Acceptance.................

 

Acceptance is not surrender. It is the moment you stop wasting energy on what is already true and start using that energy to decide what to do next.

-Shane Parrish, from this week's edition

finding the way..........

 

My senses and faculties help me to find the way from here to Killarney but on the way back to God they bewilder and impede me.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

not ours..................

 

     The problem with "willing what cannot be willed" is that we step into a territory that is not  ours—we stake the claim to be God.  This attempt to wrest control from the uncontrollable has become the keynote characteristic of our "Age of Addiction."  We try to command those aspects of our lives that cannot be commanded, we try to coerce what cannot be coerced, and in doing so, we ironically destroy the very thing we crave.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

paradox........

Perhaps the greatest paradox in the story of spirituality is the mystical insight that we are able to experience release only if we ourselves let go.  This is the paradox of surrender.  Surrender begins with the acceptance that we are not in control of the matter at hand—in fact, we are not in absolute control of anything.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

hell......................

 

Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.

-As quoted in an AA meeting

follow humbly......................

 

Sit down before facts like a child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived Notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

-Thomas Henry Huxley

unintended.........................

 Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.

-Viktor Frankl

Surrender.................................

 

He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

C. S. Lewis, from his 1939 sermon, Learning In War-time

A wild Christianity.....................

My Christian journey so far has taught me two cataphatic lessons: that God is an artist; and that he has a sense of humor. . . .

 Anthony Bloom once wrote that the Desert Fathers and their kind retreated in order to seek an “ardent and active solitude”: “These men leave everything because they have understood that in torment, disorder and purely earthly seeking they will not find the answer to the problems of their contemporaries . . . They have to find their souls again, and with their soul, the nation, the soul of their people, the soul of their contemporaries.” When the nation, the people, the culture needs to find its soul again—this is when we turn to the saints of the caves. This is when we call for their help, and their prayers. Assuming we can find them. . . .

The global Machine is teetering, even as it clamps down on its citizenry in an attempt to tamp down unrest and rein in its own wanton destruction of creation and culture. A way of seeing that sets itself against what C. S. Lewis happily characterized as the Tao—the way of great nature, willed by its creator—cannot last, however much it desperately tightens its grip. We are not gods, however much we have always wanted to be. . . .

In a time when the temptation is always toward culture war rather than inner war, I think we could learn something from our spiritual ancestors. What we might learn is not that the external battle is never necessary; sometimes it very much is. But a battle that is uninformed by inner transformation will soon eat itself, and those around it.

-Paul Kingsnorth, from here

A story of rebellion.................

 Here is how Paul describes himself: “I am an animist in an age of machines; a poet-of-sorts in a dictatorship of merchants; a believer in a culture of cynics. Either I’m mad, or the world is.” He continues: “My most strongly-held belief is this: that our modern crisis is not economic, political, scientific or technological, and that no ‘answers’ to it will be found in those spheres. I believe that we are living through a deep spiritual crisis; perhaps even a spiritual war. My interest these days is what this means.”

-Bari Weiss, from her intro to this Paul Kingsnorth essay

Life its ownself...................................

      This country has felt more stunned and doomed than at any time since the assassinations of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, and while a sense of foreboding may be appropriate, the hate is not.  At some point, the hate becomes an elective.  I was becoming insane, letting politicians get me whipped up into visions of revenge, perp walks, and jail.  But it didn't work as a drug, neither calming nor animating me.  There is no beauty or safety in hatred.  As a long-term strategy, based on craziness, it's doomed.

     No one can take this hatred off me.  I have to surrender it every time I become aware of it.  This will not go well, I know.  But I don't want my life's ending to be that I was toxic and self-righteous, and I don't know if my last day here will be next Thursday or in twenty years.  Whenever that day comes, I want to be living, insofar as possible, in the Wendell Berry words "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts," . . .

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

a radical act..................

      Hating the way I was feeling helped me give up Camel cigarettes thirty-two years ago, and then alcohol.  It is good to surrender things that poison us and our world.  Am I free of such toxicity now?  Well, about forty percent, and that is a pretty good deal.  I'll take it.

     Hate weighed me down and muddled my thinking.  It isolated me and caused my shoulders to hunch, the opposite of sticking together and lifting our hands and eyes to the sky.  The hunch changes our posture, because our shoulders slump, and it changes our vision, as we scowl and paw the ground.  So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch the best we can.  We square our shoulders and lift our gaze.

