To communicate we use metaphors for that which has no name ...
spirit, source, nameless ...
Yet the moment we do speak,
we have turned this mystery into a defined 'thing', a noun,
thus missing the point of its trans-verbal essence.
Can you use the word 'spirit' or 'nameless' with me 
without imagining anything?
If you can, then I want to say:
The nameless is our true essence
manifesting in all the colors of appearances.

NEWSLETTER CONTENT

Greeting
The Mindfulness Lectures
Reflections from the Salt Mines

Dear Mindfulness Community,

A 37-year old mother of two young children has been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. Her expected survival time is about two to three years. Yet none of her doctors or caregivers talk to her about what to her is most obvious and pressing - her death. 

While so many people perpetrate heinous crimes towards their fellow humans and so many people suffer from the most primitive violence against them; while so many people scrupulously take advantage of others and the bounty our planet has to offer and so many people are paralyzed by grinding poverty or destroyed souls; while all this is happening on a large, or more accurately on a phenomenally huge scale, we are sitting here in the comfort of a lucky stroke of destiny ...

... having been born into the wealth of what we call the 'first world', and if lucky, into the healing embrace of decent and loving parents, we muse about mindfulness and liberation, and we believe we know so much about how to help the planet, about how to fix the misery of this world, ...

... meanwhile, even in our own backyards the weather has had enough of humans; mother earth has begun to swat the swarms of parasites destroying its health and shake us off like dogs shake the water off their fur, ...

... meanwhile, while we pray, meditate, go on retreats and cultivate loving-kindness, with no sign of slowing down the train of collective human actions keeps speeding at a furious pace towards the precipice of self-destruction, madly stampeding with righteous determination towards the dubious glory of self-assertion and collective destruction, taking on its path every single living cell with it, ... 

... hoping that somehow, somebody desperate to feed her children by cutting down the last tree and killing the last beast, would not have to do that, would sacrifice her children for all humanity to let the last tree stand and the last beast procreate, and turn the world around for all of us who blindly hope, who piously worship our sacred ideals from the comfort of our iPad, whose foresight goes no further than the next worry that has to be nursed back to its fragile balance ...

What are we doing? 

 TIME TO SIGN UP FOR SATURDAY!

THE MINDFULNESS LECTURES

 


JESUS AND BUDDHA 
EXPLAIN THE BRAIN: 
Religion is not what you think 

 

Saturday, December 6, 2014
3:00pm - 5:00pm   

The idea that religion and the brain are intricately intertwined seems surprising. And yet for years now the Dalai Lama and representatives from other spiritual traditions have dialogued with world-renowned scientists from all over the world under the umbrella of the Mind and Life Institute. What if our ideas about religion and our religious practices are flawed? What if the connotations we associate with the notion of religion are inadequate? What if religion and science make surprisingly cozy bedfellows essential to health and a meaningful life?

 

You are invited to be moved, stimulated, even disturbed as Dr. T. assists our guest lecturers, Jesus and Buddha, in the exploration of who we are and what reality is.

 

* All lectures provide some common-sense directions about how to practice mindfulness.  

REFLECTIONS FROM  
THE SALT MINES

How do we discover spirit moving? A student wrote me the following: 

"After my husband died (and on other dramatic events in my life) it felt cruel and lonely and uncaring to me that seemingly everything else stayed the same. The world went on as usual; especially, for example, the lake, the sky, other people etc...
As I am more aware of the constant flow of change - that nothing can be pinned down - I realize that not only had something changed in my life, but everything else changed at the same time. I feel a bit less alone.
I am still interested in the role that time plays in all that change. I know we have touched on that before, but isn't time necessary for change (it took time for the apple to develop into an apple from everything). This may be a stupid question." 

In the salt mines, we love stupid questions, because they mine the depths. What is beautiful here is the discovery of the taste of the nameless by realizing how 'panta rhei' (= everything flows - Heraclitus), how nothing can be held on to, and how holding on and rigidity isolate us from the deep truth of Reality, causing loneliness. Time then is likely a cognitive construction, a net of thoughts with which we try to catch the air. Embrace the flow of everything in the vast emptiness of space without dimensions, and time may just reveal itself to be nothing more than the sum total of all the lies we live by. For who we really are is timeless Being, with its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere.

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I cannot express enough gratitude for being able to enjoy the privilege of working with so many talented, thoughtful, irreverent, creative and dedicated fellow travelers on this journey of inquiry, transformation and daily life application of what is most important for our human existence.

With kind regards,

Dr. T.
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