Truth And Compassion
While attending a silent (vipassana), week-long meditation retreat many years ago, my upper back and shoulders filled with so much pain on day two that I decided to ask for a short meeting with the facilitator. My intention was to inform him that, due to the excruciating pain, I was going to drop out early and go home…
Ego
When working with people who have decided to make major changes in their lives in the context of giving up behaviors which, though clearly detrimental to themselves and those they love, they seem to have great difficulty in leaving behind on a permanent basis, the phenomenon of the ego invariably arises. These people often find themselves baffled by their own destructive behaviors which, unlike many other areas of their lives, seem immune to the direction of their often very substantial willpower.
`Playing God´
`You need to quit playing God!´ This is what I heard more than once in my early years of recovery from alcoholism. It precipitated an undifferentiated jolt, like an earthquake deep under the sea bed, although the meaning of the statement, and the associated possible consequences, went way over my head. Perhaps I did not want to understand.
Apocalypse Now
Generally speaking the meaning of this (nowadays emotive) term, with its roots in Old Greek (apokalyptein – “uncover, disclose, reveal,” from apo “off, away from” + kalyptein “to cover, conceal,”) refers to `drawing back the veil´ in order to see things differently, perhaps even moving from `perception´ to `vision´, and hence from `illusion´ to `truth´. This rang a bell with me when I remembered what Wayne Dyer used to say about `not seeing the world as it is, but rather as we are´
Paradox
While it is true that the spiritual path is open to everybody, not everybody follows the call. Some never even get to hear the call. This remains one of the great mysteries, to be simply accepted as a characteristic of the human condition.
Our True Element
For most of my life, I fell prey to the very widespread illusion that the cause of all my problems is ‘out there’. In practical terms, it unfolds roughly as follows: Whenever I experienced `irritation´ in the world `out there´ (when my plans fell through, when I didn’t get my way, regretted the past, feared the future, or when I adjuged that I was being treated unjustly of unfairly, etc.), I reacted by exerting more force to `kick the world into shape´. Despite my heroic efforts, it rarely worked.
