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Quote of the Day: Victor Hugo

April 12, 2012 at 9:30 pm by Leave a Comment

Style Me Pretty

By Joe Perez

Victor Hugo: “The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”

Whether we are loved for ourselves or in spite of ourselves, we receive genuine love always from our Unique Self.

The degree to which we perceive ourselves being genuinely loved for ourself is proportional to the degree we identify with the True Self, the unqualified Ground of Being of which there is only one. The degree to which we see ourselves as loved in spite of who we are is a reflection of how much we are out of alignment with our own Unique Self, a barrrier to fulfillment which keeps us from receiving and giving love unconditionally.

Photo Credit: Craig Photography

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Daily Wisdom: The mysteriously moving creative process is the God-impulse

April 12, 2012 at 12:00 pm by Leave a Comment

Whirling Dervish

By Marc Gafni

From Marc Gafni’s Your Unique Self:

The creative process that mysteriously moves from nothing to something is the God-impulse. To live as your Unique Self means to align yourself with that process, with the ecstatic evolutionary impulse that initiated the kosmos, with the ecstasy of God, which re-creates all of reality in every second of existence.

Are you ready to respond to this invitation, to offer yourself to the infinite love intelligence that wants desperately to show up in the world through and as you?

Photo Credit: neil banas

Filed Under: Arts & Culture, Daily Wisdom, Love, Sex & Ethics, Unique Self Tagged With: , , , , ,

On the three different types of tears

April 11, 2012 at 5:09 pm by Leave a Comment

Icicles

By Joe Perez

Soulfulness includes the ability to express deep and often sorrowful feeling. In tears, aspects of the soul are released from the body, flowing erotically from one soul beyond itself. Marc Gafni in The Dance of Tears (forthcoming, Integral Publishers) has even categorized three major types of tears:

All roads of life lead to death. Death, before its imminent arrival and in its aftermath is measured and defined in large part by the nature of tears it elicits.

Two kinds of tears from two different sources dance together here…. Although [the] tears [of the person who is about to pass over into the next realm] seem to be uniform and universal their true nature really depends on where in the soul they emerge from.

Those tears could be pre-personal, personal, or transpersonal.

Pre-personal tears are a function of the instinctive drive to survive in one’s most readily known form bodily existence which feels threatened by the encounter with death.

Personal tears well up from one’s unique life story, relationships, regrets, hopes, failures, loves, losses and lived dreams.

Transpersonal tears: the moment of death itself can for those who prepare, and sometimes even for those who did not, afford a moment of enlightenment where one’s true divine nature is profoundly and powerfully realized.

Photo Credit: mysza831

Filed Under: Love, Sex & Ethics, Unique Self Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Giving a long, loving, relaxed stare is a learnable skill

April 11, 2012 at 4:52 pm by 1 Comment

Beautiful Eyes

By Joe Perez

A man writes to an online advice giver, saying that his girlfriend doesn’t think his eye contact is romantic enough. He writes:

Dear Sexes: I’ve never really felt comfortable with eye contact, and have picked up a little thing where I’ll duck my eyes off every 3 seconds or so. This is normally not too much of a problem, but now I have a new girl in my life and I feel like it’s having an affect on things. Any tips to help me perform those loving stares?

One columnist, a female, instructs him to focus on building his listening skills and to look into ways in which his psychological baggage may be making him uncomfortable with intimacy. She writes:

We’re all different and have different ways of communicating and showing love. Hopefully your girlfriend gets that. This eye-gazing thing might just not be your thing. However, it is a social norm to keep eye contact, and that contact shows confidence, respect, honesty and connection. Not a stare, but a meaningful and relaxed gaze….

So while the romantic gaze may be what you think you need, it could be this engaged listening that’s even more important to her.
As far as not darting your eyes away… I think that’s mostly about being relaxed and looking at the old story that originally made you do the eye-dart. What was that story? Remind yourself of the source of it, then remind yourself regularly that that story is done, and that you have a whole new narrative about yourself and the world. Not “rah-rah” self-talk, just simple observations like, “I’m a grown man with a good life and a girlfriend.”

A male columnist adds that developing a habit of looking at the nose bridge may be a gateway to correcting the man’s issue:

I still think this is an issue you should ultimately tackle head on (or eye to eye), but the bridge of the nose isn’t that far off. Think of it as a gateway to intimacy.

