Elizabeth Barberi - excerpts from Matter of SpiritWhen I am using all my daily energy for God's purposes, I feel that I have come home... You would think I'd stay there, but I don't.
Body and spirit are both expressions of God... Even though each is good, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. A woman (or man) can focus too much on the material world or on herself. If she does, she may believe that she is better than everybody else. She might ignore the views of others, believe that goodness is based on wealth, or seek satisfaction through self-indulgence. On the other hand... If she thinks that the material world is fundamentally bad, she may try to escape into spirituality... she might think of herself as a doormat to be walked over... forget to provide for her own needs... dislike her own body and welcome physical suffering.
People are complex and can hold more than one value system. That makes it possible to alternate between doing too much and too little... In varying situations I have had either too high or too low an opinion of myself... In some situations I am reluctant to say what I think; at other times I fail to listen or insist I am right. I have certainly (eaten) more food than I needed...
Of all (these) I think the expectation of suffering has had the biggest impact on my life. Even my first ideal, "...to be one with God," became skewed by negative beliefs I had about myself. I thought that in order to be spiritual I needed to somehow erase myself. To do this, I often suppressed my feelings. Even though I gained in spiritual awareness by using an ideal, I simultaneously developed hypersensitivities and other health problems. Now I try hard to discover... attitudes I hold that invite illness or difficult situations.
Actually God wants me to have a loving heart, not a destroyed body... I was startled to realize that there is no evidence Jesus had health problems... This convinced me that it must be possible to have a healthy spirit and healthy body at the same time. I decided to claim the healthiness I saw in Jesus... I then prayed for God to make my body match my new expectations of healthiness. My health made a sudden turn toward normality and the process moved swiftly.
...I chose (the negative attitudes I have held) because I thought they would bring me spiritual growth... (but) these attitudes still damaged my health. Choice is so important. God gives each of us the right to make our own choices... The choices we make determine the course of our lives...
Even though I chose some bad attitudes, God did not overrule my choices. God gave an instant response to prayers about my broken arm. But when I prayed about allergies God seemed to be deaf. I believe that prayer does not heal things we have chosen for ourselves... Perhaps because God does not interfere in choices, illnesses that come directly from choices are outside God's area of activity. Having reached this way of thinking, I tried praying for God to throw out all the wrong choices I had made... (but) the attempt failed. In my experience, God has not eliminated my negative attitudes in response to generalized prayers... (I must) first recognize what negative attitude I am holding. If I name the attitude and ask God to remove it, it is done.
(One) attitude was the desire to be thought well of by other people... not an uncommon attitude. I had tried for a number of years to free myself from it but (it) was stubbornly persistent. So I prayed for help removing the attitude. A week later I realized that I had not had that attitude for the entire week. The week has now become years... I am delighted.
© Elizabeth Barberi, Matter of Spirit, Salisbury, CT: Spiritual Understanding Network, LLC. 2004, p. 137-140.
visit their website - http://www.matterofspirit.com
Paul Klee
........May I use a simile, the simile of the tree? The artist has studied this world of variety and has, we may suppose, unobtrusively found his way in it. His sense of direction has brought order into the passing stream of image and experience. This sense of direction in nature and life, this branching and spreading array, I shall compare with the root of the tree.
........From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree. Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow, he guides the vision on into his work. As, in full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and space, so with his work.
........Nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its root. Between above and below can be no mirrored reflection. It is obvious that different functions expanding in different elements must produce divergences. But it is just the artist who at times is denied those departures from nature which his art demands. He has even been charged with incompetence and deliberate distortion.
........And yet, standing at his appointed place, the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules--he transmits. His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.........Presumptuous is the artist who does not follow his road through to the end. But chosen are those artists who penetrate to the region of that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution. There, where the powerhouse of all time and space--call it the brain or heart of creation--activates every function; who is the artist who would not dwell there? In the womb of nature, at the source of creation, where the secret key to all lies guarded.
........But not all enter. Each should follow where the pulse of his own heart leads.... Our pounding heart drives us down, deep down to the source of all. What springs from this source--whatever it may be called, dream, idea or fantasy--must be taken seriously only if it unites with the proper creative means to form a work of art.
