Carry Your Light To Every Dark Corner –

image from beauty of the arts.

Today I deactivated my Facebook account. I should have done it a month ago before Thanksgiving or perhaps even earlier, when the USA election was in full swing and while Brexit was turning Facebook blue. The reason for finally closing my Facebook account down today is due to the lead up to “Christmas.”

This year I simply do not have the patience to scroll through hundreds of cute kitties wrapped in shiny Christmas wrapping paper. Nor could I stomach more Christmas recipes for mince pies, toffee tarts or chocolate logs filled with dollops of almond cream.

I cannot no longer  “like” people’s family photos that simply holds no meaning for me. “Happy Holidays” is not something that appeals either and although I cannot stop the tinsel, trash and twinkling stars, I can switch it off.

The actual moment I ached to deactivate my Facebook page came when a “friend” posted the Tel. number of a suicide charity, just in case someone felt like they wanted a permanent out. And this was during the last days of November – a full month before Christmas day!

Time to tone down Christmas. Of course businesses are not going to do it. They will continue to flog Christmas in July, then switch to high-gear on “Black Friday” with an extra commercial push on “Cyber Monday.” I mean there is no end to the greed!

In the past year we have seen slogans like “Never Trump” or “Never Clinton.” Why not add a new slogan, one that will not divide us but might actually be helpful. Why not create a new slogan, something like @SayNoToSanta. I think it’s a great idea! We should broadcast it all over the Western hemisphere, to really get the message across that  we want our Holy, Christmas back! No more Happy Holidays with a huge dose of P.C.,together with over consumption and an overdrawn account that takes another year to pay off.

I leave you with a special thought for Christmas – The True Christmas

“Are you willing to stoop down and consider the needs and desires of little children; to remember the weaknesses and loneliness of people who are growing old; to stop asking how much your friends love you, and to ask yourself if you love them enough; to bear in mind the things that other people have to bear on their hearts; to trim your Christmas lamp so that it will give more light and less smoke, and to carry it in front so that your shadow will fall behind you; to make a grave for your ugly thoughts and a garden for your kindly feelings, with the gate open? Are you willing to do these things for a day? Then you are ready to keep Christmas!” -Henry Van Dyke

There’s No Free Lunch! – Philosophy

 

I found this short article by accident and being drawn by the beautiful image, I paused to read. The words  “opposite of love is power“  really made me sit up and  think.  I’d thought the opposite of love was fear, now a new adjective – (power-ful). This reminds me of the quote from The Master of Sacred Knowledge by Allan Rufus, who says:  “Note and Quote to Self – What you think, say and do! Your life mainly consists of 3 things!

What you think,

What you say and

What you do!”

 

and remember thoughts are powerful too.

 

 

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“As we see more deeply into our inner drives and defenses, we discover that the choices we are faced with aren’t all black and white. Life teaches us that our decisions aren’t necessarily based on “this” or “that.” We come to understand the truth of “both/and.”

The assumption that things are either good or bad, true or false, that I’m either happy or miserable, lovable or hateful, has been replaced by astonishing new facts: I both want to be good but my efforts can have bad effects; there’s falsehood mixed in with my truth; I want and don’t want whatever is my current desire; and I can both love and hate another person at the same time.

What about the two primary human drives, love and power? I used to think the opposite of love was hate. But life experience tells me that’s not true. Hate is so tinged with other emotions, including love! No. In my understanding, the opposite of love is power-ful. Love accepts and embraces. Power refuses and crushes opposition. Love is kind and knows how to forgive.”

—Patty De Llosa, “Power and Love.” Parabola Magazine, Spring 2011

 

Patty de Llosa, author of The Practice of Presence: Five Paths for Daily Life and Taming Your Inner Tyrant: A path to healing through dialogues with oneself, is a Tai Chi and Alexander teacher who lives and practices in New York City. She has studied many spiritual teachings while she made her living as a mainstream journalist at Time, Leisure and Fortune and raised a family.

 

Also by Patty De Llosa,

 

Happiness or Wisdom?

We all want to be happy. Is that wise? Perhaps it only works the other way around: those who become wise find happiness. The Buddha explained that what makes us feel miserable is the hankering and dejection to which we are continually subject. We hanker after what we desire, and become dejected because life doesn’t offer up what we want.

Does it take a lifetime to find the wisdom to accept what we’ve got? Not necessarily. The minute some of what we had is taken away we begin to appreciate it! Then, oh then, how we remember the Good Old Days!

