Zigzag Idiot

The Teacher who led me through ACIM in 2015 had by that time already been through the Course 3 or 4 maybe 5 times. He stressed the importance of The Lessons of the Holy Spirit in Chapter 6 when we got to that point. A. To Have, Give All to All B. To Have Peace, Teach Peace to Learn It C. Be Vigilant Only for God and His Kingdom Some of the text here: C. Be Vigilant Only for God and His Kingdom T-6.V.C.1. We said before that the Holy Spirit is evaluative, and must be. 2 He sorts out the true from the false in your mind, and teaches you to judge every thought you allow to enter it in the light of what God put there. 3 Whatever is in accord with this light He retains, to strengthen the Kingdom in you. 4 What is partly in accord with it He accepts and purifies. 5 But what is out of accord entirely He rejects by judging against. 6 This is how He keeps the Kingdom perfectly consistent and perfectly unified. 7 Remember, however, that what the Holy Spirit rejects the ego accepts. 8 This is because they are in fundamental disagreement about everything, being in fundamental disagreement about what you are. 9 The ego's beliefs on this crucial issue vary, and that is why it promotes different moods. 10 The Holy Spirit never varies on this point, and so the one mood He engenders is joy. 11 He protects it by rejecting everything that does not foster joy, and so He alone can keep you wholly joyous. T-6.V.C.2. The Holy Spirit does not teach you to judge others, because He does not want you to teach error and learn it yourself. 2 He would hardly be consistent if He allowed you to strengthen what you must learn to avoid. 3 In the mind of the thinker, then, He is judgmental, but only in order to unify the mind so it can perceive without judgment. 4 This enables the mind to teach without judgment, and therefore to learn to be without judgment. 5 The undoing is necessary only in your mind, so that you will not project, instead of extend. 6 God Himself has established what you can extend with perfect safety. 7 Therefore, the Holy Spirit's third lesson is: 8 Be vigilant only for God and His Kingdom. T-6.V.C.3. This is a major step toward fundamental change. 2 Yet it still has an aspect of thought reversal, since it implies that there is something you must be vigilant against. 3 It has advanced far from the first lesson, which is merely the beginning of the thought reversal, and also from the second, which is essentially the identification of what is more desirable. 4 This step, which follows from the second as the second follows from the first, emphasizes the dichotomy between the desirable and the undesirable. 5 It therefore makes the ultimate choice inevitable. T-6.V.C.4. While the first step seems to increase conflict and the second may still entail conflict to some extent, this step calls for consistent vigilance against it. 2 I have already told you that you can be as vigilant against the ego as for it. 3 This lesson teaches not only that you can be, but that you must be. 4 It does not concern itself with order of difficulty, but with clear-cut priority for vigilance. 5 This lesson is unequivocal in that it teaches there must be no exceptions, although it does not deny that the temptation to make exceptions will occur. 6 Here, then, your consistency is called on despite chaos. 7 Yet chaos and consistency cannot coexist for long, since they are mutually exclusive. 8 As long as you must be vigilant against anything, however, you are not recognizing this mutual exclusiveness, and still believe that you can choose either one. 9 By teaching what to choose, the Holy Spirit will ultimately teach you that you need not choose at all. 10 This will finally liberate your mind from choice, and direct it towards creation within the Kingdom. T-6.V.C.5. Choosing through the Holy Spirit will lead you to the Kingdom. 2 You create by your true being, but what you are you must learn to remember. 3 The way to remember it is inherent in the third step, which brings together the lessons implied in the others, and goes beyond them towards real integration. 4 If you allow yourself to have in your mind only what God put there, you are acknowledging your mind as God created it. 5 Therefore, you are accepting it as it is. 6 Since it is whole, you are teaching peace because you believe in it. 7 The final step will still be taken for you by God, but by the third step the Holy Spirit has prepared you for God. 8 He is getting you ready for the translation of having into being by the very nature of the steps you must take with Him. I get new insights each time I read and reread the text. For those who are curious about more of the text I'll leave this link. https://acourseinmiraclesnow.com/course-miracles-chapter-6-v-lessons-holy-spirit/

I gathered some excerpts on Awareness that I like from the Ridhwan Glossary. The Ego Responds to Anxiety by Cutting off Awareness As awareness expands, the person becomes aware first of the necessity to find ways of dealing with his superego. This is the first important task. Without this ability, the individual will find it extremely difficult to expand his awareness and deal with his unconscious. The reason is that the status quo of the personality is maintained by the superego. In particular, the status quo is continued by keeping the unconscious unconscious, by enforcing the defensive mechanisms of the ego. The agent that enforces these defensive functions is the superego. We need to understand the process of repression in order to understand this mechanism more fully: awareness of unconscious material causes anxiety to the ego. The ego responds to anxiety with repression; it cuts off awareness from the arising unconscious material. In this way it avoids experiencing the anxiety and thus avoids the disintegrating effect of the anxiety on the ego structure. Essence with the Elixir of Enlightenment, pg. 136 What Awareness Means Being aware means immediacy. It means that the tentacles of my soul are wrapping themselves around the feeling, penetrating it and all its parts, feeling it from inside and outside—because my awareness extends everywhere. If I am not fully aware of the situation, how am I going to find out the truth about it? And if I am not interested in paying attention to what is happening now, what does it mean when I say that I love being myself? When you love somebody, you want to find out everything about them, don’t you? When you love something, what do you want to do with it? You want to know it. Love always translates into awareness, into knowing. If you love somebody, you want to see them, you want to know them, you want to be as completely familiar with them as possible. If you are really interested in being yourself, that interest begins with the awareness of where you are at this very moment. Being who you are can only arise from the love of being where you are. The Unfolding Now, pg. 14 Pure Awareness is Specifically Transcendence of the Concept of Being Since pure awareness is beyond knowing, the experience is totally nonconceptual. There is awareness of awareness, which is the presence of awareness, but this presence is not felt as presence. Nonconceptual awareness is beyond the concept of being, so we cannot experience or describe it as being or presence. We might then think that it must be nonbeing, but nonbeing is also a concept, the opposite of being. Being and nonbeing constitute a pair of mutually defining concepts; like all conceptual pairs, neither exists without the other. Experientially, being is presence and nonbeing is absence; the latter is often referred to as emptiness. Because pure awareness is free from the cognitive element, it transcends all concepts, but it is specifically the transcendence of the concept of being. By transcending being it also transcends nonbeing, emptiness. Experientially we feel it as simultaneous presence and absence, being and nonbeing. But this is only when we begin to view it conceptually. When the experience is full and complete we cannot say it is both presence and absence, nor neither. In fact, it does not occur to us to say anything about it, for to speak is to conceptualize, while here we are absolutely in the moment, beyond all mind and speaking. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 327 This last excerpt reminds me of a quote Ocke de Boer uses to start off chapter 16 in his book Higher Being Bodies. The reference His gives for it is Wei - Wu- Wei, All Else is Bondage: Non-volitional Living (Fairfield Iowa; Sunstar publishing, 2002), page 53. I am the absence of my presence and I am the absence of the presence of my absence In searching for this last quote I discovered Ocke's website Higher Being Bodies is no longer up. The main feature of which was his article/interview A dialogue with Ocke was was extremely rich. Bummer, I hope it gets put back up,,,, Ocke has many interesting ideas he conveys such as: The chakras are the sense organs of the Kedsjan (Astral) body. I don't take ideas such as this as a belief but I hold them in the category of 'as if' and ponder them at times.

I printed this off back in 2007. Although it is wrinkled from being shuffled around over the years, I'm glad I did because I can no longer find it on the School of Wisdom website. It is about what the center of The Wheel represents - Awareness. I don't know if Arnold Keyserling penned it or R.C.L. who was a student of his and has remained a friend. Arnold passed away in 2005. He was a friend and student of Gurdjieff's during his Paris days after WW2.

Hexagram 15; Modesty - is one of my favorite hexagrams in ICHING The Oracle of the Cosmic Way. I guess the fact that I rarely get it may be saying something in itself. I did get it this morning though in my second hexagram. My first was hexagram 52; Mediating- with just one changing line. This is not all of the general commentary on hexagram 15-Modesty. There are still 2 more pages that I won't include but if you've read this far you've gotten a sample of some of this books treasures. The three virtues- Modesty Equality Uniqueness = Love

Jana Dixon describing an episode during a phrase of her Kundalini rising (awakening) that I found humorous. She then goes on to quote Dave Chapelle. How can you not like that? "A funny thing happened during a massive 4 day ecstasy period around the full moon in January 2007 (when the earth was closest to the sun). I was in a hardware store floating around in ecstasy looking for things and an Australian sheep dog barked at me. I made a joke that it was because the dog is Australian and I am a New Zealander, but really I knew he was barking at the ecstasy energy, which vicariously inflates the heart fields of lifeforms within its reach. The owner eyed me suspiciously however...perhaps I could have told the owner that the dog was barking due to my radically magnified heart field...but that would be just too much information for a non-initiate (trancer). While there is some volition and cooperation needed, mostly as “surrender to Grace,” it is the "alchemy" itself that does all the "work." Altho people have been trying for centuries, you cannot really force the heart to open, it opens of its own accord in its own time, and in its own pace...and it doesn't have a lot to do with our will, volition or ego control. When the cerebrospinal fluid is adequately ionized, and the amrita substances filter into the blood+lymph that goes to the right side of the heart…then the heart goes solar and circuitry in the brain is transformed at a faster rate...the whole body is transfigured within the magnified heart field. The ecstatic heart is obviously palpable to the person who owns it, and also at an unconscious level by those who come within the heart’s field. I think eventually scientists are probably going to call this energy scalar energy, if the research done at Heartmath institute is any indication. After coming down from a period of ecstasy you might feel a withdrawal-like hangover. Comprising of a sense of disorientation, clouding and sense of loss in the brainstem area. Baths, walking, stretching, rebounding, breathing, drinking water, toning and meditating with the mindseye on the brainstem will help metabolize the down-cycle." http://www.appliedmeditation.org/The_Heart/articles_joseph_chilton_pearce.shtml “Wisdom arises when the vibratory capacity of an individual, or a group, increases to a point of direct apprehension of the underlying pattern, or unity of phenomenon is possible. This capacity is modulated through a sequence of subtler planes of experience and seems to best be achieved when the heart opens. We see with this kind of opening that the root of wisdom is to be found in what we truly care about.” David La Chapelle http://www.collectivewisdominitiative.org/files_people/LaChapelle_David.htm "The hardest thing to actually handle is the "pleasure" of our own emergence." - Jana Dixon Taken from this page of her e-book- http://biologyofkundalini.com/article.php@story=HeartExpansions.html

A Man Should Too by Dr. Jim Rosen ©2020 Dr. Jim Rosen “A woman should be able to be both independent and dependent, active and passive, relaxed and serious, practical and romantic, tender and tough minded, thinking and feeling, dominant and submissive. So, obviously, should a man!” (Pierre Mornell) To try to be just one or the other (e.g. only dominant or only submissive), is to ignore your real humanness. Look at the lessons that God tries to teach us when we experience a hardship, for instance, and life demands that we be flexible and bend. It is in the letting go of the rigid ways, when you walk away from the extreme and allow yourself to experience the other side of life, that life becomes more stable and balanced.

After reading AH Almaas description that duality couldn't exist without nonduality and that anything nondual exists within nonduality, I had a peak experience. This was in 2015. Being that my capacity as an artist is arrested at the level of a second grader, I chose crayola to create my artistic expression of this. That is ultimately there is only nonduality but within are pockets of dualism. That's Nisargadatta's statement after his enlightenment in the upper right. "Nothing is wrong anymore". Not even my bad art.

My homemade starter kit for for mindfulness Years ago after reading some Vernon Howard, I was struck by the powerful effect on my state of mind or Consciousness that the words - being deliberate- had on me. Just by remembering the word 'deliberate' oftentimes my attention becomes more concentrated and less disperse. When my actions become deliberate, however simple they may be. I'm not trying to do 5 things at once and my efficiency for getting things accomplished increases dramatically. If I'm buttoning up my shirt, I'm all there while doing it. Then maybe I,m tying my shoes. When my actions are done in a very deliberate manner, I observe that a natural result is that I'm much more mindful and my movements are more efficient in carrying out a task. This may not be as a dramatic a trigger for everyone else as it was/is for me but I bet for a percentage of those reading this and who are working on themselves some will definitely observe, feel , and understand this coorelation between being deliberate and mindfulness. Im listening and following along now to Leo's latest. Actually it's paused at the moment as I type this out. Goodnight,,

@TripleFly Are you sure Martin was talking about 5 meo dmt and not nn dmt? 3 hits or inhales of NN dmt sounds about right but it takes so little of the 5 meo dmt that one hit can capture all that's needed. With the synthetic anyway. I've just used the natural 5 meo dmt from the frogs one time. I just remember that it had a horrible taste to it and it's been so long I've forgotten its potency compared to synthetic. @herghly I'm not following on what you mean by 3 rounds per session. Could you elaborate? Please don't take my questions as being adversarial. I'm just trying to figure out what everyone means,,,

I did this last spring/summer with synthetic 5 meo dmt. Twice actually Stayed out for quite a while both times. I had taken the hit and then lay back on the bed. I must have convulsed some because I woke up both times on the floor with furniture knocked over. Broke 1 ? and I pair of eyeglasses. Be careful to not overdo it and also stay on top of keeping your scales accurate everyone. My scales were bad off from being accurate. It was a waste. Got nothing out of it those 2 times. Only busted eye glasses and Tv and a loss of dignity.

I remember Jana Dixon touching on the subject of unrequited love in her book Biology of Kundalini. I happened to find it just now. It was in her chapter titled Projection. This is about the 9th paragraph down from the top that I plucked out, if you wanted to read more of what she wrote. "What about the ultimate gamble of loving and finding it unrequited? Loving someone who doesn't love us back is not such a bad thing, if we are able to use that love to grow and not react in self-destruction. The pain from such an event can help us to open and be ready for a deeper love, And more grateful when it arises, in awe of the miracle and the precariousness and the rareness of it all. Romantic longing for another is synonymous with longing for the unity of one's own Self. Unrequitted love can result in metamorphic initiation, for the energy that would have been used in relationship is then used in the opening of the inner flower of Self." From: https://www.biologyofkundalini.com/article.php@story=Projection.html

It could be,,, Although I haven't really taken them apart and studied them side by side. There is a lot in common. Thanks for spending the 2.99. AI's answer to both questions were impressive. If that's what causes a loss of a post,,, at times yeah,or no,,, me too. When spending a lot of time in choosing my words and composing a post, it's become a habit for me to copy and paste it to notes and save it before I hit the send button.

This thread is being created for those interested in learning more about and/or discussing The Fourth Way. Below is a short bit from a Wikipedia description followed by 2 bookmarked links in High Consciousness Resources which are 100% relevant to the subject. I'll add more commentary, links, and articles periodically and try not to leave any redundancies from those threads except for the following introduction video to The a Fourth Way. I recommend this guy's channel but most of his videos are found on the Gurdjieff Thread, which are very concise and usually only 2-3 minutes long. In the Fourth Way, having a big personality is usually seen as only being a detriment to the discovery of one's True Nature which is ,,,, (pause for dramatic effect) -Being. Which produces or is synonymous with presence. The Fourth Way[1] is an approach to self-development developed by George Gurdjieff over years of travel in the East (c. 1890 – 1912). It combines and harmonizes what he saw as three established traditional "ways" or "schools": those of the emotions, the body, and the mind, or of monks, fakirs, and yogis, respectively. Students often refer to the Fourth Way as "The Work", "Work on oneself", or "The System". The exact origins of some of Gurdjieff's teachings are unknown, but various sources have been suggested.[2] The term "Fourth Way" was further used by his student P. D. Ouspensky in his lectures and writings. After Ouspensky's death, his students published a book entitled The Fourth Way based on his lectures. According to this system, the three traditional schools, or ways, "are permanent forms which have survived throughout history mostly unchanged, and are based on religion. Where schools of yogis, monks or fakirs exist, they are barely distinguishable from religious schools. The fourth way differs in that "it is not a permanent way. It has no specific forms or institutions and comes and goes controlled by some particular laws of its own."[3] The Fourth Way addresses the question of humanity's place in the Universe and the possibilities of inner development. It emphasizes that people ordinarily live in a state referred to as a semi-hypnotic "waking sleep," while higher levels of consciousness, virtue, unity of will are possible. The Fourth Way teaches how to increase and focus attention and energy in various ways, and to minimize day-dreaming and absent-mindedness. This inner development in oneself is the beginning of a possible further process of change, whose aim is to transform man into "what he ought to be." Taken from: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Way

In the Fourth Way it is said that the act of Self remembering really can't be defined because the scope of its breadth and depth cannot be approached because of the limitation of language. A student and Teacher of the Work, Nicholas Tereschenko tried anyway and his attempt is found helpful by many others in the Work. He said- Self-remembering is the expansion of the field of Consciousness, so that both the outside and the inside worlds are perceived together in the unity of experience. Years ago, when I first found the Work or the Fourth Way, I assumed that I already had an inner world and at times I did but this inner world that I experienced was very shallow in its depth. Because of this, things in the outer world were always affecting me greatly and still does at times when I lose contact with the inner parts of my centers. A vital criterion in the ability of making contact with the depth of the inner world is establishing a solid grounding in the belly center aka, the hara. An embodiment in the belly center establishes the possibility of leaving the noise that goes on when we are stuck in the storm that results in a perpetual turbulence that goes on between the mental and emotional worlds. People often get disconnected from their belly center by the time of adolescence and a good many never again will rediscover and achieve a grounding there. Having an erect posture as well as experiencing inner quiet are only minor side effects of rediscovering this embodiment in which your belly expands when breathing like it did for many in childhood. Becoming grounded in the belly center makes it possible for the mental and emotional worlds to disentangle. Sensing the physical body is how you 'jailbreak your mind' to use Leo's allegorical description. Sensing, not feeling the body. The heart is the perceptual organ for feeling and intuitive seeing, but only after it becomes the manager-boss of the mind and disentangling has to be accomplished first. Until this happens the mind has you instead of you having a mind. Realization of Being is then possible and then one can have their being. I began this post with only the intention of sharing Nichols Tereschinko's attempt at describing Self-remembering but in the processes I began to spontaneously download and broadcast. So please pardon the resultant and ensuing spiritual mansplaining. Hope some of you find parts of it useful in some way. @seeking_brilliance I went to ask A. I. Philosopher once again about the Fourth Way but unless I'm wrong, it seems only to be available now if one purchases the app.

Valuable and very interesting insights @fridjonk . I appreciate your taking the time to express them here. What you say could also be true here where I live if only I got out more and interacted with people to discover. I no longer even read the local newspapers. The following is from a 12th century Egyptian Sufi named Dzou'l Noun and to me contain a whole world of meaning having to do with Conscience and the consequences of being awake in a culture that is asleep. All men are dead, except those who know. All those who know are dead, except those who practice. All those who practice are dead, except those who act. All those who act are lost,except those who act with righteous intent. And All those who act with righteous intent are all in grave danger.

I need to call Ghostbusters Either I'm hallucinating or I'm seeing ghosts or something,,,, It's been happening for more than a week anyhow. Couldn't deny it after my experiences today. Right before dark I was walking down to the mailbox and nearly called out to a man in camouflage to stop and identify himself. He was just a few yards ahead of me and I saw him become transparent. This was the most vivid apparition yet and undeniable because of the close distance, remaining daylight and vividness becoming transparent . Another odd factor is that they have been mostly in small groups and half the time are engaged in sex with one another. Not every time , but in a good percentage of these occurrences they are. Sometimes there will be just a handful and they seem to be talking to one another. I feel lucid and not delusional around these occurrences although the experiences have left me a little confused or perplexed because I couldn't decide if I was seeing actual people or not. It occurred most often when the daylight was dim in the morning or evening but sometimes at night and a little less often in full daylight when peering into woodlands. Go figure ?‍♂️ Another odd factor is that the, what I call paranormal phenomena, that Ive experienced almost continually for the last three years of hearing a chorus of crickets have grown even louder in volume. Over a year ago when I was faithfully doing two a day centering Prayer meditations, I noticed then that whenever I experienced brief periods of objectless or nonconceptual awareness and perhaps closer to that state of consciousness than normal, upon entering back into everyday awareness, I would recognize this background chorus of crickets would be louder than usual. Also a light pressure or pulse would be felt on my forehead simultaneously. This slight throb was noticed back around 2008 after having read a lot of the Almaas material and gradually recognized I too, on occasion was experiencing this which was similar to his personal descriptions of the phenomena. Telling about this probably won't help my credibility here on the forum but as I've mentioned in the past, I've intentionally left entries in that were odd, crass, petty, unflattering or just revealing a coarse sub personality or minor ship mate on this ship of fools that makeup my fracturedness which over time I'm trying to integrate into a more cohesive multidimensionality. Carl Jung once said that we should let people see us in just our undershirt. I think this was what he was reffering to. Like many of you, I come from a conservative small town environment and have refrained from revealing my journal/forum activity. For the most part, to be saved from being tarred and feathered. Lots of Christian fundamentalists, Trump supporters, and the like where I live. I did reveal this to my former Therapist and friend Jim who lives about 80 miles from here. Also two very nice ladies who were a part of my Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson group book reading on the internet, which took almost a year. One of these ladies, I would consider somewhat similar in Generation and worldview to my mother yet I felt a bond and friendship with in some way which in ordinary life would be unlikely. So Joan, if you still are stopping in from time to time and happen to be reading this, THANK YOU! and please excuse the more coarse aspects of myself that I've revealed. Knowing in the back of my mind, though, that you might be following along has allowed me to integrate and perhaps reconcile some of my fracturedness due to some stubborn aspects of My Superego. If that makes any sense. To me it does and I think perhaps it has. To those who are like myself in regard to flying under the radar of conservative small hometown environments.You better plan on the day coming when the cat gets out of the bag. Integrate before it's too late. Be like a green sapling who doesn't burn but only singes when the gaslighters come along. For those who are wondering what I'm talking about. You don't know how lucky you are. ? I'll report back on the issue of these apparitions, ghosts, or whatever they are when there is something to report.