........Then those curiosities become realities--realities of art which help to lift life out of its mediocrity. For not only do they more or less revitalize the visible, but they also make secret visions visible.
from a 1924 lecture at the Bauhaus, 'On Modern Art', quoted in An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, 1988, by Roger Lipsey, pub Shambhala
He Turns Boys Into Men
Joe Ehrmann, a former NFL star, now football coach at Gilman High School in Baltimore, MD, along with his many other roles in the community, has a new approach that is revolutionizing coaching in America. The Governor of Maryland called him, "...a very unique man. Gentle. Principled. Committed. And effective."
Gilman finished three of the last six seasons undefeated and No. 1 in Baltimore. In 2002, they ranked No. 1 in Maryland and No. 14 nationally. But Ehrmann says, "...winning is only a byproduct of everything else we do - and it's certainly not the way we evaluate ourselves."
Everything Ehrmann teaches at Gilman stems from his belief that our society does a horrible job of teaching boys how to be men and that virtually every problem we face can somehow be traced back to this failure. That is why he developed a program called Building Men for Others, which has become the signature philosophy of Gilman football. This is football? To Ehrmann the whole purpose is to totally redefine what it means to be a man.
The first step is to tear down what Ehrmann says are the standard criteria - athletic ability, sexual conquest and economic success - that are constantly held up in our culture as measurements of manhood.
"Those are the three lies that make up what I call 'false masculinity,'" Ehrmann says. "The problem is that it sets men up for tremendous failures in our lives. Because it gives us this concept that what we need to do as men is compare what we have and compete with others for what they have.
"As a young boy, I'm going to compare my athletic ability to yours and compete for whatever attention that brings. When I get older, I'm going to compare my girlfriend to yours and compete for whatever status I can acquire by being with the prettiest or the coolest or the best girl I can get. Ultimately, as adults, we compare bank accounts and job titles, houses and cars, and we compete for the amount of security and power that those represent.
"We compare, we compete. That's all we ever do. It leaves most men feeling isolated and alone. And it destroys any concept of community."
Ehrmann's solution - "strategic masculinity" - is based on only two things: relationships and having a cause beyond yourself.
"Masculinity, first and foremost, ought to be defined in terms of relationships", Ehrmann says. "It ought to be taught in terms of the capacity to love and to be loved. It comes down to this: What kind of father are you? What kind of husband are you? What kind of coach or teammate are you? What kind of son are you? What kind of friend are you? Success comes in terms of relationships.
"And then all of us ought to have some kind of cause, some kind of purpose in our lives that's bigger than our own individual hopes, dreams, wants and desires. At the end of our life, we ought to be able to look back over it from our deathbed and know that somehow the world is a better place because we lived, we loved, we were other-centered, other-focused."
How is all of this taught within the context of football?
From the first day of practice the players are bombarded with stories and lessons about being a man built for others. One player said, "All the stuff about love and relationships - I didn't really understand why it was part of football. After a while, though, getting to know some of the older guys on the team, it was the first time I've ever been around friends who really cared about me."
The coaches tell their players they expect greatness out of them. But the only way they will measure greatness is by the impact the boys make on other people's lives. Ultimately they should constantly base their actions and thoughts on one simple question: What can I do for you?
No boy is cut from the team based on athletic ability. Every senior plays - and not only late in lopsided games. Coaches always teach by building up instead of tearing down. Ehrmann says, "...never shame a boy but correct him in an uplifting and loving way."
Before the last game, each senior stands before his teammates and coaches to read an essay titled "How I Want To Be Remembered When I Die."
Here's one: "David was a man who fought for justice and accepted the consequences of his actions. He was not a man who would allow poverty, abuse, racism or any sort of oppression to take place in his presence. David carried with him the knowledge and pride of being a man built for others."
The most important coach in America sat back and smiled. Win or lose on the field of play, Joe Ehrmann had already scored the kind of victory that would last a lifetime.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Marx is the author of "Season of Life," a book about Joe Ehrmann, published August, 2004 by Simon & Schuster.
Adam and Eve
* The mind is fertile ground for concepts, ideas, and opinions. If someone tells us a lie and we believe it, that lie takes root in our mind and can grow big and strong, like a tree. One little lie can be very contagious, spreading its seeds from person to person when we share it with others.
* Knowledge goes into our mind and reproduces a structure inside our head, which is everything that we know. With all that knowledge in our head, we only perceive what we believe; we only perceive our own knowledge. And what is it that we know? Mostly lies.
* Once the Tree of Knowledge is alive in our mind, we hear the fallen angel talking very loudly. That voice never stops judging. It tells us what is right and what is wrong, what is beautiful and what is ugly. The storyteller is born inside our head, and survives inside our head because we feed it with our faith.
* Heaven exists when our spiritual eyes are open, when we perceive the world through the eyes of truth. Once lies hook our attention, our spiritual eyes are closed. We fall from the dream of heaven and begin to live the dream of hell.
* Heaven belongs to us because we are the children of heaven. The voice in our head doesn't belong to us. When we are born, we don't have that voice. Thinking comes after we learn -- first the language, then different points of view, then all the judgments and lies. The voice of knowledge comes as we accumulate knowledge.
* Before we eat the lies that come with knowledge, we live in truth. We speak only truth. We live in love without any fear. Once we have knowledge, we judge ourselves as no longer good enough; we feel guilt, shame, and the need to be punished. We begin to dream lies, and we separate from God.
* In the moment when we separate from God, we begin to search for God, for the love we believe we don't have. Humans are continually searching for justice, for beauty, for truth -- for the way we used to be before we believed in lies. We are searching for our authentic self.
from The Voice of Knowlege by Don Miguel Ruiz with Janet Mills, 2004, Amber-Allen Pub.
David SmithThe Question -- what is your hope
I would like to make sculpture that would rise from water and tower in the air --
that carried conviction and vision that had not existed before
that rose from a natural pool of clear water to sandy shores with rocks and plants
that men could view as natural without reverence or awe
but to whom such things were natural because they were
statements of peaceful pursuit -- and joined in the phenomenon of life
Emerging from unpolluted water at which men could bathe and animals drink -- that
harboured fish and clams and all things natural to it
I don't want to repeat the accepted fact, moralize or praise the past or sell a product
I want it to show the man made wonder that flowing water,
rocks, clouds, vegetation, have for a man in peace who glorifies in existence
this sculpture will not be the mystical abode of power, of wealth, of religion,
Its existence will be its statement
It will not be a scorned ornament on a money changers temple or a house of fear
It will not be a tower of elevators and plumbing with every
room rented, deductions, taxes, allowing for depreciation
amortization yielding a percentage in dividends
It will say that in peace we have time
that a man has vision, has been fed, has worked
it will not incite greed or war
That hands and mind and tools and material made a
symbol to the elevation of vision
It will not be a pyramid to hide a royal corpse from pillage
It has no roof to be supported by burdened maidens
lt has no bells to beat the heads of sinners
or clap the traps of hypocrites, no benediction
falls from its lights, no fears from its shadow
this vision cannot be of a single mind -- a single concept,
it is a small tooth in the gear of man,
it was the wish incision in a cave,
the devotion of a stone hewer at Memphis
the hope of a Congo hunter
It may be a sculpture to hold in the hand that will not seek to outdo by bulky grandeur
which to each man, one at a time, offers a marvel, of close communion,
a symbol which answers to the holders vision,
correlates the forms of woman and nature,
stimulates the recall sense of pleasurable emotion, that
momentarily rewards for the battle of beingThe observations by David Smith originally appeared in ART IN AMERICA, January-February, 1966 and were reprinted in the catalog 'David Smith', Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY, October, 1971 through the courtesy of the author, Cleve Gray.
Isamu Noguchi
I don't think that art comes from art... I think it comes from the awakening person. Awakening is what you might call the spiritual. It is a linkage to something flowing... through the air, and I can put my finger on it and plug in...
[Everything] tends toward awakening... I would say from my own experience that the motivation (for art) doesn't come from religious formulations or anything of that kind... (which) are, in a sense, refractions of the flow.
With some people, it comes with less obstruction... The artist tries to overcome [barriers], especially barriers of the self and what one thinks about art... (These barriers can become)... in time an opportunity...
from an interview with Roger Lipsey (4/87), published in
An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, 1988. pp. 355-6.
The Lifeful WayWe do not get to choose what happens to us in life. We can exercise some influence over what experiences come our way, but ultimately many things will happen to us that we don't choose. We do, however, have complete freedom to choose how we respond to what happens to us.
The Lifeful Way is a conscious decision to exercise this choice by responding to the experience of life - no matter what it sends our way - with intelligent love. [This] is the only response that increases goodness and spiritual wellness... on the individual as well as the social level... any [other] response... simply increases the very things we're trying to reduce in our world. If someone causes harm to life we can say they are acting "deathfully." Yet if we respond to them in a way that causes harm to life we are simply contributing more deathfulness to the world - no matter how "justified" we feel by their actions. This deathfulness will have a harmful effect on us personally and on our world as well.
... most people are not completely lifeful or completely deathful but rather somewhere between these two extremes. We can know where we are on this continuum simply by looking at the fruit of our lives... If you're... feeling defeated, chronically angry and hopeless, these are fruits of deathful ways... Lifefulness... does not produce this kind of fruit, but rather its opposite.
And ... looking at our world can tell us where we are socially and globally. ...greed, despair, crime, violence, racism, poverty, child abuse, rage, dishonest government, overflowing prisons, ghettos... are the collective results of deathful thinking ... [we should] 1) live in ways that do not produce such conditions in the first place or 2) respond intelligently to them after we have produced them.
We need to be about the business of waking up and living lifefully... by promoting the basic teachings of The Lifeful Way... first on the personal, then on the social level.
The Lifeful Way - visit their website - http://www.lifefulway.org/
happiness
the bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp
john berry, flight of white crows
depend not on another, but lean instead on thyself... true happiness is born of self-reliance
the laws of manu
source ....the quotations page .... http://www.quotationspage.com/
Baba Muktananda on war
Why should you be under the shadow of any fear? Even if there were no war, are we going to live forever? There are many countries which do not get involved in Wars. Do the people there enjoy everlasting life?
God is performing three functions constantly: creation, sustenance, and
destruction. War is nothing but the destructive aspect of God.The wars that were fought in ancient times, particularly in ancient India, were fought under certain principles. I am not talking about modern wars. In those days inhuman tactics were not used. Sources of drinking water were not poisoned, children and old men were not massacred and cities and towns were not set on fire at night. In the Mahabharata certain principles relating to war were laid down. A warrior must not kill women, he must not kill children, he must particularly take care of pregnant women, and he must not kill the aged. Warriors were supposed to fight only with warriors. Modern war is, however, very different. It doesn't seem to follow any principles.
Just as man changes his character according to the age he lives in, wars also change their character according to the age in which they are fought. Whether a war is just or unjust, it springs from attachment and aversion. It springs from desire.
There have been so many wars in the past; why should you be scared of future wars? Whatever is inevitable will happen. If a war has to happen, it will happen; nobody can prevent it. But first you should think about the war going on inside you, and that war is far more destructive than any outer war.
... Even a nuclear war will not last long. The war inside you lasts all the time, and it is far more dangerous than any outer war. You should not worry about outer wars; worry about the inner war. The irony of your life is that you want peace, but what you get inside is agitation; you want love, but what you feel inside is hatred. You want serenity, but what you find inside is disturbance. First you should understand this contradiction and try to remove it from your life.
It all depends on what the trend of the time is. There is a time when there is a surge of creative activity, with scientists, engineers, and architects building up things; and then there comes a time for destruction, when bombs are manufactured and whatever has been built up is destroyed. So there are doers of good as well as doers of evil in this world. It has been like this from time immemorial, and it will continue to be like this until the end of the world.
... The world doesn't have much value, it may end any day. So you should concentrate on the inner Self. One wonders how many kings and warriors and artists and writers have appeared on the scene of this world and disappeared. Some of them were creative while others were destructive, but none of them survived. There was a poet-saint, a very good poet-saint called Narayana and he says that one should be aware of two things in the world. The first is the Lord, and the second is death.
from Satsang With Baba , Vol. 5 Copyright 1978
Gurudev Siddha Peetha, Ganeshpuri, India
thomas jefferson
"Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:
(1) Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
(2) Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depository of the public interests.
In every country these two parties exist; and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves."
from a letter to Henry Lee, August 10, 1824.
Fear and distrust are signs of the ego asserting itself, while the soul is expressed in feelings of love, humility and identification with all other souls. Thus the two parties described by Jefferson are largely dominated by: (1) the mentality of the ego and (2) the soul.
Of course many individuals are exceptions to this. We all deal daily with the struggle between ego and soul and there are wide differences in the outcome for different people and at different moments, from one extreme to the other.
To know where we stand at this moment in this continuum we need to ask: is my worldview based in fear, pride and distrust - or love, humility and identification with others? Only by answering this honestly to ourselves can we begin to make progress in honoring the higher aspects of our persona.
comments by tk, 12/6/00 to 3/12/04
albert einstein
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details.""Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."
"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)
Copyright: Kevin Harris 1995 (may be freely distributed with this acknowledgement)
justice and punishmentdharma talk given by Thich Nhat Hanh on august 4, 1998 in Plum Village, France.
questions and answers
Here is another related question: Thay, what are your views on capital punishment? Suppose someone has killed ten children. Why should he be allowed to live on?
Ten people are dead; now you want another one, you want eleven. A person who has killed ten children is a sick person. Of course we want to lock him up to prevent him killing more, but that is a sick person, and we have to find ways to help that person. Killing him does not help him, and does not help us. There are others like him in society, and looking at him deeply we know that something is wrong with our society; our society has created people like that. Therefore, looking at him, we can see in the light of interbeing the other elements that have produced him. That is how your understanding arises in yourself, and then you see that that person is there for you to help, and not to punish. Of course you have to lock him up for the safety of other children, but locking him up is not the only thing you can do. We can do other things to help him. Punishing is not the only thing, we can do much better.
Recently Buddhist books on meditation, Buddhist magazines, and even Dharma talks have been offered in prisons, and many inmates have been practicing accordingly. Several of them have gotten relief, and have been able to live peacefully in prison. I myself get a number of letters from prisoners, and many of them come from prisons in North America - who have read my books. One person said, "Thay, when I stand above the staircase and look down, and see other inmates running up and down, I can see their suffering, their agitation. I hope they can do as I do, walking down and up the staircase in mindfulness, following my breathing. When I do that, I feel peace within myself, and when I feel peace within myself I can see very clearly the suffering of other inmates." That person has been able to create, to give rise to the compassion within him. You know, when we have compassion in our hearts, we don't suffer too much. When compassion is there in our hearts, we are not the person who suffers the most.
There is another prisoner who received a copy of Being Peace, a photocopy, and later on he got the real book Being Peace, so he had two copies. He had stopped smoking, but he still kept some tobacco. One day the fellow next to his cell banged on the wall and shouted to ask for some tobacco. Although he did not smoke anymore, he wanted to offer him this tobacco. And he took the first page of Being Peace, and he wrapped some tobacco in it, and sneaked it to the other side, with the hope that the other person might enjoy being peace. He himself had enjoyed being peace, and had started practicing sitting meditation in his cell. He just gave a small amount of that tobacco, and the next time he used page two, then page three. He was on death row. Finally he had transferred the whole set of copied pages to the other prisoner. It was wonderful - the other prisoner began to practice in his cell, and became very quiet. In the beginning he had banged, and shouted, and cursed. But finally he became very subdued and very calm, and he was released. In order to thank the other person, he passed in front of the cell, and they looked at each other, and together they recited one sentence from the book, which they both knew by heart. That prisoner on death row was able to write a whole book on his practice, within his cell, and the book has been published by a publisher outside.
So it is clear that punishment is not the only thing we can do. There is much more we can do in order to help. Transformation and healing is possible in these difficult situations. Another prisoner wrote to me, saying, "Thay, I am very surprised to find that I can still retain my humanness in prison, and that I have not gone mad. That is thanks to the practice. My only hope is that one day when I am released, and someone comes to see me and looks at my face, and says, 'With the amount of suffering he endured in prison, yet he can look like that", that would be wonderful, the greatest reward that I could get." He said that the conditions in which he lived, the suffering he endured in jail, you could not imagine. But he has managed, in order to survive, to keep his humanness alive through all these difficulties. If we suffer less outside here, and have a little bit of time, of course we can do something to help those inside. That is why killing that person only reveals our weakness. We surrender. We don't know what to do any more, and we give up. That is a cry of despair, when you have to kill people. I hope that together we can practice looking deeply in order to find better means than to approve of capital punishment. My answer to the question is that not only can we reconcile justice and compassion, but we can also demonstrate that true justice must have compassion and understanding in it.© Thich Nhat Hanh
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