Then there’s the opposite message, the folk wisdom that your reach should exceed your grasp. How to bring these opposites together? In my opinion, the solution lies in practice and, above all, work. If you aim both body and mind at what you want and work hard for it, your feet tend to stay on the ground and, hopefully, your head this side of the clouds. So inner and outer work are part of real wisdom, expressed in Madison Avenue’s adage that there’s no free lunch.

Speak No Evil – Philosophy

 

Why is there so much evil in the world? To bemoan the evil so prevalent today is to fail to take account of our part. The walls we build around ourselves create an illusion of separateness. Our egos dwell there and crave power, authority, and dominion – stings of the serpent’s venom. The fundamental duality of good and evil is then taken as a law unto itself. Although it will not be stayed in its course, on a large, cosmic scale, evil derives from a blockage of a circulation of vital energy. Here, in this post, I’ve decided to address evil through quotes that I have come to admire on this topic. I hope they will be useful and interesting to the reader.  Eve

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From the viewpoint of the initiate seeking wisdom, evil is dissipation, a scattering of one’s energies and attention, whereas good is that which leads to spiritual concentration, that is to unity.

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A permanent idea of good and evil can be formed in man only in connection with a permanent aim and a permanent understanding. If a man understands that he is asleep and if he wishes to awake, then everything that helps him to awake will be good and everything that hinders him, everything that prolongs his sleep, will be evil. But this is so only for those who want to awake, that is, for those who understand that they are asleep. Those who do not understand that they are asleep and those who can have no wish to awake, cannot have understanding of good and evil. And as the overwhelming majority of people do not realize and will never realize that they are asleep, neither good nor evil can actually exist for them.

-G. I. Gurdjieff.

 

Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too much to give it up.

– Mohandas K. Gandhi

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The idea of sacred medicine teaches us that the universe is conscious only to conscious man, and that there are states of being in which universally active forces can reach my body from within my body. These forces cannot act upon my body from without, except as my body is part of organic life on earth with its great cycles of life, death, fertilization, and decay. The ego cannot battle against that either in nature or in the body. body. …

Man in the state of egoism is crushed by the universe, both actually and in theory. The ego alone, with all its bodily habits to support it, lives in a hostile universe because it constantly fights to preserve itself. It is a euphemism to speak of the universe of modern science as unalive, non-living. We call it a dead universe because we are unable to bear that our state of consciousness evokes a hostile universe. Traditional man was clearer about the enmity we gather when we live severed from a higher consciousness. It is a lawful enmity to be sure, not directed to me personally, but it is a genuine enmity and to communicate this, it is not so far from the mark to speak of evil spirits and of punishment.

– Jacob Needleman

 

 

 

 

O My Heart – Myth And Legend

Our thoughts are powerful, and just like the Tibetan Master Djwhal Khul said and I quote  here: “The average man is often the victim of his own thought forms. He constructs them, but is neither strong enough to send them out to do their work, nor wise enough to dissipate them when required. This has brought about the thick swirling fog of half-formed, semi-vitalized forms in which eighty five percent of the human race is surrounded.”

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There is an ancient image of the heart and its function that likens it to the way a sound arises from an underground cave. To an older way of thinking, thought begins below in our hearts.  Then ascends to our brains, where it brings insight and intelligence to our awareness. Silence is a requirement. When our thoughts has collected sufficiently, they are ready to be carried outward, in words. Only then do our voices call to express what  needs saying as it was meant. Then, we speak truly. Our words are heartfelt. All is well, we hope.

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That The Heart No Longer Moves – Sufi Tale

Long ago, in Andalusia, a Sufi merchant awaited the arrival of his shipment of goods. A messenger came running to inform him of a great mishap – the boat had sunk, carrying the livelihoods of many to the bottom of the ocean. Upon receiving the news, the merchant paused, cast his eyes downward, and softly said, “Praise be to God – AlhamduliLah.”

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Some weeks later, the messenger joyfully appear at the merchant’s door.

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“O Merchant,” he cried out. “Your goods arrived safely and are at this very moment being unloaded on the dock. The ship did not sink after all!”

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At this the merchant again lowered his gaze and murmured, “All praise is due to God.” The messenger inquired, “What is this pausing and lowering of your gaze?” The merchant replied, “In both cases, I was checking to make sure my heart didn’t move.”

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-Retold by Gray Henry

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To end on a wise quotation from the Peaceful Warrior. 

“You haven’t yet opened your heart fully, to life, to each moment. The peaceful warrior’s way is not about invulnerability, but absolute vulnerability–to the world, to life, and to the Presence you felt. All along I’ve shown you by example that a warrior’s life is not about imagined perfection or victory; it is about love. Love is a warrior’s sword; wherever it cuts, it gives life, not death.” – Dan Millman