Crushed summary of the following article- The heart is an organ of spiritual perception . Emoting is not the same of true feeling. When one is engaged in emoting, they are in a form of spiritual sleep. The Way of the Heart, by Cynthia Bourgeault From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind Post authorBy Cynthia Bourgeault Post dateJanuary 31, 2017 Photograph by Brandon Zierer From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind Put the mind in the heart…. Put the mind in the heart…. Stand before the Lord with the mind in the heart.” From page after page in the Philokalia, that hallowed collection of spiritual writings from the Christian East, this same refrain emerges. It is striking in both its insistence and its specificity. Whatever that exalted level of spiritual attainment is conceived to be—whether you call it “salvation,” “enlightenment,” “contemplation,” or “divine union”—this is the inner configuration in which it is found. This and no other. It leaves one wondering what these old spiritual masters actually knew and—if it’s even remotely as precise and anatomically grounded as it sounds—why this knowledge has not factored more prominently in contemporary typologies of consciousness. Part of the problem as this ancient teaching falls on contemporary ears is that we will inevitably be hearing it through a modern filter that does not serve it well. In our own times the word “heart” has come to be associated primarily with the emotions (as opposed to the mental operations of the mind), and so the instruction will be inevitably heard as “get out of your mind and into your emotions”—which is, alas, pretty close to 180 degrees from what the instruction is actually saying. Yes, it is certainly true that the heart’s native language is affectivity—perception through deep feelingness. But it may come as a shock to contemporary seekers to learn that the things we nowadays identify with the feeling life—passion, drama, intensity, compelling emotion—are qualities that in the ancient anatomical treatises were associated not with the heart but with the liver! They are signs of agitation and turbidity (an excess of bile!) rather than authentic feelingness. In fact, they are traditionally seen as the roadblocks to the authentic feeling life, the saboteurs that steal its energy and distort its true nature. And so before we can even begin to unlock the wisdom of these ancient texts, we need to gently set aside our contemporary fascination with emotivity as the royal road to spiritual authenticity and return to the classic understanding from which these teachings emerge, which features the heart in a far more spacious and luminous role. According to the great wisdom traditions of the West (Christian, Jewish, Islamic), the heart is first and foremost an organ of spiritual perception. Its primary function is to look beyond the obvious, the boundaried surface of things, and see into a deeper reality, emerging from some unknown profundity, which plays lightly upon the surface of this life without being caught there: a world where meaning, insight, and clarity come together in a whole different way. Saint Paul talked about this other kind of perceptivity with the term “faith” (“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”), but the word “faith” is itself often misunderstood by the linear mind. What it really designates is not a leaping into the dark (as so often misconstrued) but a subtle seeing in the dark, a kind of spiritual night vision that allows one to see with inner certainty that the elusive golden thread glimpsed from within actually does lead somewhere. Perhaps the most comprehensive definition of this wider spiritual perceptivity is from Kabir Helminski, a modern Sufi master. I realize that I quote it in nearly every book I have written, but I do so because it is so fundamental to the wisdom tradition that I have come to know as the authentic heart of Christianity. Here it is yet again: We have subtle subconscious faculties we are not using. Beyond the limited analytic intellect is a vast realm of mind that includes psychic and extrasensory abilities; intuition; wisdom; a sense of unity; aesthetic, qualitative and creative faculties; and image-forming and symbolic capacities. Though these faculties are many, we give them a single name with some justification for they are working best when they are in concert. They comprise a mind, moreover, in spontaneous connection to the cosmic mind. This total mind we call “heart.”1 The purification of Muhammad’s heart by three Divine messengers. Bal’ami. Early fourteenth century “The heart,” Helminski continues, is the antenna that receives the emanations of subtler levels of existence. The human heart has its proper field of function beyond the limits of the superficial, reactive ego-self. Awakening the heart, or the spiritualized mind, is an unlimited process of making the mind more sensitive, focused, energized, subtle, and refined, of joining it to its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love.2 Now it may concern some of you that you’re hearing Islamic teaching here, not Christian. And it may well be true that this understanding of the heart as “spiritualized mind”— “the organ prepared by God for contemplation”3—has been brought to its subtlest and most comprehensive articulation in the great Islamic Sufi masters. As early as the tenth century, Al-Hakîm al Tirmidhî’s masterful Treatise on the Heart laid the foundations for an elaborate Sufi understanding of the heart as a tripartite physical, emotional, and spiritual organ.4 On this foundation would gradually rise an expansive repertory of spiritual practices supporting this increasingly “sensitive, focused, energized, subtle, and refined” heart attunement. But it’s right there in Christianity as well. Aside from the incomparable Orthodox teachings on Prayer of the Heart collected in the Philokalia, it’s completely scriptural. Simply open your Bible to the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:8) and read the words straight from Jesus himself: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” We will return to what “pure in heart” means in due course. But clearly Jesus had a foundational grasp on the heart as an organ of spiritual perception, and he had his own highly specific method for catalyzing this quantum leap in human consciousness. I have written extensively about this in my book The Wisdom Jesus, in which I lay out the principles of his kenotic (“letting go”) spirituality as a pathway of conscious transformation leading to nondual awakening. You will see there how this goal formed the core of his teaching, hidden in plain sight for twenty centuries now. I will be drawing on this material from time to time as it becomes pertinent to our present exploration. For now, the essential point is simply to realize that the teaching on the heart is not intrinsically an “Islamic” revelation, any more than it is a “Christian” one. If anything, its headwaters lie in that great evolutionary incubator of Judaism, in which more and more in those final centuries before the Common Era, the great Israelite prophets begin to sense a new evolutionary star rising on the horizon of consciousness. Yahweh is about to do something new, about to up the ante in the continuing journey of mutual self-disclosure that has formed the basis of the covenant with Israel. The prophet Ezekiel gets it the most directly, as the following words of revelation tumble from his mouth, directly from the heart of God: I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land I gave to your ancestors, and you shall be my people and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36:24–28) A new interiority is dawning on the horizon, a new capacity to read the pattern from within: to live the covenant without a need for external forms and regulations, simply by living it from an inner integrity. And for the first time in Western history, this capacity to see from within is explicitly linked to the heart, and specifically to a “heart of flesh.” Without any attempt to end-run the massive theological and historical parameters that have grown up around this issue, my bare-bones take on Jesus is that he comes as the “master cardiologist,” the next in the great succession of Hebrew prophets, to do that “heart surgery” first announced by Ezekiel. And his powerfully original (at least in terms of anything heretofore seen in the Semitic lands) method of awakening heart perceptivity—through a radical nonclinging or “letting go”—will in fact reveal itself as the tie rod connecting everything I am talking about in this book. Do I Really Mean the Physical Heart? Not to be naive here, but yes. We are indeed talking about the physical heart, at least insofar as it furnishes our bodily anchor for all those wondrous voyages into far-flung spiritual realms. Again, the Eastern Orthodox tradition is not in the least equivocal on this point. Lest there be any tendency to hear the word as merely symbolic of some “innermost essence” of a person, the texts direct us immediately to the chest, where the sign that prayer is progressing will be a palpable physical warmth: To stand guard over the heart, to stand with the mind in the heart, to descend from the head to the heart—all these are one and the same thing. The core of the work lies in concentrating the attention and the standing before the invisible Lord, not in the head but in the chest, close to the heart and in the heart. When the divine warmth comes, all this will be clear.5 The following instruction is even more specific: When we read in the writings of the Fathers about the place of the heart which the mind finds by way of prayer, we must understand by this the spiritual faculty that exists in the heart. Placed by the creator in the upper part of the heart, this spiritual faculty distinguishes the human heart from the heart of animals…. The intellectual faculty in man’s soul, though spiritual, dwells in the brain, that is to say in the head: in the same way, the spiritual faculty which we term the spirit of man, though spiritual, dwells in the upper part of the heart, close to the left nipple of the chest and a little above it.6 Mosaic, Jungholz, Austria While the sheer physicality of this may make some readers squirm, the contemporary phenomenologist Robert Sardello is another strong advocate for a full inclusion of the physical heart in any serious consideration of the spirituality of the heart. When he speaks of the heart, as he makes clear in his remarkable book Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness, he is always referring to “the physical organ of the heart,” which merits this special consideration precisely because “it functions simultaneously as a physical, psychic, and spiritual organ.”7 It is this seamlessly tripartite nature of the heart’s field of activity that bestows its unusual transformative powers. While there are many spiritual traditions that focus on “the heart as the instrument through which religious practices take place,” Sardello feels that “these traditions do not focus on the inherent activity of the heart, which is already an act of a spiritual nature.”8 To demonstrate what this “inherently spiritual nature” of the heart might feel like, Sardello leads his readers on a profound voyage of discovery into the inner chambers of their own heart. Wielding those two classic tools of inner work, attention and sensation, he teaches us how to access the heart through concentrated sensation (rather than visualization or emotion) and there discover its inherent vibrational signature as “pure intimacy…intimacy without something or someone attached to that intimacy.”9 I have to say I followed that exercise several times and was astonished by the results. I had experienced something of that “pure intimacy” before, as that sort of golden tenderness that sometimes surrounds a period of Centering Prayer. But never had I experienced it with such force or clarity, as a distinct inner bandwidth resonating in perfect synchrony with (in Kabir Helminski’s words) “its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love.” No wonder the embodied aspect of heart spirituality is so important! For it is only through sensation—that is, “attention concentrated in the heart”—that this experience of utter fullness and belonging becomes accessible.10 Sardello is not the only voice in the field. There is now a substantial and growing body of “bridge literature” linking classic spiritual teachings on the heart with emerging discoveries in the field of neurobiology. I have already mentioned the pioneering work of the HeartMath Institute, but I want to call attention to two other fascinating and useful books for the spiritually adventurous nonspecialist: The Biology of Transcendence by Joseph Chilton Pearce11and The Secret Teaching of Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner.12Marshaling considerable scientific data in a format easily accessible to a lay reader, each of these books demonstrates how contemporary science has taken us far beyond the notion of the heart as a mechanical pump to revision it as “an electromagnetic generator,”13 working simultaneously across a range of vibrational frequencies to perform its various tasks of internal and external self-regulation and information exchange. (An “organ of spiritual perception,” after all, can be understood in this context as simply an electromagnetic generator picking up information at far subtler vibrational bandwidths.) Both books call attention, as does the HeartMath Institute, to the intricate feedback loops between heart and brain—almost as if the human being were expressly wired to facilitate this exchange, which Pearce sees as fundamentally between the universal (carried in the heart) and the particular (carried in the brain). As he expresses it, “The heart takes on the subtle individual colors of a person without losing its essential universality. It seems to mediate between our individual self and a universal process while being representative of that universal process.”14 While such bold statements may make hard-core scientists writhe, from the spiritual side of the bridge it is easily comprehensible and brings additional confirmation that “putting the mind in the heart” is not merely a quaint spiritual metaphor but contains precise and essential information on the physiological undergirding of conscious transformation. The Weighing of the Heart from the Book of the Dead of Ani. c. 1300 B.C. British Museum What Gets in the Way? According to Western understanding, the heart does not need to be “grown” or “evolved.” Every heart is already a perfect holograph of the divine heart, carrying within itself full access to the information of the whole. But it does need to bepurified, as Jesus himself observed. In its spiritual capacity, the heart is fundamentally a homing beacon, allowing us to stay aligned with those “emanations from more subtle levels of existence” Helminski refers to, and hence to follow the authentic path of our own unfolding. But when the signals get jammed by the interference of lower-level noise, then it is no longer able to do its beaconing work. Unanimously, the Christian wisdom tradition proclaims that the source of this lower-level noise is “the passions.” As the Philokaliarepeatedly emphasizes, the problem with the passions is that they divide the heart.15 A heart that is divided, pulled this way and that by competing inner agendas, is like a wind-tossed sea: unable to reflect on its surface the clear image of the moon. Here again is a teaching that tends to set contemporary people’s teeth on edge. I know this from personal experience, because the issue comes up at nearly every workshop I give. To our modern Western way of hearing, “passion” is a good thing: something akin to élan vital, the source of our aliveness and motivation. It is to be encouraged, not discouraged. At a recent workshop I led, a bishop approached me with some concern and explained that in his diocese, following the recommendations of a church consultant, he had managed to boost morale and productivity by significant percentages simply by encouraging his clergy “to follow their passions.” Well-nigh universally today, the notion of “passionlessness” (a quality eagerly sought after in the ancient teachings of the desert fathers and mothers) equates to “emotionally brain dead.” If you take away passion, what is left? Madonna and child. Saint Augustinus Church, Miguel Hidalgo, Federal District, Mexico So once again we have to begin with some decoding. If you consult any English dictionary, you will discover that the word “passion” comes from the Latin verb patior, which means “to suffer” (passio is the first-person singular). But this still doesn’t get us all the way, because the literal, now largely archaic, meaning of the verb “to suffer” (to “undergo or experience”) is literally to be acted upon. The chief operative here is the involuntary and mechanical aspect of the transaction. And according to the traditional wisdom teachings, it is precisely that involuntary and mechanical aspect of being “grabbed” that leads to suffering in the sense of how we use the term today. Thus, in the ancient insights on which this spiritual teaching rests, passion did not mean élan vital, energy, or aliveness. It designated being stuck, grabbed, and blindly reactive. This original meaning is clearly uppermost in the powerful teaching of the fourth-century desert father Evagrius Ponticus. Sometimes credited with being the first spiritual psychologist in the Christian West, Evagrius developed a marvelously subtle teaching on the progressive nature of emotional entanglement, a teaching that would eventually bear fruit in the fully articulated doctrine of the seven deadly sins. His core realization was that when the first stirrings of what will eventually become full-fledged passionate outbursts appear on the screen of consciousness, they begin as “thoughts”—logismoi, in his words—streams of associative logic following well-conditioned inner tracks. At first they are merely that—“thought-loops,” mere flotsam on the endlessly moving river of the mind. But at some point a thought-loop will entrain with one’s sense of identity—an emotional value or point of view is suddenly at stake—and then one is hooked. A passion is born, and the emotions spew forth. Thomas Keating has marvelously repackaged this ancient teaching in his diagram of the life cycle of an emotion,16 a core part of his Centering Prayer teaching. This diagram makes clear that once the emotion is engaged, once that sense of “I” locks in, what follows is a full-scale emotional uproar—which then, as Father Keating points out, simply drives the syndrome deeper and deeper into the unconscious, where it becomes even more involuntary and mechanically triggered. What breaks the syndrome? For Evagrius, liberation lies in an increasingly developed inner capacity to notice when a thought is beginning to take on emotional coloration and to nip it in the bud before it becomes a passion by dis-identifying or disengaging from it. This is the essence of the teaching that has held sway in our tradition for more than a thousand years. Now, of course, there are various ways of going about this disengaging. Contemporary psychology has added the important qualifier that disengaging is not the same thing as repressing (which is simply sweeping the issue under the psychological rug) and has developed important methodologies for allowing people to become consciously present to and “own” the stew fermenting within them. But it must also be stated that “owning” does not automatically entail either “acting out” or verbally “expressing” that emotional uproar. Rather, the genius of the earlier tradition has been to insist that if one can merely back the identification out—that sense of “me,” stuck to a fixed frame of reference or value—then the energy being co-opted and squandered in useless emotional turmoil can be recaptured at a higher level to strengthen the intensity and clarity of heart perceptivity. Rather than fueling the “reactive ego-self,” the energy can be “rejoined to its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love.” And that, essentially, constitutes the goal of purification—at least as it has been understood in service of conscious transformation. Gravestone, Jewish Cemetery, Olesno, Poland Emotion versus Feeling Here again, we have an important clarification contributed by Robert Sardello. Echoing the classic understanding of the Christian Inner tradition (I first encountered this teaching in the Gurdjieff Work), Sardello points out that most of us use the terms “feeling” and “emotion” interchangeably, as if they are synonyms. They are not. Emotion is technically “stuck” feeling, feeling bound to a fixed point of view or fixed reference point. “We are not free in our emotional life,” he points out, since emotion always “occurs quite automatically as a reaction to something that happens to us.”17 It would correspond to what Helminski calls “the heart in service to the reactive ego-self.” Beyond this limited sphere opens up a vast reservoir of feelingness. Here the currents run hard and strong, always tinged with a kind of multivalence in which the hard-and-fast boundaries distinguishing one emotion from another begin to blend together. Happiness is tinged with sadness, grief touches at its bottomless depths the mysterious upwelling of comfort, loneliness is suffused with intimacy, and the deep ache of yearning for the absent beloved becomes the paradoxical sacrament of presence. “For beauty is only the beginning of a terror we can just scarcely bear,” observes Rilke, “and the reason we adore it so is that it serenely disdains to destroy us.”18 Such is the sensation of the heart beginning to swim in those deeper waters, awakening to its birthright as an organ of spiritual perception. And it would stand to reason, of course, that the experience is feeling-ful because that is the heart’s modus operandi; it gains information by entering the inside of things and coming into resonance with them. But this is feeling of an entirely different order, no longer affixed to a personal self-center, but flowing in holographic union with that which can always and only flow, the great dynamism of love. “Feeling as a form of knowing”19 becomes the pathway of this other mode of perceptivity, more intense, but strangely familiar and effortless. The great wager around which the Western Inner tradition has encamped is that as one is able to release the heart from its enslavement to the passions, this other heart emerges: this “organ of contemplation,” of luminous sight and compassionate action. For what one “sees” and entrains with is none other than this higher order of divine coherence and compassion, which can be verified as objectively real, but becomes accessible only when the heart is able to rise to this highest level and assume its cosmically appointed function. Then grace upon grace flows through this vibrating reed and on out into a transfigured world: transfigured by the very grace of being bathed in this undivided light. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” In this one sentence, the whole of the teaching is conveyed. What remains is for us to come to a greater understanding of how this purification is actually accomplished: a critical issue on which Christian tradition is by no means unanimous. This will be the subject of our next chapter. ♦ 1 Kabir Helminski, Living Presence: A Sufi Guide to Mindfulness and the Essential Self (New York: Tarcher/Perigree Books, 1992), 157. 2 Ibid., 158. 3 Sidney H. Griffith, “Merton, Massignon, and the Challenge of Islam,” in Rob Barker and Gray Henry, eds., Merton and Sufism: The Untold Story (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 1999), 65. 4 For extensive bibliographical information on this work, see “A Treatise on the Heart,” trans. Nicholas Heer, (ibid., 79–88). 5 E. Kadloubovsky and E. M. Palmer, eds., The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 194. 6 Ibid., 190. 7 Robert Sardello, Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness (Benson, NC: Goldenstone Press, 2006), 82. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 86. 10 No wonder the embodied aspect of heart spirituality is so important! For if Sardello is right here (and my own work confirms that he is), then the stunning conclusion is that there is no lack. That primordial hunger for intimacy and belonging we so frantically project onto others in our attempt to find fulfillment is fulfilled already, there in the “infinity of love” already residing holographically in our own hearts, once we have truly learned to attune to its frequency and trust that with which it reverberates. In this sense, our physical heart is the quintessential “treasure buried in the field.” 11 Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Biology of Transcendence:A Blueprint of the Human Spirit (Rochester, VT: Park Street Place, 2002). 12 Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature (Rochester, VT: Bear and Company, 2004). 13 Ibid., 71. 14 Pearce, 64–65. 15 For a particularly clear and forceful discussion of this point, see E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer, trans., Unseen Warfare, trans. E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 241–44. 16 Reproduced in Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2004), 136. 17 Sardello, 72. 18 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1939), 21. 19 Sardello, 72. From The Heart of Centering Prayer by Cynthia Bourgeault © 2016. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. From our current issue Parabola Volume 42, No. 1, “The Search for Meaning,” Spring 2017. This issue is available to purchase here. If you have enjoyed this piece, consider subscribing.

