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October 16, 2025 at 2:15 pm #450989
Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
“So, we humans cannot not judge at all—but we can soften our judgment. Personally, I do need to judge less often, way less. I am opening to this.”
There’s method to the madness when the wisdom traditions warn us not to judge. The truth is, we’re really not that great at it. 🙂
James’s seed points past measurement, labeling, or even thought itself. That kind of presence is possible, which you may have touched, even if just for a moment, through meditation or contemplation. I feel its a gift, not something we grasp or will, but something we receive.
In Joseph Campbell’s view, the heart chakra represents a turning point in the journey of awareness. It’s living from a consciousness that is fully engaged with life, yet no longer ruled by fear or grasping. So I agree with Jung that living from the heart chakra is a consciousness we all should strive towards for a balanced, healthy sense of self.
If the root chakra is the will to survive, the sacral chakra the will to pleasure, and the solar plexus the will to power, then the heart chakra is the will to love, not as sentiment, but as spacious presence. It’s the place where the ego begins to loosen and the soul begins to speak. It’s where duality begins to dissolve, not by force, but through love.
Living from the heart doesn’t mean escaping life, it means embracing it with open hands. It’s where we notice our judgments and soften them. Where we remain engaged, but no longer entangled. It’s the beginning of the return to presence. And just maybe the seed James planted takes root.
October 16, 2025 at 11:39 am #450980Peter
ParticipantIts not always noticed but language has a huge role when it comes to duality and often creates much of our suffering. The “fall” into ego consciousness can’t be separated from language leaving me to wonder if language is the ego’s or ‘Life’ way of trying to explain and know itself.
Language is powerful, but it relies on duality, it needs opposites to make meaning. We say “light” because we know “dark.” We say “me” because we know “you.” In this way, language itself is born from the awakened awareness of separation and complicated things further. The moment we speak, have a thought, we divide and exit any pure non-dual state.
Think of the experience of AUM, surrounded by silence, the sound of Life itself, rising and returning to stillness. The rhythm of being. The breath of creation.
Contemplative traditions honor silence because silence remembers what came before words. It touches the unity that existed before we began to name and divide. God and silence… interconnected?
Last night I watched a show about a priest who left the Church after a tragedy. He had prayed and pleaded, but God’s response was silence. He judged silence as absence, as a non-response.
Today I wonder if the Priest understood… That perhaps silence was the only place God could still be found, not to give answers, but to offer a return to the whole… Beyond the noise of certainty. Beyond the language of explanation.
Maybe silence isn’t what remains after tragedy, it’s what holds it and us?October 16, 2025 at 10:26 am #450979Peter
ParticipantIn Buddhism, the rise of the chakras can be seen as a journey of unfolding awareness. The lower chakras are rooted in survival and identity, much like the hyenas who act from instinct. But as awareness rises, so does the capacity to witness, to hold paradox, to rest in silence. The higher chakras invite us into spaciousness, into the possibility of seeing without dividing, knowing without naming.
Here I note that Jung, Buddha, and shamanism suggest that the heart center as a place to engage with life for most people. The place most of us are currently engaged at.
The rise of the chakras is a journey from survival and identity to spaciousness and unity. Each chakra a change in a relationship of ‘consciousness’. The seed James has been planting points to the seventh chakra. The seventh chakra, at the crown, is the point where the self dissolves into the whole, where duality dissolves.
Joseph Campbell uses the metaphor of the moth who doesn’t just admire the flame, but merges with it, “dies” to it. This is the image of the seventh chakra: the merging of the subjective and the objective, the end of the illusion that they were ever separate. It’s not annihilation, it’s union. The flame doesn’t destroy the moth; it completes it.
At this level, there is no longer duality, no “me” and “you,” “inside” and “outside.” There is only the dance of being, the silent knowing that all things arise from the same source and return to it. Language falls away here, not because it’s wrong, but because it’s no longer needed. What remains is presence, pure, unmeasured, whole.
October 16, 2025 at 9:11 am #450978Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
I’ll try to answer the question simply. (you should see my initial response as I tried to sort though my thoughts which I may share after) 🙂
Imagine you’re a child playing with building blocks. At first, there’s just the blocks and the joy of playing. But then, you start sorting them: red blocks here, blue blocks there. You say, “This one is mine,” and “That one is not.”, “This one I like”, This one I don’t” That’s the moment the mind begins to divide into “me” and “not me,” “good” and “bad,” “us” and “them.”
Or imagine you’re a child standing in front of a mirror. At first you don’t know the difference between you and your reflection. You just see movement, light, presence. But as you grow, you learn to say “me” and “not me.” That’s the beginning of separation, of seeing yourself as one thing, and everything else as something else.
Hyenas, like you said, act from instinct. They haven’t “fallen” into consciousness. They flow with life as it is, responding from instinct protecting their space and chase away others. That’s nature doing its job. Life being Life. But humans have something extra: we can watch our thoughts. We can notice when we’re sorting the blocks too tightly, or when we’re afraid of a block just because it’s different.
Humans have a special kind of awareness. We think we name, we measure. We say “this is right,” “that is wrong,” “you are different from me.” This kind of thinking, what some call ego-consciousness is duality which helps us build language, culture, and meaning. But it also creates division and suffering. It can make us feel separate, alone, or afraid.
Non-duality doesn’t mean pretending everything is the same. It means remembering that before we started dividing the world into pieces, we were part of something whole. It’s like looking at a forest and seeing not just trees, but the life that connects them all and we are part of that All.
Mystics and contemplatives say that silence helps us remember this wholeness. Not because our thoughts our words are bad, but because silence touches what came before words, the deep unity beneath all our naming. In that light compassion naturally arisen.
So what do we do with this? We don’t need to undo nature or stop thinking. But we can soften our judgments. We can live with more presence. We can see others not as “not me,” but as part of the same light, the same life.
At the deepest level, there’s no “me” and “you,” no “inside” and “outside.” Just the dance of being.
October 15, 2025 at 11:24 am #450948Peter
ParticipantThe story of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is traditionally seen as the origin of sin where disobedience ruptured humanity’s innocence. But mystics read it differently. They see it not as a moral failure, but as the birth of duality: the moment consciousness split into opposites, good and evil, right and wrong, self and other.
In this view, the “fall” wasn’t into sin, but into ego. Into the mind’s habit of dividing and naming, of grasping and judging. It was the loss of unity with the divine, replaced by the illusion of separation. Sadly, in my opinion, the traditional view holds the most sway and maybe why law is so often mistaken for love, discipline for devotion and righteousness for relationship. But that may be unkind…
October 15, 2025 at 9:30 am #450933Peter
ParticipantHi Tee,
I sense we’re landing in the same space, even if we’re using different language to get there. That said, when I read your statement -“Getting rid of all thought is not the goal. Getting rid of wrong thought…” the word “wrong” stood out. For me, it introduces a kind of tension, a grasping that clings, rather than the spaciousness that invites a more fluid relationship with thought.As you noted, in Zen the goal isn’t to eliminate thought, though it also warns against categorizing thought as “right” or “wrong” in a moralistic or dualistic way. It’s the very act of labeling, of dividing, that often deepens suffering. Not because the thought itself is inherently problematic, but because of how we hold or reject it.
I’m reminded of the Genesis story where the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is often interpreted as granting divine clarity about what is good or evil. But “knowledge of” is not the same as “knowing what is.” That subtle difference matters (or should more then it tends to). In reaching for that knowledge, we stepped into separation, mistaking the capacity to judge for the wisdom to know. One is a burden; the other, a mystery that unfolds in relationship, in presence, in humility.
For me, and as you suggest, the invitation isn’t to get rid of thought, especially as a act of will, but to hold thoughts lightly creating flow and space for the ‘unknown’ to arise…
October 15, 2025 at 7:51 am #450932Peter
ParticipantHi James
I feel the essence of what you’re pointing to: when thoughts are no longer clung to, they lose their grip on identity and simply become part of the body’s functioning, like breath or heartbeat. In that spaciousness, what remains is not a thing, but a presence. A stillness.
Your question “If there is no attachment to thoughts, what remains?” feels like a koan which invites not an answer, but a direct seeing. Here I feel maybe where the rhythm of breath comes in. I’ve been exploring a gentler approach, where instead of a dramatic psychological death, there’s an invitation to dance, a soft surrender woven into each inhale and exhale – Life, Death woven within the Eternal. In that rhythm, silence returns. And in that silence, the unknown becomes accessible.
The challenge with any realization is that the moment realization of a unknown arises, the space shifts. We’re no longer in the unknown, no longer without thought, we’ve named it, grasped it, and the rhythm continues. It’s like the tide: knowing, unknowing, knowing again. Not a final death, but a continual “dying” to what we think we know.
It’s hard to explain, but maybe it’s not meant to be explained. Maybe it’s meant to be lived?
I note that in Buddhism, the path to full enlightenment nirvana is often framed as a monastic pursuit and I wonder if this isn’t a point of departure in the discussion?
The Buddha offered distinct teachings for laypeople, emphasizing ethical living, mindfulness, and a gradual awakening of the heart. While liberation remains the ultimate aim, the path for householders, those whose lives unfold within the messiness of daily engagement often centers on integration rather than transcendence. The invitation is not to bypass life, but to meet it skillfully, with presence and compassion.
October 14, 2025 at 2:18 pm #450912Peter
ParticipantBeautifully said Thomas and as always Tee a great break down though I might gently push back on the idea that “the answer should always be hope, love, focusing on the positive.” In my experience, such an approach often turns back on itself, creating the very suffering we seek to release or allow to die.
The act of dying James speaks of I think points to something different: allowing space in our narratives to remain empty. Not rushing to fill the gap with positivity or certainty, but letting go of the compulsion to replace one story with another. Sometimes, the most compassionate move for ourselves is to leave room for silence, for unknowing because that space can become the doorway to freedom from the known, and to the joy of simply being.
In that light I agree with James though I might soften the intensity.
My observation and experience is that the “death” James speaks of isn’t a one-time event or a distant threshold, it’s a reality available in each breath. To die inwardly is to release the illusion of permanence and step into the eternal present, where life is not something to possess or defend but something to participate in. In that sense, death becomes renewal, a doorway to freedom from the known, as Krishnamurti says, and to the joy of simply being. And in that timeless stillness is where Campbell’s words echo: “That which you are was never born and will never die.”
At first, Krishnamurti’s call to “die now” and Campbell’s assurance that “you were never born and will never die” might sound like opposites. But they speak to different layers of reality. Krishnamurti addresses the psychological self, the bundle of desires, fears, hopes and stories we cling to. That must die for freedom to emerge. Campbell points to the essential being beneath those layers, the ground of existence that is timeless. That never dies because it was never born. So, the paradox resolves: what dies is the illusion, not the essence. And in letting go of the illusion, we awaken to the eternal present Campbell describes.
Perhaps the truth lives in the tension between these voices. To die psychologically is not to annihilate life but to awaken to its depth. And when we see that eternity is woven into the present, death becomes less a demand and more a rhythm, a letting go that happens moment by moment, breath by breath. In that rhythm, even the scent of roses changes, because there is no “you” smelling them, only life itself, playing, breathing, being.
October 14, 2025 at 12:17 pm #450909Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
it takes courage to revisit situations that didn’t go the way we hoped. I might challenge your use of labeling language of bad and good and offer a reframing: one moment doesn’t define who you are. You’re not a “bad” or “good” person, you’re a human being who made a mistake and is learning from it.Seen through that lens, you sidestep common thinking traps like labeling, all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, and emotional reasoning. And you give yourself a little more space.
October 14, 2025 at 8:35 am #450899Peter
ParticipantHi Everyone
“When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die.” – Campbell
“If you think you’ve nailed down the self, you’ve missed the joke. The self is the dance, not the dancer.” – Watts
Both Campbell and Watts point to the same insight through different lenses. Campbell reminds us that eternity is not a distant realm or something that begins after death, it is a dimension of the present moment, a quality of being that reveals our essence as timeless: never truly born, never truly dying.
Watts, with his playful metaphysics, frames life as a cosmic game of hide-and-seek, where the universe forgets this truth in order to rediscover it through us. Forgetting means identifying with the separate self, bound by time and mortality; remembering is awakening to the dance, the realization that the self is not the dancer but the dance itself. In this way, both voices invite us to see that eternity, which is timeless and not a measurement, is here and now, and the game is not about escape but rediscovery.
For fun I thought I’d have Campbell and Watts join the dialog
Setting: A dimly lit circular room with mirrored walls. Four chairs face each other. A candle flickers at the center. The air hums with quiet tension and curiosity.
CHARACTERS:
Ariadne – poetic, intuitive, speaks in metaphors and fluid language
Theo – analytical, precise, favors definitions and logical clarity
Campbell – mythic, calm, speaks in archetypes and timeless truths
Watts – playful, irreverent, dances with paradox and cosmic humorAriadne: The self is a shimmer, a ripple in the stream. Try to grasp it, and it slips through your fingers. We are illusions dreaming of permanence.
Theo: Illusion implies something false. If we are to speak meaningfully, we must define what we mean by “self.” Is it consciousness? Memory? Identity?
Watts: Oh, definitions! Lovely toys. But don’t mistake the menu for the meal. The self is a role in the cosmic play. You’re not a noun, you’re a verb. You are the universe experiencing itself.
Theo: That’s poetic, but dangerously vague. If everything is everything, then nothing is anything. We need boundaries to think, to speak, to be.
Campbell: Boundaries are the bones of myth. But the truth lies beyond them. That which you are was never born and will never die. The hero’s journey begins with identity and ends in transcendence.
Ariadne: So, the game is to forget and then remember. To lose the self in the labyrinth and find it again in the center.
Watts: Exactly! And the punchline is there was never a labyrinth. Just the dance. Just the music. You took the game seriously, and that’s the joke.
Theo: So, all this… these realizations, these awakenings… they’re just… games?
Campbell: Yes. But sacred games. The myths we live by are not lies; they are metaphors pointing to truths too vast for logic.
Watts: And the best part? You don’t have to win. You just have to play.Together, Campbell and Watts whisper: “Eternity is not later. It’s now.” – “You are the universe pretending to be a person.” – let us hold these words lightly.
Living isn’t about slaying dragons or finding treasure. It’s about waking up to the fact that you were never separate from the treasure to begin with. That the game was always rigged in favor of joy, if only we stop trying to win and start playing.
Today, I wonder what if. What if I try to live as if I were never born and will never die. What if… I dance. I play. I remember.
October 13, 2025 at 8:54 am #450878Peter
ParticipantHi Everyone
I recall conversations years ago where I admitted feeling that the hope I was leaning into was making life grim and depressing. The hope I was taught was tied to unmet expectations projected onto some imagined life after death where all would be well… I wondered if it might be better not to hope at all. When I shared this, the response was nearly universal: You have to have hope, or you’ll fall into despair. – Despair on one side, despair on the other – a catch-22.
That led me to a deeper question: why, when we try to change a story we tell ourselves, do we feel such pressure, both internal and external, to replace it immediately with a new one? What are we so afraid of in the silence between narratives?
When I considered removing my story of hope, I was told the only alternative was to fill that space with a story of despair. But over time, I’ve learned this isn’t true. You can stop telling a story without replacing it. You can leave the space open, and remain whole.
This has taken years of practice. Along the way, I’ve learned to be careful with words like hope, especially because they so easily blur with belief, faith, even life and live. These words carry weight, and when we use them interchangeably, we risk confusing very different ways of being.
Take the statements: “Life without hope is a grim one.” “Live without hope.” They sound similar, but they point in opposite directions. The first assumes hope is essential for meaning. The second, echoing T.S. Eliot, invites us to let go of clinging to specific outcomes. It doesn’t suggest despair, but rather a posture of openness, of freedom from illusion.
This is where language matters. When we don’t clarify what kind of hope we mean, “living without hope” can sound like giving up. But it can also mean living without the burden of expectation. It can mean being present, receptive, and courageous in the face of uncertainty.
To avoid confusion, I’ve found it helpful to distinguish between two kinds of hope:
– Hope as expectation – which binds us to outcomes and often leads to disappointment.
– Hope as presence – which keeps us open to what unfolds, without needing to control it.The first is a clenched fist. The second is an open hand.
From that clarity, I’ve begun to reclaim hope as an active essence rooted in courage and responsibility. Not a story I tell to avoid despair, but a way of living that embraces the unknown with grace.
October 10, 2025 at 11:14 am #450776Peter
ParticipantJut to add – If someone told me a 10+ years ago that my hope was unskillful and passive as Fromm suggests I would have rejected the notion. Back then, hope felt active to me. Over time, I’ve learned what T.S. Eliot meant by “wait without hope, for hope would be hope of the wrong thing.”
That’s still waiting, but a least not one that pretends. Today I think I’m ready to reclaim hope, disentangling it from passive faith and restore its active essences… hope as a verb, not a feeling.
October 10, 2025 at 10:21 am #450771Peter
ParticipantHi Tee
That was a interesting breakdown.
I think our bias lies in associating action as good and stillness as passive and… less good. And that this bias shapes how we imagine hope. We picture hope as active, as a something that must be good, something that will lead us to freedom, but often don’t notice due to our bias, when it becomes passive: waiting for rescue rather than engaging with reality. When hope turns into waiting, trust shifts outward where we have a tendance to place it in leaders or systems instead of our own capacity for inner work and shared responsibility. This bias applied unskillfully to hope often leads to the irony that those who cry “Freedom” the loudest, as a call to action, may actually be giving it away.
The following is a journal entry in progress as I try to put my feeling on something I’ve been feeling
In many communities, hope and faith are deeply intertwined and often treated as synonymous virtues. Yet this entanglement can obscure a critical distinction, one that Erich Fromm explored with urgency: the difference between active hope and passive resignation. Fromm argued that genuine hope is not a passive waiting for salvation, but an active, courageous engagement with the future. It is rooted in agency, responsibility, and the moral will to shape what comes next.
In my own community, I’ve observed a troubling pattern. People speak of hope with conviction, often in religious or cultural terms, but their posture is one of waiting. They believe they are hoping actively, yet much of this hope resembles Fromm’s notion of passivity, a quiet surrender masked as spiritual trust. This confusion has consequences. When hope becomes passive, and not recognized as such, it creates a vacuum of agency. People feel powerless, uncomfortable but still believe “something” will save them. Living in the uncomfortable tension but not fully conscious of it, feeding a unacknowledged anger that calls out for ‘dad’ to save them.
Fromm warned that passive hope, especially when cloaked in faith, can become fertile ground for authoritarianism. The leader becomes the embodiment of “active hope,” even if their actions are coercive or destructive. The more people mistake waiting for hoping (pretending its action), the more they surrender their autonomy to those who claim to act on their behalf. In this way, the erosion of true hope becomes a gateway to political and psychological submission.
October 9, 2025 at 3:25 pm #450750Peter
ParticipantHi Tee
Yes, it’s an area that occupies me, though still a work in progress. Wisdom traditions have long warned about mistaking activity for passivity and vice versa, but we seem deeply resistant to this insight. That resistance, I suspect, is a source of much of our suffering.
Society holds a paradoxical view of change. We readily agree that change from the inside out is more lasting than change imposed from the outside in. Yet we undervalue the very process that makes that inner change possible. Why? My thought is because we mistake inner work (subjectivity) for passivity and external enforcement (objectivity) for action.
We live in a culture that celebrates transformation, makeovers, breakthroughs, revolutions… a world that privileges what can be seen, counted, and proven. Action, in this frame, means movement.
Inner work, by contrast, is subjective. It happens in silence, in solitude, in the messy terrain of thought and feeling. It lacks the markers of “doing something” that our culture recognizes: speed, noise, output. So we label it passive. We call reflection “navel-gazing,” restraint “weakness,” and emotional labor “soft.”
As a result, we rush to fix, to act, to judge, to enforce, believing that movement equals progress and defense of our boundaries. But this bias blinds us to a deeper truth that inner work is often the most courageous, demanding, and transformative form of action.
Tor Nørretranders, in The User Illusion, tells a story of physicists debating why the good guy in Westerns always wins the shootout. The answer? Because the bad guy acts while the good guy is present. Conscious, ego-driven action is about half a second slower than presence. The bad guy loses because he decides to act and moves first, while the good guy, fully present, was already active.
Here, stillness is not inaction. t’s presence. It’s the fruit of inner work: knowing oneself, mastering fear, refusing to be baited by chaos. The gunslinger’s stillness looks passive but its not, it’s the most active force in the scene, shaping the outcome.
My thought is that to truly understand action and passivity, we must integrate both objective and subjective perspectives. We must learn to see the invisible, to recognize that stillness can be strength and motion can be avoidance. In doing so, we confront our biases about what counts as passive and what counts as active. And perhaps then, we begin to discern how those biases have shaped the way we hope, what we expect from change, and where we place our trust.
October 8, 2025 at 3:00 pm #450714Peter
ParticipantHi Thomas
Thanks for the kind words. It’s true you write candidly and with directness. I personally find it refreshing and would hate to lose your voice.
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