quotelr:

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

— Audre Lorde

(via the-hope-of-a-new-day)

quotelr:

“We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content.”

— Eduardo Galeano

(via the-hope-of-a-new-day)

philosophybits:

“To define is to limit.”

— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

whiskyandwonder:

(via while-i-kiss-the-sky)

radical-revolution:

Oh, there is such a beautiful truth to the teaching of ‘non-duality’, of course! We discover the absolute and unshakable Presence that we are, prior to the story of our lives. We touch That which never changes in the midst of all external change. Life itself. Our true nature. Prior to thought and feeling and perception and sensation. Deathless, eternal, still. Forever at rest.

We need nothing. We want nothing. We are nothing.

And in that nothing ‘we’ cannot even know ‘nothing’.

Yet the conceptual mind co-opts this beautiful and absolute truth. We lose ourselves in the silence and the silence becomes a new identity and we pretend that we are ‘beyond’ suffering, that we have ‘transcended’ thoughts and feelings, that we are ‘enlightened’ now. Our untouchability becomes a mask, a persona, a new place to hide.

Our new identity becomes ‘no identity at all’.

“Only non-duality is real. Duality is an illusion”.

We are no longer a person. We are “Pure Awareness”.

Yes, it’s true. And it’s totally untrue at the same time.

You are unlimited Awareness but you are also a fragile and vulnerable and delicate and passionate and limited human being. You feel deeply. You hurt, sometimes. You have wounds that are longing to be felt, seen, embraced, included in the bigger picture of You. Your wounds won’t go away just because you’ve discovered your true nature. They won’t go away just because you are ‘nobody’ now. They won’t go away just because you are a teacher, an author, a spiritual expert, an enlightened one, a non-person, a non-non-person, or whatever dream character you’ve dreamed yourself to be in this great and lucid play.

For many, many years I have been emphasizing the ‘other side’ of non-duality (yes that is a paradox and yes all words are temporary here). And the ‘other side’ is nothing less than a courageous embrace of duality, a deep YES to our humanness – our sorrow, our shame, our pain, our fears, our confusion, our loneliness, our doubts and our despair. A YES to our vulnerability, to being touched deeply and to touching life in return. To embracing our grief, our inner victim, our chaos and our sweet imperfection. To loving this fleshy mortal mess that we are.

If we bury our shame, our guilt, our wounds, if we suffocate the precious inner child and pretend to be free and perfect and enlightened and ‘done’, our wounds will only fester and poison and drain us from the inside. We will act out in unconscious, habitual and unkind ways, to ourselves and the ones we love.

What we resist persists, and what we try to numb ends up numbing us in return.

I truly don’t see our humanity as divided from our divinity. I don’t see ‘no self’ as the final truth, but a place to begin. We are nothing and we are also something! We are Awareness and we are human, the absolute as the relative, the sacred as the manifest, the ocean dancing as the wave. We bleed. We hurt. We need help. Sometimes we just want a brother or sister to hold us. Sometimes we tire of being ‘the spiritual one’, ‘the one who knows’, ‘the expert’. Sometimes we just need to fall to our knees in humility and ask the Universe for support and guidance.

We are gods and we are so very fragile. We live so close to life, so close to death. So close to joy, so close to sorrow. We are invulnerable and we can feel the world’s pain as our own, in compassion.

I want to speak up for a non-duality that is nothing less than a full embrace of duality. A compassionate, heart-centered non-duality that loves the world, that infuses the Earth with empathy, that grounds itself in the struggles of daily life, that bows to form and celebrates form and un-shames form, that drenches every thought, sensation and feeling in love and understanding. That says ‘Hey, it’s okay to be human, it’s okay to hurt, and your sorrow is sacred, and your fear isn’t a sign that you’re broken but a sign that you are sensitive and open and awake, and these painful parts are only parts longing for acceptance…”

And in the end, remember, even these words must collapse under their own weight. There is no nonduality or duality. Even that mythology must crumble into the vast mystery of Now.

There is only this unspeakable feeling of the breath rising and falling, and the heart beating in the chest, and the mysterious and magical weight of the earth-bound body, and the sound of the bird singing, the traffic outside, and the tingly aliveness in the toes, the hands, the throat, the fluttering in the belly, and this wonderful sense of being alive, prior to words, prior to the search itself, prior to all things, and there are no experts here, and we are all beginning again, in every moment.

- Jeff Foster

philosophybits:

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

— Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks