Spiritual Clean-up on Aisle Five

This article was originally published by Technorati on 20 February 2010. To see all my Technorati articles, click Lifestyle in the Contents listing on the sidebar.

The Good News Gazette is reporting on a Washington Post story about Rev. Anita Naves, who has taken up shop . . . well . . . inside a shop.

After her ordination, Rev. Naves searched for a proper venue to start up a church. For two years, nothing materialized around her home in Temple Hill, MD, in the Washington, D.C., area.

But as they say, when God closes a door, he opens a produce section.

That's when Naves says she felt God's urging to check out the community room at a new Giant Food store in District Heights, MD. She arranged a meeting with an assistant manager.

Moving Refrigerators with Marcus Aurelius and Eckhart Tolle

What is evil to thee does not subsist in the ruling principle of another; nor yet in any turning and mutation of thy corporeal covering. Where is it then? It is in that part of thee in which subsists the power of forming opinions about evils. Let this power then not form opinions, and all is well. And if that which is nearest to it, the poor body, is cut, burnt, filled with matter and rottenness, nevertheless let the part which forms opinions about these things be quiet, that is, let it judge that nothing is either bad or good which can happen equally to the bad man and the good. For that which happens equally to him who lives contrary to nature and to him who lives according to nature, is neither according to nature nor contrary to nature.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV No. 39

* * *

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 239–251

* * *

In Zen they say: "Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions."

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, p. 121

* * *

Judge not, lest you be judged.

Jesus, The Holy Bible, Matthew 7: 1

* * * * *

Whenever one is called upon to move refrigerators for a friend (that isn't us in the picture), it is likely in that mode of awakened doing our good friend Eckhart Tolle calls "Acceptance." The other two are "Enjoyment" and "Enthusiasm" (see Monetize Your Life for a complete discussion.)

"Whatever you cannot enjoy doing," he writes in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Oprah's Book Club, Selection 61), "you can at least accept that this is what you have to do. Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly."

Millionaire Gives Away Fortune, Keeps Next to Nothing

This article was originally published by Technorati on 11 February 2010. Well worth a second look. To see all my Technorati articles, click Lifestyle in the Contents listing on the sidebar.

Austrian millionaire Karl Rabeder has decided to give away all of the $6.7 million fortune he amassed in the furniture business because he said it made him miserable.

"My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing," he said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. "Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come."

In War of Words, Obama Essentially No Different

This article was originally published by Technorati on 4 April 2010.

He who sows the wind, reaps the whirlwind, to paraphrase the Jewish prophet Hosea. What goes around comes around. Karma.

In a "puffy" interview airing today on CBS's Sunday Morning, President Obama decries what he calls the vitriolic tone in Washington. "I am concerned," he says while strolling to the White House basketball court to take on Clark Kellogg in a game of POTUS (a variant of HORSE) "about a political climate in which the other side is demonized."

Isn't this the same Barack Obama who as a U.S. Senator from Illinois commencing in 2004 stood by while his predecessor, George Bush, was mercilessly demonized by so many of Obama's own party?

Awakened Consciousness Not a Backseat Driver

Let's put it this way: the job of your consciousness--the consciousness that you are--is to sit back and enjoy the ride. Don't interfere, don't be a backseat driver. Just relax and watch the scenery.

Jiddu Krishnamurti put it a slightly different way, but he meant the same thing. In A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, Eckhart Tolle tells the story of Krishnamurti's revelation of his "secret." It was simple. He said, "I don't mind what happens."

Who is "I" in this statement? Krishnamurti's consciousness. Consciousness that does not mind what's going on is free to sit back relax--inner peace--without interfering with The Good that runs the universe, all that is, including us.

The Trouble with Spiritual Teachers

I've just finished a book called A Course in Miracles (the first edition is available online), and I have to say that I am no closer to working a miracle than before I started reading.

It seems to be mostly just one inane non-sequitur after another written in a kind of bible-ese, with a lot of "untos" and "wherefores" and "nors"--lots of "nors"--and awkward syntax that its authors (or as they prefer "scribes") Dr. Helen Schucman (below left) and Dr. William Thetford (below right), must have picked up from contact with the King James Version from somewhere at some point.

I shall select a passage at random to make my point. Let's try this one:

"It is through these strange and shadowy figures that the insane relate to their insane world. For they see only those who remind them of these images, and it is to them that they relate. Thus do they communicate with those who are not there, and it is they who answer them. And no one hears their answer save him who called upon them."

I'm not kidding! I picked that passage completely at random. It goes on like that, meaninglessly, for some 622 long, dense pages. It's gibberish and the intro to the book (also on the website) admits as much:

"The Text is largely theoretical, and sets forth the concepts on which the Course's thought system is based. Its ideas contain the foundation for the Workbook's lessons. Without the practical application the Workbook provides, the Text would remain largely a series of abstractions which would hardly suffice to bring about the thought reversal at which the Course aims."

The Trouble with Televangelists

Ever wonder why Plato wrote his Dialogues the way he did? They're narratives; they read like stories, generally about dialogues that took place between Socrates and philosophers or students in and around Athens. They are timeless, as good a-reading today, if you are interested in the subject, as they ever were.

Compare them with Aristotle's Metaphysics and the vast majority of written matter on the subject of philosophy, which is completely cerebral and dry as the dust that coats them in libraries. No one reads them except academics, a condemnation not shared by Plato.

Apart for abounding good taste, why did Plato write like this? The answer may be found in one of his Dialogues called "Phaedrus." In it, Socrates has traveled to the countryside outside the walls of Athens, where he engages in his familiar verbal jousting (called "dialectic") with his young friend Phaedrus.

The storyline is generally about the benefits of rhetoric versus philosophy. But one of the lines of questioning concerns the benefit of writing. Socrates tells Phaedrus a myth about an Egyptian god, Theuth, who, according to the myth, was the inventor of writing.

Theuth brought his invention to King Thamus, hoping that all the Egyptians might make use of it, claiming, "This . . . will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories."

King Thamus told Theuth that he was mistaken. Writing would not benefit memory at all. Rather, it would weaken it.