To these two advice givers, I add that learning to give long, loving, relaxed gazes is a learnable skill for appreciating the uniqueness of another person. The eye-to-eye contact is a potential opening from one Unique Self to another Unique Self, creating a lounge-chair-easy spaciousness of causal attraction.

And it can also bring up a person’s Unique Shadow by triggering specific contractions in the body-mind, reactions which can be gradually healed through even greater levels of practicing love.

Photo Credit: by girish_suryawanshi

Filed Under: Belief & Practice, Love, Sex & Ethics, Unique Self Tagged With: , , , ,

Daily Wisdom: Your Unique Self is God’s love-signature written all over you

April 11, 2012 at 12:00 pm by Leave a Comment

Hebrew Calligraphy

By Marc Gafni

From Marc Gafni’s Your Unique Self:

Unique Self is the enlightened realization that you are both absolutely one with the whole, and absolutely unique. You are free from the contractions of your personality, even as you experience yourself as personally engaged in the great evolutionary unfolding of consciousness.

Realizing your Unique Self will fundamentally change the way you understand virtually every facet of your awakened life… These teachings fundamentally reconfigure and dramatically re-vision our understanding of love, joy, shadow, sexuality, parenting, death, relationships, loneliness, evolutionary spirituality, malice, ego psychology, and the integration of East and West.

Your Unique Self is God’s love-signature written all over you. God loved you so much, He personalized himself as you. You are the indi- vidualized heart and mind of God. This is your Unique Self.

Photo Credit: Josh Berer

Filed Under: Belief & Practice, Daily Wisdom, Health & Medicine, Love, Sex & Ethics, Shadow & Psyche, Unique Self Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

On the possibility and necessity of a World Spirituality

April 11, 2012 at 1:18 am by Leave a Comment

By Marc Gafni

For the first time in the history of planet Earth, in the history of consciousness, a World Spirituality is utterly possible and utterly necessary.

A World Spirituality is one that trance-ends. It ends the trance of any particular religion or nationality. It weaves together the best medicines of every great system of knowing into a larger whole.

It’s a World Spirituality which tells us that what unites us is far greater than that which divides us. We understand and live the common truths and calls and obligations that are laid out by all the great systems of spirit.

And we also experience and benefit from the unique gifts of the systems of spirit woven together in a large great tapestry, and all people of earth can find themselves as citizens of a World Spirituality. That is a possibility that exists today in a way that never did before in the history of planet Earth.

This vision is an utter necessity today and this vision of a World Spirituality is only possible today and was never possible in any other time in the history of the planet.

Why? Because the new life conditions, the world’s challenges, need a world response. The beginning of that response is a World Spirituality.

So the evolution of a World Spirituality is Spirit’s next move… the beginning of creating a genuine felt sense of wholeness of all the peoples of the Earth, a sense of the interconnectivity of the All with the All which can only be led by a shift in consciousness to a World Spirituality which is an utter necessity today.

The second reason why this necessity is a possibility: for the first time in the history of the world, there’s a huge piece of good news. There are for the first time hundreds of millions of people who are living at worldcentric consciousness.

Egocentric consciousness means my caring and my concern and my love is for me and the people who give me security in the world. Me. My immediate, my family. The people around me, the people I work with.

A higher level of consciousness is ethnocentric consciousness. Ethnocentric means I care not only about my immediate people, I care about my tribe, my nation.

A higher evolution is worldcentric consciousness. My circle of caring and concern expands to include all the peoples of the Earth.

That’s amazing! That leap of consciousness from ethnocentric to worldcentric has never happened before at this level, where there is a public culture with hundreds of millions of people who are holding a worldcentric consciousness.

And it is that group that will be the formative group in the creation of a World Spirituality. That’s the second factor. It makes a World Spirituality necessary and utterly possible today.

Third, for the first time, the best and greatest teachings of all the great systems of spirit, every great religion, the sciences, physics and psychology. Every great religion, its medicine, it’s available online, in books, libraries, and through living teachers.

You have living teachers and books today which are being disseminated way beyond the boundaries of a particular system. Buddhist systems don’t only teach Buddhists in Nepal or China but all over the world. Jewish teachers teach all over the world. Christian teachers teach all over the world, but not in the way of coersive missionizing, but in a beautful new way of opening up the systems of knowing to all the people on Earth.

That’s a new reality that never existed before in the history of planet Earth.

All three of these factors come together to yield the necessary evolutionary emergent, a World Spirituality … which is Spirit’s next move.

