There is a great longing within each of us. We long to discover the secrets and mysteries of our individual lives, to find our unique way of belonging to this world.
Bill Plotkin
What Is The Great Longing Within Us?
Mindfulness And Habitual Thought Patterns
Practicing Mindfulness
When we practice mindfulness, instead of believing everything we think, we begin to get familiar with our habitual patterns. With practice, we begin to see through the filters our habitual patterns impose to the world beyond, fragmented though it may still appear given the speedy momentum of our minds.
Discerning Thought Patterns
Eventually, we discover within us a background of awareness that underlies the ever-changing content of our busy minds. Just as the sun illuminates the objects of the outer world, the light of awareness reveals the patterns within us that color our version of reality, and thus allows us to discern with greater clarity the patterns that exist in the world around us.
Meeting Your Mind
Carol S. Hyman
Creation & Chaos In The Ancient Near East
Chaos in the Beginning
For cultures of the Near East, the process of creation began with chaos, the Greek word used to signify the undifferentiated material out of which the universe was made. Chaos was imagined as water in darkness, much like a stormy sea at night, that filled everything. There was no concept of nothingness or empty outer space — there was not even the number zero.
Creation Out of Nothing
The concept of creatio ex nihilo, “creation out of nothing,” didn’t yet exist. That idea was a much later invention, not gaining full expression until the Christian period. It was a concept that developed after and because of monotheism, in controversies about what was eternal: Was God alone at the beginning, or was the “stuff” out of which the world was made there also? Was there one eternal principle or two, God and chaos?
The River of God
Gregory Riley
How Do We See Our World?
Seeing Our World
Vision seems so simple. We open our eyes and there is the world. Yet scientists have long appreciated how difficult this is to explain.
For a start, we move our eyes about five or six times a second, fixating on something and then moving quickly on, but we don’t notice this, and the world appears stable. Also, what we can see clears only a tiny area around that fixation point, yet it feels as though we are seeing the whole scene at once.
Zen and the Art of Consciousness
Susan Blackmore
What Is Renunciation?
Turning Away
In the West, renunciation evokes images of monastic austeries. However, renunciation actually means “turning away from our suffering.” It is not the external reality that we are renouncing, but our inner reality.
Causes of Suffering
The causes of our suffering are to be found not “out there” but “in here.” And, if we want to turn away from the causes of our suffering, the focus of our efforts has to be on our mind.
Enlightenment to Go
David Michie
Who Knows Anyhow? 