Monday 23rd March 2009
"A lot of people who do spiritual work are putting whipped cream on top of garbage"
- Bob Hoffman
"Many people have these moments of awakening, but how many people are prepared to have the diligence, the discipline to do the work on oneself...in order, in the words of Brother Lawrence, "to be able to live in the presence of God", as a daily way.
- Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Many people feel that all they have to do is meditate or hyerventilate and have some experience and that will imply some sort of transformation.
All genuine spiritual work is built on a matrix. Probably three-fourths of the people in this room have had an experience that, if written up well, could compare to those of Meister Eckhart. But are you free from your suffering? From emotional recoil?
Without a suitable vessel to hold the kind of insight that may arise based on a great insight, that experience won't touch you. You may remember it, even for the rest of your life, but you won't be different because of it. Without a matrix to hold an experience - any kind of experience - it won't stick. It is not accessible, and your life doesn't reflect that experience. For your life to change from the way it is now the experiences you have must be integrated into your life.
- Lee Lozowick
Not off to a flying start with my new assignment/experiment, but I'm not too worried...
I'm finding time to write each day but it's not easy, and it's even harder to collect and record my REAL thoughts - not the cleanly laundered thoughts that I usually compose and edit for this blog.
I did walk to work today, but only because of the vow I made to myself, so in a small way this little assignment/experiment is working. The walk is a good 30 minutes and I ask myself why don't I do it more often?....
Felt guilty for missing practice with Kosta on Saturday and only doing 10 minutes of stretching this morning so I'll have to do my additional 6am practice on Wednesday or Friday this week.
Meditation is happening - I'm making the time to sit at night, but the quality of my meditation is poor. Too many monkeys in there.
2 comments:
...the quality of my meditation is poor. Too many monkeys in there.
I find myself making similar judgments all the time. When I'm a bit mindful of my own judgments, I tell myself a story about karma seeds that I planted days and weeks and years ago, sprouting and growing to become a particular thought that pops up in my mind when I sit to meditate. I tell myself that part of the value of meditation is to enable those karma seeds to grow in an environment where I can see them directly and choose whether or how to respond to them, rather than having them arise when I'm not conscious of them at all, and have them steer my life without my awareness. Like weeds in a garden, I'd rather have them sprout while I'm there to weed them out than when I'm gone for a couple of days.
Wonderful insight...as always...thank you.
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