God Beauty Perfection Love :: Synonyms
Simplicity
The urge to write hasn’t appeared often in my life of late. Every now and again, though. A friend posted this image on Facebook with the observation, “love the simplicity of this!” Something in the image and that thought gave rise to these words.
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Sticks and Stones
Metaphors pass through a clear spirit.
No harm.
No armor or defences required.
Unless you allow your mind to manifest them.
Peace & Love
Less and less am I concerned
with what I or others perceive to be
right and wrong
good and evil
proper and improper
beautiful and ugly…
These seem to me distractions
from the core practices of spirituality:
Experience peace
Express love
Within the Broken Lies the Beautiful
And so it goes, on and on,
The teacher and the lesson.
Is the conception of 'self' false?
A Facebook friend posted this image today and it jarred loose some thoughts.
False self…
It’s very popular to denigrate the ego, and we are often taught that only by annihilating it can we achieve enlightenment. But I think my spirit-guide would have me thank my ego. Without it, I would never have survived because, no matter how ultimately self-destructive our ego’s perceptions are, there is no part of us with a more powerful will to exist. At some points in all our lives, the ego is the only self we may know. It keeps us alive until we can learn about our other selves.
So the ego is a true aspect of self, though one whose value diminishes as we become more enlightened. As we move along that path, its influence weakens. But it is there for us when we are weak, when we are trying to discover ourselves, it helps us set boundaries when we need them, reminds us when we are failing to care for our physical selves. The ego is the well for our pain which we must dip into, time and again, in order to learn that emotional and spiritual pain is something we create in ourselves.
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The Truth: Next Exit
Truth is a bit of a scary concept to me, and an even more disturbing quantity when wielded by the minds of any but the truly enlightened. Whenever I find myself speaking capitol “T” truths, it’s time to get off at the next exit, or at least find a rest stop.
I recognize certain Truths … we live, we die, we eat, we love, we speak in fancy wordy ways … but these are so fundamentally self-evident as to be the first steps of a spiritual path to self-awareness … the stillness begins with simply observing these most simple of truths — in ourselves at first, then in others.
On Wings of Fire
Carrying the burdens of others...
I’m going to tell you a story about someone who became a part of my life in a way few other people ever experience. Well, I wonder about that. I wonder how many other people go about their day-to-day lives only vaguely aware that there’s something unusual going on in their life, but just can’t put their finger on it.
That verse, from Pink Floyd‘s album, The Wall, rose into my awareness like blinking neon lights in center frame. A bit ironic, given the nature of its meaning. But it acknowledged a vague sense of mine. It seemed to me I was often catching a glimpse of something, out of the corner of my mind’s eye, but it would cloud itself in a misty withdrawal whenever my mind would turn to it. And I could go back to being comfortably numb. Or, rather, uncomfortably numb. Had it been comfortable, I wouldn’t be writing this now. This is a story about how I did put my finger on it, and how music and a book played a part in the journey.
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I envelop myself in words