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

Well, that explains a lot..................

 That which we want, desire, and insist upon from another person is felt by them as pressure.  They will, therefore, unconsciously resist.

-David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender

remove the barricade of knowledge.....

       There's a great power in not knowing.  When faced with a challenging task, we may tell ourselves it's too difficult, it's not worth the effort, it's not the way things are done, it's not likely to work, or it's not likely to work for us.

       If we approach a task with ignorance, it can remove the barricade of knowledge blocking progress.  Curiously, not being aware of a challenge may be just what we need to rise to it.

-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

re-contextualized..................

      A key to making Love unconditional is the willingness to forgive.  With forgiveness, events and people are re-contextualized as simply "limited"—not "bad" or "unlovable."  With humility we are willing to relinquish our perception of a past event.

-David Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway Of Surrender

On compassion.......................

 The surrendered person no longer needs others for personal fulfillment but is with them out of choice because of love and enjoyment.  Compassion for others and for their humanness transforms like and all relationship.

-David R. Hawkins,  Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender

injustice collecting.....................

     We need to be aware that we have unwittingly become "injustice collectors."  The media reports are full of this form of chronic resentment.  We see "injustice collecting" in international relations where making the other nation "wrong" is actually a primary objective.  We are unconsciously programmed to believe that  "injustice collecting" is "normal."  In contrast to this habitual pattern, which is destructive and weakening, the letting go technique frees us from keeping close account of the "wrongs" made against us.  Our time and attention are freed up to see the beauty and opportunity around us.
     Anger is binding, not freeing.  It connects us to another person and holds them in our life pattern.  We are stuck in the negative pattern until we let go of the energy of anger and its little payoffs of righteous indignation, feeling wronged, and the desire for revenge.  It may not be exactly the same person who constantly recurs in our life.  If not that person, then others will appear who have the same quality that triggers our anger and resentment.  This will keep recurring until we finally handle our inner angriness.   Then, suddenly, people with that quality disappear from our life.  Therefore, anger may force someone to be physically distant from us, but psychically it binds them to us more closely, until we fully relinquish the anger and resentment.
     Relinquishing anger brings us many benefits.  We are free to experience emotional comfort and ease, gratitude for the daily opportunities to grow and heal, mutual caring with another without subtle "strings attached," improvement in health, and more life energy.  These breakthroughs allow us to move up to a more effective and effortless state of inner freedom.

-David R. Hawkins,  Letting Go:  The Pathway Of Surrender

both at the same time...............

     F. Scott Fitzgerald, a contemporary of William Jennings Bryan, described this paradox.  "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.  One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them better."  It seems to me that the lesson in both Bryan's and Fitzgerald's comments is to simultaneously choose life while serenely knowing that the mysterious future pull is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing as our bodies age and die.  Thus we are in charge and we are not in charge, both at the same time, and it is all right for these two opposites to coexist.

-Wayne Dyer,  from Wisdom of the Ages

Resign...........................

If you add up the time you spend where it's none of your business, or none of your concern, or that you cannot affect the outcome (news, TV reruns, and other crap) you could have been the greatest salesperson in the world or a syndicated columnist, or an author.  But no, you'd rather piss your time down the drain thinking that you're some kind of savior to mankind when in fact, it's just the opposite.  Save your own ass first. . . .
In 1972, when the twins were born, I was in a rotten marriage, I was broke, and I was studying positive attitude daily.  I first read the phrase resign your position as general manager of the universe.  I have searched back and cannot find its origin.  I wish I could.  I wish I could tell you that I created this phrase, but I can't.  What I can tell you is that I have used this philosophy as one of the building blocks of my success.  The reason I have saved it for last is because it is the least evident and the most difficult.

-Jeffrey Gitomer,  The Little Red Book Of Selling

On letting go..................

     God is life.  God is life in action.  The best way to say, "I love you, God," is to live your life doing your best.  The best way to say, "Thank you, god," is by letting go of the past and living in the present moment, right here and now.  Whatever life takes away from you, let it go.  When you surrender and let go of the past, you allow yourself to be fully alive in the moment.  Letting go of the past means you can enjoy the dream that is happening right now.

-Don Miguel Ruiz,  The Four Agreements:  A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom