1. 23:27 19th May 2013

    Self Portrait



    It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
    Or many gods.
    I want to know if you belong — or feel abandoned;
    If you know despair
    Or can see it in others.
    I want to know
    If you are prepared to live in the world
    With its harsh need to change you;
    If you can look back with firm eyes
    Saying “this is where I stand.”
    I want to know if you know how to melt
    Into that fierce heat of living
    Falling toward the center of your longing.
    I want to know if you are willing
    To live day by day
    With the consequence of love
    And the bitter unwanted passion
    Of your sure defeat.
    I have been told
    In that fierce embrace
    Even the gods
    Speak of God.

    ~ David Whyte ~

     

  2. 00:05 15th May 2013

    Notes: 1

    Tags: ReligionspiritualityEmergentintegralphilosophy

    The wisdom of the Desert Fathers includes the wisdom that the hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self—to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it. All you have to do is recognize another you “out there”—your other self in the world—for whom you may care as instinctively as you care for yourself. To become that person, even for a moment, is to understand what it means to die to your self. This can be as frightening as it is liberating. It may be the only real spiritual discipline there is.

    – Barbara Brown Taylor, “An Altar in the World”

     

  3. 23:58 11th May 2013

    Tags: ReligionspiritualityEmergentintegral

    Purity

    “But Teilhard points to a different way, a way I believe was pioneered by Jesus. We do not escape the world in order to keep ourselves unstained, rather, we immerse ourselves in the world in a quest both to find God there and to bring God there. Each of us is the image and likeness of God. As Jesus emptied himself (kenosis) of his divinity to embrace the humanness of the incarnation, so each of us — we who are members of the body of Christ, and who have been given the mind of Christ — are invited to do the same thing: empty ourselves of our own need to be pure, clean, unstained, unsullied, and give ourselves away, embracing the fullness of life in all its messiness and brokenness, not so that we may be conformed to the despair we find around us, but rather that we might bring a different consciousness (the mind of Christ, the consciousness of love) into a world that so desperately needs it.

    And as we do this, we find, paradoxically, that our purity lies not in how clean we are but in how loving we are. To be truly loving, we must connect with those we love. Love does not flourish in separation from, but in deeper immersion in, the beloved. And in that, we are healed, we are made whole, we are pure, we are holy.”

     

  4. 23:24

    Tags: spiritualityphilosophyReligion

    “We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.”

    ― Aldous Huxley, Island

     

  5. 22:47 12th Apr 2013

    Notes: 3

    Tags: spiritualityphilosophyintegralinterfaith

    “In this era, to become a spiritual inquirer without social consciousness is a luxury that we can ill afford, and to be a social activist without a scientific understanding of the inner workings of the mind is the worst folly. Neither approach in isolation has had any significant success. There is no question now that an inquirer will have to make an effort to be socially conscious or that an activist will have to be persuaded of the moral crisis in the human psyche, the significance of being attentive to the inner life. The challenge awaiting us is to go much deeper as human beings, to abandon superficial prejudices and preferences, to expand understanding to a global scale, integrating the totality of living, and to become aware of the wholeness of which we are a manifestation.”

    —Vimala Thakar, from Moving in Wholeness

     

  6. 22:45

    Notes: 8

    Tags: artspiritualityReligionintegral

    image: Download

    Santa Tierra  (Holy Earth) by Jade Leyva

    Santa Tierra  (Holy Earth) by Jade Leyva

     

  7. 23:45 11th Apr 2013

    Notes: 1

    Tags: Religionspiritualityart

    image: Download

    Pope Francis meets Patti Smith.

    Pope Francis meets Patti Smith.

     

  8. 23:43

    Notes: 4

    Tags: ReligionspiritualityphilosophyintegralEmergentinterfaith

    There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness. —The Dalai Lama Photograph: The Dalai Lama visits Thomas Merton’s grave in 1997 at the Abbey of Gethsemani.   from the facebook page of Parabola

    There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.
    —The Dalai Lama

    Photograph: The Dalai Lama visits Thomas Merton’s grave in 1997 at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

     

    from the facebook page of Parabola

     

  9. 22:54 10th Apr 2013

    Notes: 23

    Tags: philosophyartDr WhospiritualityEmergent

    “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” - Doctor Who

    “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” - Doctor Who

     

  10. 23:20 7th Apr 2013

    Tags: spiritualityReligionEmergentintegral

    “To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain the sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live.”

    - Abraham Joshua Heschel