Stephen Levine: How Soon Will We Accept This Opportunity?

We are motivated more by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive....
 
How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die?
 

― Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last

 

Jack Kornfield: Returning To Our Home

In time we must each awaken. Awakening may hide in our attic for years, waiting until we raise our children or finish our business career. But someday it will appear, to break down the gate and say, "Ready or not, here I am."

Being alive is itself an expression of mystery. The clues to our real nature are always around us. When the mind opens, the body changes, or the heart is touched, all the elements of spiritual life are revealed. Great questioning, unexpected suffering, original innocence - any of these can require us to open beyond our daily routine, to "step out of the bureaucracy of ego," as Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa counseled. Every day brings its own calls back to the spirit, some small, some large, some surprising, some ordinary.

- Jack Kornfield 

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry:

How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path

Gandhi: Essential Unity

I believe in the essential unity of all that lives.

Therefore I believe that if one person gains spiritually,

the whole world gains, and if one person falls,

the world falls to that extent.

- Gandhi

Chris Hedges: Portland Event + Quotes

Chris Hedges will be coming to Portland this week!

June 10, 2015 @ 7:30 pm

Powell's City of Books

1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR

 http://www.powells.com/events/6616/

 

This will be my third or fourth time to see Chris Hedges.

His books are also illuminating and powerful.

Highly recommended!

Peace ~ Molly

Quotes by Chris Hedges

“Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.” ― Chris Hedges

 

******

 

 “Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are seen as maladjusted and in need of assistance. Their attitudes need correction. Once we adopt an upbeat vision of reality, positive things will happen. This belief encourages us to flee from reality when reality does not elicit positive feelings. These specialists in "happiness" have formulated something they call the "Law of Attraction." It argues that we attract those things in life, whether it is money, relationships or employment, which we focus on. Suddenly, abused and battered wives or children, the unemployed, the depressed and mentally ill, the illiterate, the lonely, those grieving for lost loved ones, those crushed by poverty, the terminally ill, those fighting with addictions, those suffering from trauma, those trapped in menial and poorly paid jobs, those whose homes are in foreclosure or who are filing for bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills, are to blame for their negativity. The ideology justifies the cruelty of unfettered capitalism, shifting the blame from the power elite to those they oppress. And many of us have internalized this pernicious message, which in times of difficulty leads to personal despair, passivity and disillusionment.”
― Chris Hedges

 

******

“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” 
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

 

******

 

“If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining…

The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.” ― Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class

 

******

 

 “Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick. ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state.” 
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

 

******

 

“The violent subjugation of the Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghans will only ensure that those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the language we speak to them—violence.” ― Chris Hedges

 

******

 

 “The words consent of the governed have become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science and economics are obsolete. Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests. This elite, in the name of patriotism and democracy, in the name of all the values that were once part of the American system and defined the Protestant work ethic, has systematically destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury, corrupted our democracy, and trashed the financial system. During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting around the corner.” ― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

 

******

 

 

“War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians....

“The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” ― Chris Hedges

Victor Hugo: Nature Speaks

How sad to think that nature speaks

and mankind doesn't listen.

- Victor Hugo, 1840

Naomi Klein: Will He Ever See a Moose?

What gets me most are not the scary scientific studies about melting glaciers, the ones I used to avoid. It's the books I read to my two-year-old. Looking for a Moose is one of his favorites. It's about a bunch of kids that really, really, really want to see a moose. They search high and low - through a forest, a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a mountain, for "a long legged, bulgy nosed, branchy antlered moose." The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page. In the end, the animals all come out of hiding and the ecstatic kids proclaim: "We've never ever seen so many moose!"

On about the seventy-fifth reading, it suddenly hit me: he might never see a moose. I tried to hold it together. I went back to my computer and began to write about my time in northern Alberta, tar sands country, where members of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation told about how the moose had changed - one woman described killing a moose on a hunting trip only to find the the flesh had already turned green. I heard a lot about strange tumors too, which locals assumed had to do with the animals drinking water contaminated by tar sands toxins. But mostly I hear how the moose were simply gone.

And not just in Alberta. "Rapid Climate Changes Turn North Woods into Moose Graveyard," reads a May 2012 headline in Scientific American. A year and a half later, The New York Times was reporting that one of Minnesota's two moose populations had declined from four thousand in the1990s to just one hundred today.

Will he ever see a moose?...

When fear like that used to creep through my armor of climate change denial, I would do my utmost to stuff it away, change the channel, click past it. Now I try to feel it. It seems to me that I owe it to my son, just as we all owe it to ourselves and one another.

But what should we do with this fear that comes from living on a planet that is dying, made less alive every day? First, accept that it won't go away. That it is a fully rational response to the unbearable reality that we are living in a dying world, a world that a great many of us are helping to kill, by doing things like making tea and driving to the grocery store and yes, okay, having kids.

Next, use it. Fear is a survival response. Fear makes us run, it makes us leap, it can make us act superhuman. But we need somewhere to run to. Without that, the fear is only paralyzing. So the real trick, the only hope, really, is to allow the terror of an unlivable future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something much better than many of us have previously dared hope.

Yes, there will be things we will lose, luxuries some of us will have to give up. Whole industries that will disappear. And it's too late to stop climate change from coming; it is already here, and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no matter what we do. But it's not too late to avert the worst, and there is still time to change ourselves so that we are far less brutal to one another when those disasters strike. And that, it seems to me, is worth a great deal.

Because the thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing, is that it changes everything. It changes what we can do, where we can hope for, what we can demand from ourselves and our leaders. It means there is a whole lot of stuff that we have been told is inevitable that simply cannot stand. And it means that a whole lot of stuff we have been told is impossible has to start happening right away.

Can we pull it off? All I know is that nothing is inevitable. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.

- Naomi Klein

Excerpted from the Introduction of This Changes Everything: 

Capitalism vs The Climate

Rumi: Don't Go Back To Sleep

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.
From within, I couldn’t decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
Then I walked outside.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

- Rumi

Rumi: Two Kinds of Intelligence

There are two kinds of intelligence: One acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.

- Rumi

Dalai Lama: If There Is Love

If there is love, there is hope to have real families, real brotherhood, real equanimity, real peace. If the love within your mind is lost, if you continue to see other beings as enemies, then no matter how much knowledge or education you have, no matter how much material progress is made, only suffering and confusion will ensue.

- The Dalai Lama

 

Jack Kornfield: Allowing Our Hearts To Open

We must look at ourselves over and over again in order to learn 

to love, to discover what has kept our hearts closed, 

and what it means to allow our hearts to open.

― Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life