It’s what we need to evolve into the next generation, to evolve Spirit, to create joy, to create sustainability, to create responsibility, to create depth and meaning for the future generations of this world.

The most urgent need we have today is to participate in the gathering of all of us who want to participate in this great evolutionary unfolding. It’s already happening all over the world.

World Spirituality is breaking out all over the world. When? Right now. Who? We are. All of us need to participate. If we feel we are beyond the religions or if we are dual citizens. The time is now. Welcome to this great necessity and the great privilege of our generation.

Filed Under: Arts & Culture, Belief & Practice, Health & Medicine, Learning & Work, Love, Sex & Ethics, Shadow & Psyche, Unique Self, World Politics Tagged With: ,

What does the world need most?

April 11, 2012 at 1:01 am by 1 Comment

Illumined World

By Joe Perez

Some say the world needs more peace and others say the world needs less complacency.

Some say the world needs fewer carbon emissions and others say the world needs more jobs.

Some say the world needs less hunger and poverty and others say the world needs more gratitude.

Some say the world needs a cure for terrible diseases and others say all disease is in the mind.

Some say the world needs equal rights for women, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities…and others say the world needs to recover a social order from ages past.

Some say the world needs more conservative solutions to problems, and definitely more individual liberty. But others say the world needs more progressive solutions to problems, and definitely more cooperation.

Some say the world needs people to feel more and get “out of our heads.” But others say the world needs people to be smarter, more rational, and moved less by irrational feelings.

Some say the world needs nothing: that it is perfect just the way it is.

So… What does the world most need now?

The principles of Integral Spirituality teach us that every one of these answers has a part of the truth. They all see the world from a different point of view. But not all windows on the world are equal; they don’t all have an equal part of the truth. There are many different levels of truth, if you will, as there are many different layers of an onion… and peeling back the easier, superficial answers isn’t for the faint of heart.

Also, the Integral toolset gives us a great starting point for organizing ideas about what the world needs now: it can help us to visualize how each of these issues involves many different dimensions, and it can tell us a great deal about how different people with different psychological profiles and intellectual worldviews make sense of these needs.

But in itself, the Integral Framework does little more than specify a range of possible answers to the question and frame the potential answers. It doesn’t actually answer the question in the abstract, absolute sense. An integral spiritual operating system requires the addition of an empowering and ennobling and wise vision within which to work its particular magic.

And it is this vision of an embodied Integral way of being human that people in the World Spirituality movement from around the world are articulating, learning about, putting into practice, and building community experiences around. It is one hugely important way God is speaking and Spirit is working in the world today.

World Spirituality is, as Marc Gafni frequently says, about democratizing enlightenment. World Spirituality affirms that no task is more important right now than enlightenment… and that this is not just a project for cave-dwelling monks but the highest and most profound calling direct for each and every one of us.

It also suggests the HOW of enlightenment in a wide variety of ways that do justice to all the complexity and developmental perspectives. This is important because adhering to the tenets of a World Spirituality based on Integral principles helps us to avoid making mistakes like lapsing into fundamentalism, scientism, postmodernism, or any other ideology masquerading as the Total Truth.

And one of the most central insights of all is that we all have a Unique Self, a personal face of essence, that is to say, an Ultimate Identity. Therefore we must all be our highest and wisest and truest Self, and not try to hide or diminish it. Our True Self knows needs that our body, feelings and mind do not by themselves apprehend.

So the answer to the question, “What does the world most need now?” begins with YOU.

Only and uniquely YOU.

If you are living from the True Self, that indistinct suchness that is All That Arises, then you are not acting selfishishly and egotistically or just concerned about the ideals of people just like you and the groups with which you associate. On the contrary, you are concerned about every sentient being and want the best for everyone and all creatures.

You need not concern yourself with all perspectives on the question,  “What does the world most need now?”

You only need concern yourself with just enough perspectives to help you move forward step by step from where you are right at this moment. You need not be paralyzed by worrying that you won’t do the perfect thing. You need not be frantic, tossed about by haphazard winds of the power of self-will.

THE NEXT THING YOU DO is what the world most needs now, if you are practicing a genuine World Spirituality based on Integral principles.

Filed Under: Arts & Culture, Belief & Practice, Featured, Health & Medicine, Learning & Work, Love, Sex & Ethics, Shadow & Psyche, Unique Self, World Politics Tagged With: , ,
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