I'm not defending the current beef industry in the U.S. but if you want beef finished out to have the quality taste people are used to. That takes corn, cottonseed mill, soybeans, or other substitutes depending on different crop conditions for a particular year. There's a small slice of genetically engineered angus cattle that do real well converting grass into lbs of flesh but pretty much the idea of grass fattened beef is propaganda and fallacy.

What? There is no grass for cattle to graze on in America's 26,586 feedlots The most recent census of agriculture [3] reported an estimated 26,586 feedlots in the USA. Of these, approximately 61% have fewer than 100 cattle. Approximately 77% of cattle were produced in feedlotswith capacity greater than 1,000 animals.Jun 21, 2018 https://www.ncba.org/beefindustrystatistics.aspx

It's all relative. Eating meat is bad, m'kay. It takes an enormous amount of corn to finish a feeder steer/heifer. That's bad, mckay. Like taking a duke in the Urinal, m'kay. That's bad. Hog manure is a wonderful fertilizer, mckay. That's good, m'kay. Ken Wilber points out that the Dalai Lama eats roast beef often. This is in a cold, high elevation environment where a vegetarian or fruitarian diet is not very doable. He also points out that a cow screams louder than a carrot when you kill them. Therefore it's better to eat a carrot than to eat a cow. M'kay. Unless your in Tibet. Toxic masculinity and the heritage of patriarchical dominance is bad. M'kay. Slavery's bad, m'kay. Liberals who are blind to their own lack of common sense, that's bad, m'kay. That's bad because it fueled the political rise of that Arch Idiot Trump, m'kay, which is really bad, m'kay. There's some truth in the idea of a negative energetic imprint from eating meat, m'kay but it's very subtle, m'kay and that's bad. Expressing negative emotions and treating each other rudely is more harmful though, m'kay, and that's too bad m'kay.

Spiritual Emergency This term is used by Jana Dixon as well as Stan Grof and his deceased wife Christina. Christina contributed much to this theory while she was alive. Roller coaster emotions may be a signal that a Kundalini awakening is underway. Jana Dixon articulates this in many different ways throughout this book. Also the felt sensation that one doesn't fit in the world and that life has no meaning until one settles into beginning stages of the Transpersonal. I hypothesize that this phenomena she describes is one of natures mechanisms to hurl humans out of the first tier of Spiral Dynamics. Thoughts anyone? Jana Dixon- Often we have a radical opening, just to find ourselves flipping back in the opposite direction. The ego and armor seem pull back ones closure around one after a radical opening. Through witnessing the openings and the closures time and time again we become aware that this vascilation is biochemically driven hyperbolic curves. Ultimately though with the radical heart expansions and associated gravity warping and acute sensory and psychic experience...we are essentially "broken open" by love. To achieve the Grail of the Soul the mind must surrender its frequencies and entrain with the Heart. One could say that the heart is the organ of meaning and purpose. If the metamorphic process proceeds with adequate grace and conditions are not too detrimental to the process then the Percival Heart is born, or the Heart that is radiant irrespective of external conditions. In this we learn to take such radical responsibility that we do not injure ourselves with the world. Compassion is so fundamentally deep at this point that we have transcended our reactive conditioning and the reptilian brain has less of an impact on our functioning. At this point there is just One Love, and so the energy that is usually wasted in ego-definition and protection is now spent on a higher order of functioning. We may back away from our flowering edge however, just because we can, and this return to a less mature state is taken for various reasons. But the major insight to get is that we have to give ourselves permission to show up in our full glory for the world is not going to invite us to arrive...it must be self-initiated. Thus we must become "causal," through the Percival Heart is the Solar or Causal Heart. If you can stop running from both the "loss of meaning" and the "presence of meaning" then you are enlightened. The transpersonal includs the glorification of the personal, the amplification of the self. Our inability to be causal and create a life is a matter of responsibility. There are so many steps and things involved, commitment to being here, being the first I think. And knowing approximately what one is doing here. But really a human life takes intimacy with others. If our sense of failure is equal to our faith, this provides a wall of detachment removal--a distraction from really being here. "Without the inner world the outer loses its meaning, and without the outer the inner loses its substance." ~ R.D. Laing from: http://biologyofkundalini.com/article.php@story=MeaningofKundalini.html