4/6 Reflector PLL-DLR

Freedom

No fear is real

‘You have anxiety and fear. Anxiety is focused on an object, such as a lion or a great height or a terrorist. You’re scared, but you can relate by thinking about it or avoid it. Fear is a very different emotion: the object is missing, it is purely a sense that something bad might happen. Fear comes from your imagination. If you ride through a dark forest, your imagination starts working. Then you start to imagine that behind that tree a wolf or a rapist is hiding.’

‘Geen enkele angst is reëel. Je hebt angst en vrees. Vrees is gericht op een object, zoals een leeuw of een grote hoogte of een terrorist. Je bent er bang voor, maar je kunt je ertoe verhouden door erover na te denken of het uit de weg te gaan. Angst is een heel andere emotie: het object ontbreekt, het is puur een gevoel voor iets naars dat zou kunnen gebeuren. Angst komt voort uit je eigen verbeelding. Als je door een donker bos fietst, gaat je fantasie werken. Dan ga je je verbeelden dat zich achter die boom een wolf of een verkrachter schuilhoudt.’

http://www.vn.nl/Archief/Samenleving/Artikel-Samenleving/Psychiaterfilosoof-Damiaan-Denys.htm

The middle way

“Gautam Buddha was the first man to use the words “to be in the middle”, and of course nobody has been able to improve upon the meanings that he gave to the word middle.

He called his path the middle path. The first meaning is that if you can avoid both the extremes, the rightist and the leftist – if you can be exactly in the middle of both extremes, you will not be in the middle you will have transcended the whole trinity of extremes, and the middle. If you drop both the extremes, the middle disappears on its own accord. Middle of what…?

Gautam Buddha’s insistence on the middle is not the middle itself; it is, in fact, a subtle way to persuade you for transformation. But to tell you directly to be transformed may make you apprehensive, afraid. To be in the middle seems to be very simple.

Gautam Buddha played with the word out of sheer compassion. His own term for the middle is majjhim nikaya, the middle path. Every extreme has to exclude the other extreme; every extreme has to be in opposition to the other polarity. The negative is against the positive, the minus is against the plus, death is against life. If you take them as extremes, they naturally appear as opposites.

But the man who can stop exactly in the middle immediately transcends all the extremes and the middle together. From the higher standpoint of the transformed being, you can see there is no opposition at all. The extremes are not opposites, not contradictories, but only complementaries.
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A newsletter – now –  after so long

Eco-logic books Email Update:
06-Oct-14:
====================================================

Dear eco-logic newsletter subscribers

You may have been wondering why on earth you have signed up to an email that is less frequent than a wunch of bankers foregoing their bonuses. An interesting question – the last newsletter according to my computer was June 2011

I should imagine most of you have gone away, changed emails, stopped reading or have come to believe you can solve all the world’s problems with marmalade – so really this is an email to see who is still out there.
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Gratis geld

Stel dat we iedereen in Nederland een basisinkomen geven, zonder voorwaarden. Klinkt te mooi om waar te zijn? Tegenlicht verkent de mogelijkheden.

Stel dat we iedereen in Nederland een basisinkomen geven, zonder voorwaarden. Klinkt te mooi om waar te zijn? Als we weten dat een deel van de bestaande banen gaat verdwijnen door robotisering en algoritmes, en dat het huidige stelsel van uitkeringen- en toeslagen te complex en beschuldigend en fraudegevoelig is, is het dan niet tenminste het onderzoeken waard?

http://tegenlicht.vpro.nl/afleveringen/2014-2015/gratis-geld.html
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I make coffee

“We prepare a tray with cups and cream and sugar and some sweet stuff and carry it all back to the couch in the living room, which is positioned to provide an unobstructed view of the turbulent clouds through large west-facing windows.

This conversation is more interesting to me than many because I’m clarifying it for myself as we go along. When the topic is enlightenment, I can speak with the perfect authority of a true master and my only real challenge is how to transmit thoughts and ideas more succinctly. But when the topic is the nature of delusion, the ego, false constructs, and human nature, I’m just a guy with a little experience, a lot of interest, and good seats. Yes, I’ve gone through the transformative process and yes, I remember a good deal from my own before and during periods, but whereas enlightenment is exactly the same for anyone, anytime, anyplace, the journey to it is as unique and varied as there are people to make it.
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MoonBlog 54.5

Facebook or not

about a year ago it became clear to me, and people near me, that I had to approach my online presence in a different way. Noticing how I got consumed by righting wrongs and engaging in many online skirmishes and even battles that then also trickled down into offline life. Now of course not every person one meets is for you, correctly so or not, whether online or offline, and with some people I am glad to have only met as briefly as we did, because really, some of you, fuck you man, wow. And given my Perspective/view of Power where I not only see the winners and losers, from my own perspective, I do indeed keep score, naturally. But all that is just the face of it, that might even only be the result.

What is far more important, is my own process, and the ongoing investigation; why do I do the things that I do, or not do? Important and exiting, exhilarating at times, as I dive into the uncertainty of the quest, and all the different explorations that open up as I question myself.
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In the Ward of Fevered Minds

Bed after bed, child after child.
Some calm, some thrashing.
Some laughing, some wailing.
Calling for mommy.
Calling for God.

One sits up, eyes open, asking.
I go to him, sit, answer.
He nods, falls back, gone again.

I was once in a bed like them—fevered, deluded.
Now I’m in a chair—I suppose it’s better.
A roomful of loonies.

I return to my crossword puzzle
Until the next one sits up, asks.
– Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment, The Damnedest Thing

big boat, little boat

“Before enligtenment the master prepares the people who are going to succeed him, makes them more articulate, makes them better able to transform the wordless into words, the absolutely silent into song, the absolutely unmoving into dance. Only then will he be able to convey something of help to blind humanity.

Buddha divided his enlightened people into two categories. They both have the same height-there is no quality of lower or higher-they both belong to the same cosmic reality, the fundamental nature. One category is called the arhatas-the arhatas are the ones who become enlightened and remain silent and the second category is called bodhisattvas. They also become enlightened, but their work is to convey something, some device, some hint about their experience to people.
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MoonBlog 35.3

To be grateful is a hoax, another trick of the mind, to soothe ourselves into believing in the goodness of the life we live, to focus on that one side of life to feel good about ourselves and our life. But who needs one-sided tricks to do that, to simply enjoy and accept all of it?

To include the drama, the horrors, the hurt, the cheating lovers, the broken down car, the crashed banks, why can we not be grateful about that? Why is striving for gratitude even an issue, what do we have to prove, to ourselves or others. Humbleness does not show, especially not on FaceTube

We can see the forced efforts in the sentences, comments, and even the videos, so desperately trying to show and show off what the fuck we are so grateful about. And the horror of admitting -that- is palpable.
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We have seen that

any psychic process that controls you gets much of its power from being unconscious. Therefore, the first phase in regaining control of your own heart and mind is to make the particular process as conscious as possible. By being curious and willing to be in touch with what you are already experiencing, you are becoming more aware of the psychic activity of self-judgment.

Self-judgment is the constant valuation of yourself according to standards learned in the past. It manifests as attacking and engagement. The more you become conscious of the inner activity of attacking and engagement, the more you realize that almost any mental activity used to stop judgment ends up supporting rather than ending it. This is because the effort to stop the attack is initially motivated by the experience of yourself as the victim of the attack-that is, the child. But as you have seen, acting from that selfimage of the child-victim always leads to some form of engagement. In other words, real disengagement requires disidentifying from the child self-image so that you can be truly effective in stopping the attack.
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Arthur tells me he wants a technique.

Rather, he wants the technique. I really only have one technique and everybody who comes to the house soon learns what it is from other students, but, oddly, nobody seems to practice it until they receive it from me. I’ve laid it out many times and tried to put it in the public domain for the use of whoever wants it, but it has remained strangely proprietary, as if the only way it can work is if it comes directly from me. There’s really not much to it, but I guess there’s not much to closing your eyes and repeating a mantra or counting your breaths either.
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UNDEFINED

Leave everything undefined,
including yourself.

Befriend uncertainty.
Fall in love with mystery.

Kneel at the altar
of Not Knowing.

Give your questions
time to breathe.

And the answers
will find you.

– Jeff Foster

MoonBlog 62.3

Life, interaction, energy -can not- be reciprocal. That is mechanically impossible, unless we make ourselves do that, make ourselves behave in those ways, forced. As we place another condition before having our experiences. See where that takes anyone?

Just look at our own self, and our own desires as a reply to our own experiences. “I want the other to be this, to be that. This person is correct, this one is not” and all are made a. from a mental discernment and judgment about b. the experiences we have because c. we don’t want or like those experiences. But when this happens to us, someone demanding these things, then we get all wound up about it, too.

Everyone is unique. We can not place demands on anyone else. No one is here to fix things, or to be equal to another. You are here to be you, while you -experience- the other. Uplifting or draining. Be aware, notice, experience.

This breath, this breath, this breath.

Sounds so easy right? Now try it 

icon_twisted

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What do you want?

I look at her, trying to gauge the intent of the question. Seeing my confusion, she holds her notes up for me to see. “Right there, question fourteen; ‘What does Jed want?'”

It’s still not clear to me what she means, but the answer is probably the same no matter how the question is interpreted. “I don’t want anything. I don’t want.”
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The heart’s direct antidote

to judgment is compassion. Because the judge sees only what is wrong and what needs fixing, you know you will get no compassion from it. You will therefore be wary of exposing painful, scary, or negative parts of yourself, for you can be certain the judge will make you wish you hadn’t. Everything you think and feel can be used against you. Its job is to maintain the status quo, to protect you by maintaining a restricted sense of self.
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In the East

“people have condemned the body, condemned matter, called matter “illusory,” maya – it does not really exist, it only appears to exist; it is made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. They denied the world, and that is the reason for the East remaining poor, sick, in starvation. Half of humanity has been accepting the inner world but denying the outer world.

The other half of humanity has been accepting the material world and denying the inner world. Both are half, and no man who is half can be contented. You have to be whole: rich in the body, rich in science; rich in meditation, rich in consciousness. Only a whole person is a holy person, according to me.” -OSHO