exploring the perennial tradition

"In one sense we are always traveling, and traveling as if we did not know where we were going. In another sense we have already arrived." (Thomas Merton)

[opaquestrategies]

1. are you settling for some thing(s) solid, consistent, and understandable at the risk of sacrificing the transcendent, the progressing, and the extraordinary?

2. are you folding yourself in half so you can say you want less? 

3. are you more invested in the thing itself, or in the concept of having it?

[philosophybits]

Philosophers are not the people to come to if you want confirmation that the things you love with all your heart are central to the structure of the universe, or that your sense of moral responsibility is ‘rational and objective’ rather than ‘just’ a result of how you were brought up. There are still, as C. S. Peirce put it, 'philosophical slop-shops on every corner’ which will provide such confirmation. But there is a price. To pay the price you have to turn your back on intellectual history and on what Milan Kundera calls 'the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood… the wisdom of the novel’. You risk losing the sense of finitude, and the tolerance, which result from realizing how very many synoptic visions there have been, and how little argument can do to help you choose among them.

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (via philosophybits)

[whentherewerebicycles]

“This is not a time to live without a practice. It is a time when all of us will need the most faithful, self-generated enthusiasm (enthusiasm: to be filled with god) in order to survive in human fashion. Whether we reach this inner state of recognized divinity through prayer, meditation, dancing, swimming, walking, feeding the hungry or enriching the impoverished is immaterial. We will be doubly bereft without some form of practice that connects us, in a caring way, to what begins to feel like a dissolving world. In addition to contemplating the Hopi message: know your garden and where is your water, we must also ask: What is my practice? What is steering this boat that is my fragile human life?”

— Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

[onancientpaths]

Attention is the only faculty of the soul which gives access to God. Mental gymnastics rely on an inferior, discursive form of attention, which reasons. Properly directed, however, this attention may give rise in the soul to another, of the highest kind, which is intuitive attention. Pure, intuitive attention is the only source of perfectly beautiful art, truly original and brilliant scientific discovery, of philosophy which really aspires to wisdom and of true, practical love of one’s neighbour. This kind of attention when turned to God is true prayer.

Simone Weil (via onancientpaths)

[onancientpaths]

What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (via onancientpaths)

[perennialseeker]

I stop before a thick-trunked short-leaning close-to-the-ground tree to pray, a place I've made my shrine, and exhausted from the five-mile run I bow to the east, asking the Light to guide me and illuminate my path, I turn to the south asking the Darkness to befriend me and teach me vigilance, I turn west to my ancestors, thank them for carrying messages to the Creator, then north, where I pray to the great Bear for healing and moral strength.

– Jimmy Santiago Baca

[thecalminside]

“Whatever you resist you become. If you resist anger, you are always angry. If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering. If you resist confusion,you are always confused. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them.”

Adyashanti

[onancientpaths]

Now this truth of our eternity, which dominates our present and augurs of our future, is revealed to us only in the silence of the soul–that is, in the exclusion of foolish thoughts which lead to a puerile and dissipating indulgence in distraction, in the repression of the murmured suggestions that our disordered passions never weary of uttering. Vocation calls for response which, in one effort to surmount self, hears and consents.

A.G. Sertillanges (via onancientpaths)

[perennialseeker]

Taoism offers context for the entire spiritual enterprise in the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching: 'The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.' Buddhism affirms that there is only one of us, and therefore we are each responsible for every link in the web of being. Christianity offers us the unconditional mercy of an incarnational God who permeates the whole of creation with love. Judaism urges us to demonstrate our love for God in the way we treat each other and care for creation. Hinduism kindles the fire of devotion for reunification with the Beloved who is no other than our own true Self. Islam shares the peace that comes with complete submission to the One.

Mirabai Starr in The World Wisdom Bible: A New Testament for a Global Spirituality (2017)

[perennialseeker]

The Moon in Lleyn

The last quarter of the moon of Jesus gives way to the dark; the serpent digests the egg. Here on my knees in this stone church, that is full only of the silent congregation of shadows and the sea's sound, it is easy to believe Yeats was right. Just as though choirs had not sung, shells have swallowed them; the tide laps at the Bible; the bell fetches no people to the brittle miracle of bread. The sand is waiting for the running back of the grains in the wall into its blondglass. Religion is over, and what will emerge from the body of the new moon, no one can say.

But a voice sounds in my ear. Why so fast, mortal? These very seas are baptized. The parish has a saint's name time cannot unfrock. In cities that have outgrown their promise people are becoming pilgrims again, if not to this place, then to the recreation of it in their own spirits. You must remain kneeling. Even as this moon making its way through the earth's cumbersome shadow, prayer, too, has its phases.

–R. S. Thomas

[thelovejournals]

The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living 

(via pearlkillers)

[perennialseeker]

God is not a goal to be achieved. God is a presence to be recognized. Nor is God something that happens at the end of life. On the contrary, God is in every pore of it.

Joan Chittister, Radical Spirit (2017)

[worshipgifs]

“If you’re suffering right now, you don’t have to pretend it’s all good. You don’t have to add, ‘But praise God.’ When Jesus was hours from crucifixion, he didn’t sing in the garden or act hyper-spiritual. He was sweating blood. He asked the Father for a way out. But Jesus ultimately went to that cross with joy: not a shallow consolation that knows no pain, but a joy deepened by sorrow and recognizing the hurt of humanity. God is always trying to make you more human and not less. You can cry out in agony. In that honesty, God is establishing great character in you. Such a Christian is both happier and sadder at the same time, because they long for a better home and already have one.”

— J.S. Park (via jspark3000)

[gatheringbones]

Students at the Institute for Environmental Research at RWTH Aachen discovered something amazing about photosynthesis in undisturbed beech forests. Apparently, the trees synchronize their performance so that they are all equally successful. And that is not what one would expect. Each beech tree grows in a unique location, and conditions can vary greatly in just a few yards. The soil can be stony or loose. It can retain a great deal of water or almost no water. It can be full of nutrients or extremely barren. Accordingly, each tree experiences different growing conditions; therefore, each tree grows more quickly or more slowly and produces more or less sugar or wood, and thus you would expect every tree to be photosynthesizing at a different rate. And that’s what makes the research results so astounding. The rate of photosynthesis is the same for all the trees. The trees, it seems, are equalizing differences between the strong and the weak. Whether they are thick or thin, all members of the same species are using light to produce the same amount of sugar per leaf. This equalization is taking place underground through the roots. There’s obviously a lively exchange going on down there. Whoever has an abundance of sugar hands some over; whoever is running short gets help. Once again, fungi are involved. Their enormous networks act as gigantic redistribution mechanisms. It’s a bit like the way social security systems operate to ensure individual members of society don’t fall too far behind. In such a system, it is not possible for the trees to grow too close to each other. Quite the opposite. Huddling together is desirable and the trunks are often spaced no more than 3 feet apart. Because of this, the crowns remain small and cramped, and even many foresters believe this is not good for the trees. Therefore, the trees are spaced out through felling, meaning that supposedly excess trees are removed. However, colleagues from Lübeck in northern Germany have discovered that a beech forest is more productive when the trees are packed together. A clear annual increase in biomass, above all wood, is proof of the health of the forest throng. When trees grow together, nutrients and water can be optimally divided among them all so that each tree can grow into the best tree it can be. If you “help” individual trees by getting rid of their supposed competition, the remaining trees are bereft. They send messages out to their neighbors in vain, because nothing remains but stumps. Every tree now muddles along on its own, giving rise to great differences in productivity. Some individuals photosynthesize like mad until sugar positively bubbles along their trunk. As a result, they are fit and grow better, but they aren’t particularly long-lived. This is because a tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World Peter Wohlleben, Tim Flannery, and Jane Billinghurst (via gatheringbones)

[joylandkid-deactivated20180715]

forest witch: here grew willows and alders, their trunks twisted like giants’ sinews. around them bark lichen bloomed blue-white in the darkness. it felt like a good place, where there was old magic.

[perennialseeker]

Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (1862)

[accelerationist-king-piccolo]