Nervous Conditions

S: The real changes I’ve seen in my life all happened when I was totally beside myself, and feeling that if I didn’t stop something, whatever it was, that I would be dead in a few days or minutes. I was feeling desperate, and I don’t think people can trust those states.

AH: My dear friend, it is always desperate like that-we just don’t see it. You think of physical death as a bad thing. What happens to most people is worse. It’s always a desperate condition. This is one of the truths you need to see. You have to look at your assumptions and ideas and see that things could be different from what you think. You thought at one time you were in a desperate situation, and I see that you are always in a desperate situation. You might cover it over. People cover up their desperateness and hopelessness and everything else. Most of the time people are desperately trying to do something. There is always this feverish movement going on inside, always. If you really look at yourself deeply you will see that.

- A.H. Almaas, Diamond Heart, Book 2, p. 115 (“Change and Truth”)

His freedom stretches so widely…

Man’s freedom has roots that are in his very nature as man. It cannot be totally eradicated by circumstances, no matter how severely it is stifled under the stiff iron mesh of neurotic patterns. However, we may also use the expression “free, unique personality” to indicate the person in the fullness of being, when he has reached the top level of freedom. His freedom is such that he is able to give complete fulfillment to each of the facts that go toward making up his personality. His freedom stretches so widely into all corners of his life that he is able to turn each obstacle or adversity into a positive personal value. In freedom, he becomes able to experience his very illnesses in such a way that they help him grow.

– Adrian Van Kaam, The Art of Existential Counseling (p. 52)

Our love for our children and for the human race…

The greatest and most devastating ignorance of humanity is perpetuated in the daily lives of families. Most of us do not want such knowledge or perception; it is too painful and frustrating to confront our fears and illusions. But our love for our children and for the human race might give us the courage to face these issues and allow us to look inward to find the true harmony of Being.

- A. H. Almaas, Pearl Beyond Price (p. 249)

Abandon the search for God…

Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you makes everything his own and says, My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him in yourself.

- Hippolytus, Heresies, 8.15.1-2 (quoted in Karen Armstrong’s A History of God [96])

On Evil Deeds

Re:

NYT – “Bombings Kill at Least 171 Iraqis in Baghdad” and the Virginia Tech Shootings

When our view is informed by seeing life without the veil of the personality-when we see things objectively, in other words-we see that since most of humanity lives on the surface of themselves, out of touch with their inner depths, such behavior is inevitable and needs to be curtailed and controlled. To say, however, that such things should not happen does not make sense-they are a natural consequence of humanity’s estrangement from its depths. Also, what we consider evil behavior is simply behavior rooted in ignorance of how things really are. Rather than destructiveness estranging us from the Divine, it is an expression of our estrangement, which has nothing to do with the underlying presence of that dimension of existence. The solution to human destructiveness does not lie in trying to regulate or eradicate it but rather with connecting to a dimension within ourselves in which such behavior does not make any sense.

- Sandra Maitri, The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram (158)

The Holy Truth

The Holy Truth includes everything – including guilt and self-blame. It is all-inclusive and all-encompassing; otherwise it would not be holy. The belief that some manifestations are holy and others are not, or that some people are chosen by God and others are not, is not the Holy Truth. The Holy Truth chooses all people – they are its life. This is why it is said that, “The sought becomes the seeker.” The Holy Truth itself manifests as the seeker looking for the Holy Truth. So the journey is a matter of the seeker finding out that he or she is what is sought. When we know this, we realize that there is no need for seeking.

– A.H. Almaas, Facets of Unity (96)

From the Archives: “What are my motives for seeking?” (circa 2001)

“A person may [seek] because of the wrong motives – such as curiosity, desire for power, fear, insecurity…”

I would like to explore this with an objective eye – with the realization that false motives are inevitable, not to be ignored but to be acknowledged and remembered, and addressed.

I imagine a circular room lined with doors, on each door an image of what lies within. Many images are appealing, many not. None offers anything but a roomful of activiti4es, not a passage but dead-end; the activities that attract me are ends in themselves, they require an attitude of devotion to the act – art, music, writing, mountaineering, traveling – and the possibilities are inherently limited – like a roomful of toys for the rest for the rest of my life.

So I can not choose a door, because of each one’s limited quality. I am left with no option other than the one dark passage that is not a door, that has no image, promises nothing but possibility and the absence of an articifial, false framework for life. There is no promice of success, in fact there is fear – fear of the dark vagueness, the stumbling and crashing into walls. But there is something, and so it is the only choice my real self can make.

Am I ignoring false aspects? Painting my search in a self-lauding way? No, I think any falseness must come in not by the idea but the methods of attaining that idea – in fact the methods may be in opposition to the real search, and I see this fact in me all the time. But essentially I want to avoid the habits, the activities, which are essentially ways of killing time, “making do” or “getting by” as best one can, until death comes.

…the only permanent reality possible consists of good works useful for another, immortal life. Every other hope that I desired to see realized was followed by melancholy, sometimes because what was ardently desired escaped me, sometimes because I decided to abandon it.

- Ibn Hazm, “Falsfat al-Akhlaq w-Al-Siyar,” translated by J. Kritzeck and quoted in The King’s Son, Eds. Cecil, Robert et al.

But there was something about Canopus itself that… is the word attracted? me. No. Obsessed? No, there was too much else in my life to allow a one-sided preoccupation.

I felt about Canopus that inward, brooding question, wondering, that one may sometimes feel about a person whose sources of action, of being, seem distant and other – as if understanding this being may open doors in oneself whose existence one does not do more than suspect. Yet they are there… one knows it… one cannot – may not? – open them… but other people have opened similar doors in themselves… they operate on altogether different – higher? – levels of themselves… if one understood how one could come close not only to them but to that area of oneself that matches their higher otherness… so one broods, ponders, questions, sometimes for long ages, about some individual who – one is convinced – is only part glimpsed, certainly only part understood.

- Doris Lessing, The Sirian Experiments (66-7)

Deep in the sea are riches beyond compare.
But if you seek safety, it is on the shore.

- Saadi, Rose Garden

Metaphysically minded people, and especially those who feel that they are comfortable in the domain of mysticism or “inner perception,” have no greater start on the generality of humanity where Sufism is concerned. Their subjectivity, especially where it is linked with a strong sense of personal uniqueness ‘caught’ from other people, can in fact be a serious disability… Sufism does not trad in airyfairiness, mutual admiration, or lukewarm generalities.

- Idries Shah, The Sufis (19)

Gifts

But you must recall, Servian, that when a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.

- Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer (90)

The distant drama of friends are the hardest to conjure up

I thought about Prague often later on and when evil times came, sympathy, anger and the guilt which the fate of Eastern Europe has justly implanted in the West, coloured my cogitations. Brief acquaintance in happier times had left me with the vision of an actual city to set against the conjectured metamorphosis and this made later events seem both more immediate and more difficult to grasp. Nothing can surprise one in the reported vicissitudes of a total stranger. It is the distant dramas of friends that are the hardest to conjure up.

- Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (265-6) [1977]

What we fail to notice

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

- Daniel Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception