Tools to Wake Up and Grow Up

[Lost in Translation]

Found this article earlier today. Definitely worth reading.

 

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Tools to Wake Up and Grow Up
BY KRISTA TIPPETT | JULY 12, 2019

For Lion’s Roar’s 40th anniversary, we’re looking ahead at Buddhism’s next 40 years. In our March 2019 issue, Krista Tippett shares what she feels is the most helpful message Buddhism can offer in coming decades.
What made the news yesterday and today, what trended twenty minutes ago, tells of disarray and despair and destruction—of suffering and mindlessness heaped upon each other. That is part of the story of our time. But it is not the whole story of our time. There is also the generative possibility of our time—of compassion and healing and collective awakening. This too is happening all around us, but my fellow journalists do not shine the bright light on it. Those of us who see it must participate in and nourish it.

In the last few centuries, we began to consign spiritual life to a compartment labeled “private.” We placed more and more of our collective faith in the large, loud, external pursuits of politics and economics. One appeal of these disciplines—to which we attached descriptors like “serious” and “hard”—was their certainty that irrational human tendencies could be controlled by rational forms.

Now, on the shaky ground of this early century, politics and economics have become the thinnest of veneers over the inner human drama of dreams and desires, pain, and fear. It is becoming ever clearer that the complex reality of human nature is the hardest and most serious business of all. So many advances we believed in are fragile because, amid all the outer changes, we did not change ourselves.

I am suffering, so is everyone else, and we have to work directly with that. The Buddha saw, named, and investigated this underlying truth of life. Across the millennia, human beings have chosen to grapple with the revelations this truth presents—or to turn away. In our time, brilliant young technologies act like extensions of our brains and bodies and give us, among other things, new and shiny means to turn away. Yet these same technologies have connected our minds and lives, and so made my suffering and yours, and the well-being of all life and the planet that nourishes it, utterly inextricable.

I sense that behind the question that has been posed here—what message Buddhism can offer in coming decades—is a noble desire to do “more.” I believe that “more” will flow naturally if the magnificent traditions of Buddhism, with which I converse as a delighted guest, student, and companion—are shared more boldly and expansively, in their full complexity and depth. The spiritual technologies of meditation and mindfulness are just when we need them most. But they’ve been imparted in many ways that arrived detached from their own deep roots. The world is ready to benefit from the wisdom in that rich soil.

The insights of Buddhist psychology have been a window into this for me. I have come to treasure it as a tremendous gift for seeing and diagnosing what ails us. Buddhist psychology offers seeds and tools for the fresh start our species needs to wake up and grow up. Sitting with, letting everything arise, allowing discomfort—these are spiritual and moral muscles for the work of being curious about, and gently mistrusting, that exhilarating feeling when suffering hardens into hatefulness and feels momentarily like power.

For we do not know how to sit with, or stand before, the pain, fear, and suffering now in the middle of our life together so that they have a chance to soften. We do not know how to greet them as part of our wholeness and as a potential source of compassion.

We have actively taught ourselves and our children to fight for beliefs and identities. This has had an unintended effect of orienting us—and our entire culture—toward what we must resist and overcome. We are skilled at taking refuge in outrage. This too is called “strong.”

While there is certainly a place for all of this in a moral life, its intention and effect are radically different from the calling of being a warrior in the Buddhist sense. The “humble warrior,” the “fierce bodhisattva”: these seem like contradictions in terms, a counterintuitive merger of power and tenderness. Yet this is the only way I know to describe the embodied presence of the wisest people I’ve been privileged to draw out in conversation. I’d begin my list with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, his friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and go from there.

Buddhist analysis of the human predicament has become a pointer as I seek to navigate this moment we inhabit with clarity, equanimity, and grace. I often share its insights and vocabulary with others, though I am no Buddhist teacher, and I have watched them instantaneously unlock energy and presence.

The Buddhist concept of “near enemies” to the great virtues is exquisitely helpful in grasping why, as we are deluged by images of violence and despair, the sorrow and pity that feel like humane responses actually paralyze us and lead us astray from the compassion that would help us remain present.

The word metta, loving-kindness, adds psychological acuity to the range of teachings about love that humanity possesses. It richly complements the fresh challenge alive in our midst to make love something muscular, practical, and public. With distinctive pragmatism, it gently points us back to the foundational truth modernity tried to forget: that inner life and outer presence in the world are intertwined, whether we want that to be true or not. They are companions toward wholeness.

What I’m describing here is quiet work, breath to breath to breath, life to life to life. But I don’t think the civilizational potential of Buddhism’s teaching and modeling in the years ahead can be overstated. Other centuries, including the one in which the Buddha was born, have held vast brutality and dangers, yet the challenges before ours may be existential for our species.

On the upside of all that vexes us, we are the first generation with the tools to think and act together as a species. This will require us to claim the full intelligence, consciousness, and wisdom within our grasp. If in the end we recover the nobility and humility that this moment demands, the beautiful tradition of Buddhism that came into the world three millennia ago will have been pivotal.

 

https://www.lionsroar.com/tools-to-wake-up-and-grow-up/

 

I found the following sections quite relevant:

 

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Now, on the shaky ground of this early century, politics and economics have become the thinnest of veneers over the inner human drama of dreams and desires, pain, and fear. It is becoming ever clearer that the complex reality of human nature is the hardest and most serious business of all. So many advances we believed in are fragile because, amid all the outer changes, we did not change ourselves.

I am suffering, so is everyone else, and we have to work directly with that. The Buddha saw, named, and investigated this underlying truth of life. Across the millennia, human beings have chosen to grapple with the revelations this truth presents—or to turn away. In our time, brilliant young technologies act like extensions of our brains and bodies and give us, among other things, new and shiny means to turn away. Yet these same technologies have connected our minds and lives, and so made my suffering and yours, and the well-being of all life and the planet that nourishes it, utterly inextricable.

 

Emphasis is mine, of course.

 

[Everything]

More like, "thought forms which lessen your consciousness and stagnate your personal growth, in and as life and of life."

 

You gotta remember, that the degree of your flowing the consciousness through you, is always accurately indicated, by the energy in motion, that you are translating to your feelings of emotions, which always perfectly indicating your here and now alignment or misalignment of your perspective with your greater allowed flow of your own greater non-physical consciousness, or less.

 

When you are focused on the suffering, you are actually lessening your own consciousness and also of those people around you, by leading example, not by any assertive power by any means. No one can match your resistant energetic thought patterns to and of life, unless they choose to do so willingly, and there is some pre-birth decisions that go with that, of higher intentions for and of transformation, as in all that life truely is in its evermore being and evermore becoming, evermore. Of your very own greater allowed flow of consciousness of all that you truely are aswell, which you would be blocking for yourself temporarily, through the holding on to these thoughts forms of discordance, which are self contradictory in nature of their energetic being, which would temporarily lessen your experience of your true being and freedom that is of that true being of the true nature of who you are aswell.

 

 

All healing is done only by holding the state of being which is already healed, and offering that state of being as something that someone can choose to match or not, for themselves. 

 

But most often, when people speak of healing, they are often indicating a personal desire to experience their positive influence on the people around them, their desire of their own self realisation of their own state of worthiness, their own personal greater realisation of their own value in and as and of life. And these things are simply primarily indicated by the emotions that they would be feeling, in their own natural self allowed realisation of their own true being of their true value and unique being and becoming of all that they truely are being and becoming evermore. And this greater allowed flow and realisation of their own greater non-physical consciousness of infinite intelligence and eternal wisdom, can only be allowed, if one selfishly cares, about how they feel, UNCONDITIONALLY, meaning under any and all conditions. To thus then accurately utilize the emotional guidance system for their person alignment with the source of all creation, for their own personal selfish benefit of self and those around them.

 

And to allow and realise your greater more fully allowed and realised state of being, is not something that can be done, but something that has to be allowed. And when it is, it is always manifesting along the path of least resistance, that is the joy of the eternal journey of your own infinite being and ever becoming, evermore. That is always something that you simply allow in the moment or not. And you can always tell, by virtue of how you feel. And if you don't feel so good, then that simply means you know exactly, the perspective you need to shift around, in your ability to focus on your greater allowance of your greater flow of consciousness and fully realised being and becoming, evermore, always here and now. And as you enjoy the joy of the journey, in every single here and now moment, of your evermore greater being and becoming, then there is no end to that journey, and so joy is evermore to you. And this will simply catapult and catalyze you into your evermore allowed greater realisation of all that you truely are being and becoming evermore, always fully along the path of least resistance, that indicates the natural and effortless allowed alignment with the source of all creation, always here and now.

 

In other words, many people are simply enjoying their life, and nothing is stopping you from doing the same, except yourself. And putting that response ability unto someone or something else, will simply always reflect back at you, your own greater ability to do it for yourself. So you can make up any tool and technique as you go, or take those which work for you, and leave the rest. Because you are simply here to be yourself in the best way you know how. And so using the words of others as an excuse, to not allow yourself to be all that you truely can be allowing yourself to be the evermore becoming of, will never work. Because you don't need any excuse to be who you truely are, rather, you need to allow the natural realisation, that you are always being who you truely are, and that is not something that can be done. Rather, something that has to be allowed. And when you do, find a way, to release all the energetic thought patterns of resistance, which are not compatible with your true nature of being and ever becoming, then joy will simply naturally and effortlessly be there.

 

As simple as letting go and letting god. Or letting go and falling in love. And meditation can help with that, as it has always been the most universally applicable and effective permission slip, of all the permission slips which we call tools and technique, we feel we need, in order to allow ourselves to be more of all that we truely are being and becoming evermore, fully. In this greater allowed state of being, in absolute joy, freedom, bliss, love, knowledge, whatever you wish to call that positive emotional indication of relief evermore, of your having realised a greater state of allowance, always right here and now, evermore, into all that you will be the evermore becoming of evermore.

[ilumairen]

On 7/17/2019 at 9:37 PM, Lost in Translation said:

The word metta, loving-kindness, adds psychological acuity to the range of teachings about love that humanity possesses. It richly complements the fresh challenge alive in our midst to make love something muscular, practical, and public. With distinctive pragmatism, it gently points us back to the foundational truth modernity tried to forget: that inner life and outer presence in the world are intertwined, whether we want that to be true or not. They are companions toward wholeness.

 

Thanks for sharing LiT.

 

_/\_