in the here and now. When you live in the present,
you are without stress, because the worries of the past and the future
cannot touch you. And the more you live in the present, the more efficient
and joyful your live becomes, so that the worries that can lead to stress
disappear.
- Lorna Catford, Ph.D., and Michael Ray, Ph.D.
The Path of the Everyday Hero (p. 125)
January 17, 2000
The word [Ku'oosh, the shaman-medicine man] chose to express "fragile"
was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength
inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early
in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took
a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists
alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with
a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility
that went with being human, old Ku'oosh said, the story behind each word
must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been
said; and this demanded great patience and love.
- Leslie Marmon Silko
Ceremony, p35-36
January 24, 2000
Seizing and blocking opportunity, confusing polarity, disguising tracks
-- these are some of the marks of trickster's intelligence. The last of
them leads to the final item on this initial list: if trickster can disguise
his tracks, surely he can disguise himself. He can encript his own image,
distort it, cover it up. In particular, tricksters are known for changing
their skin. I mean this in two ways: sometimes tricksters alter the appearance
of their skin; sometimes they actually replace one skin with another.
Lewis Hyde
Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth and Art
January 31, 2000
Schorer has said that the mythological image is what gives sense
and organization to experience. A. K. Coomaraswamy went so far as
to say that "myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth
that can be stated in words." All this is because the poetic,
mythical, or mystical mode of vision perceives orders and relationships
which, as I have tried to show, escape factual description. The
factual language dissects and disintegrates experience into categories
and oppositions that cannot be resolved. It is the language of either/or,
and from its standpoint all that is on the dark side of life --
death, evil, and suffering -- cannot be assimilated. There is nothing
for it but to get rid of it....By contrast, the language of myth
and poetry is integrative, for the language of the image is organic
language. Thus is expresses a point of view in which the dark side
of things has its place, or rather, in which the light and dark
are transcended through being seen in the terms of a dramatic unity.
This is the catharsis, or soul-cleansing function, of the tragic
drama
Allan Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity, p.
14-15
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