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Post by Admin on Oct 23, 2015 8:39:14 GMT
“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” – Crowfoot
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Post by Admin on Oct 23, 2015 9:36:44 GMT
Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment – a little makes the way of the best happiness. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
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Post by Admin on Oct 27, 2015 22:16:54 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2015 7:16:08 GMT
"Our essence is beyond space and time, aware of itself as a part of infinity. I'll call this Spirit
This essence puts a very small part of itself - the soul - into the world of space and time, incarnation, and so develops its consciousness through experiencing duality. After hundreds or even thousands of incarnations, the soul is ready to merge into its spirit and continue its evolution in worlds beyond our imagination.
The soul itself creates another layer - the personality or ego - which is the vehicle of consciousness for the soul in one particular life time.
In Western culture the soul is strongly encouraged to forget its own identity, and to identify itself solely with its personality. This makes for a cheap, obedient workforce.
Spiritual emergence in this model occurs when identification with the personality/ego is broken, even for only a moment. The personality/ego has to come to terms with the realisation that there is much more to life than it had realised (made real).
Once this limited identification is broken, the ego will desire to return to its old way of life, yet usually has to concede it has a bigger purpose than it wants to know about. Consensual reality no longer works for it, so it must experiment and create a larger map of reality.
Often ego inflation occurs at this stage. The ego has a strong sense of separation, yet has had a glimpse of the immensity of the universal mind. It may then decide it is the messiah or God or a chosen saviour. As a spirit, it is indeed God, however as a soul and ego, it is still evolving to become God incarnate.
A spiritual emergence is a part of the evolutionary process when awareness shifts from ego to soul. With mindfulness, we can observe if our thoughts, emotions and actions arise from our ego - that strong sense of a separate me - or from the soul.
Eventually, the ego has had enough of suffering, and is ready to accept it is a part of a much greater being than it believed itself to be, and to be grateful for that."
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Post by Admin on Nov 1, 2015 11:12:49 GMT
Transpersonal FAQ - www.transpersonalscience.org/tranfaq.aspxWhat is the purpose of this FAQ? This FAQ aims to explain the meaning, nature and significance of transpersonal studies for a general educated audience. It answers commonly asked questions about spiritual belief and practice and offers guidance on academic and professional study of the transpersonal. What does 'transpersonal' mean? The term ‘transpersonal’ literally means ‘beyond (or through) the personal’. It refers to experiences, processes and events in which our normal limiting sense of self is transcended and in which there is a feeling of connection to a larger, more meaningful reality.
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Post by snowstorm on Nov 1, 2015 13:07:52 GMT
Transpersonal FAQ is very interesting and current, as the research includes 'How can we achieve greater happiness and fulfilment' and 'How can we be more creative.'
Intrigued to see that a rave is classed as a transpersonal event!
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Post by Admin on Nov 9, 2015 11:19:17 GMT
"The strange part of it is man's inability to see false answers as false answers. No matter how often he wakes up with the same headache, the familiar nerves, the habitual anger, he stumbles right back to the same blunders.
Then there is the Supermind solution. It is a shady place. It comes when the mind grows weary, gives up, dares to know nothing and abandons itself to something unknown and indescribable."
The Power of your Supermind, Chap. 9, p. 114
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Post by Admin on Nov 11, 2015 10:43:05 GMT
"Humans are pained by wanting something to be true that isn't true. You need never ever want anything to be true because the very wanting of it will cause you to project your idea of what you think is true, what you prefer to be true, your choice, your benefit, your reward, and you will call that what is true, which means it is false."
from a talk given 4/25/1986 Vernon Howard's Higher World - MP3 CD Volume 3, talk 66, track 13
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Post by Admin on Nov 14, 2015 14:45:14 GMT
"If you prefer smoke over fire then get up now and leave. For I do not intend to perfume your mind's clothings with more sooty knowledge.
No, I have something else in mind. Today I hold a flame in my left hand and a sword in my right. There will be no damage control today.
For God is in a mood to plunder your riches and fling you nakedly into such breathtaking poverty that all that will be left of you will be a tendency to shine.
So don't just sit around this flame choking on your mind. For this is no campfire song to mindlessly mantra yourself to sleep with.
Jump now into the space between thoughts and exit this dream before I burn the damn place down."
~ Adyashanti
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Post by Admin on Nov 14, 2015 17:59:15 GMT
You Are Not Just Your Brain www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/11/13/455731022/you-are-not-just-your-brainFor some time now, I've been skeptical about the neuroscience of consciousness. Not so much because I doubt that consciousness is affected by neural states and processes, but because of the persistent tendency on the part of some neuroscientists to think of consciousness itself as a neural phenomenon. Nothing epitomizes this tendency better than Francis Crick's famous claim — he called it his "astonishing hypothesis" — that you are your brain. At an interdisciplinary conference at Brown not so long ago, I heard a prominent neuroscientist blandly assert, as if voicing well-established scientific fact, that thoughts, feelings and beliefs are specific constellations of matter that are located (as it happens) inside the head. My own view — I laid this out in a book I wrote a few years back called Out of Our Heads — is that the brain is only part of the story, and that we can only begin to understand how the brain makes us consciousness by realizing that brain functions only in the setting of our bodies and our broader environmental (including our social and cultural) situation. The skull is not a magical membrane, my late collaborator, friend and teacher Susan Hurley used to say. And there is no reason to think the processes supporting consciousness are confined to what happens only on one side (the inside) of that boundary. There is a nice interview on the Oxford University Press website with Anil Seth, the editor of a new Oxford journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. It's an informative discussion and makes the valuable point that the study of consciousness is interdisciplinary. As he puts it: "Consciousness science is fundamentally interdisciplinary. Today, it is a flourishing enterprise which engages neuroscientists, psychologists, computer scientists, clinicians, mathematicians, and physicists, with sociologists and anthropologists also joining the party. Consciousness is studied in psychiatric and neurological patients, in non-human animals and in healthy human volunteers (including infants), with experiments deploying increasingly powerful methodologies for acquiring, analysing, and connecting data of many different kinds, all brought together by powerful new theories and computational models." He doesn't mention philosophy here, but he might have. As he notes, the new Oxford journal will be the official journal of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. The ASSC, of which I am member (and a former member of the executive committee), is a society that was founded by philosophers and neuroscientists back in the 1990s with the goal of furthering the new science of consciousness. Seth is correct that "it's tricky to come up with a rigorous scientific definition of consciousness which enjoys a broad consensus." He goes on to say: "Put simply, for a conscious organism, there is 'something it is like' to be that organism." It's worth noting that this characterization of what it is for an organism to be conscious — that there is something that it is like to be that organism — was first advanced in the 70s by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. I don't intend this observation as a criticism. To the contrary, I applaud Seth for undertaking the project of leading this new research journal and for emphasizing, at the outset, that consciousness science isn't — and can't be — just neuroscience. Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015). ____________________________________________ IS CONSCIOUSNESS FUNDAMENTAL? originsofconsciousness.com/book/Consciousness is that inner awareness each of us has. It is the witness to our thoughts, and ultimately, who we really are. In this book, the term ‘consciousness’ will be used to describe any form of awareness, regardless of complexity or degree. But what is consciousness? Are thoughts things? How does the felt world of experience arise from the soft, wet tissue of our brains? Are we no more than our brains? And if so, what is it about brains that permit this experiencing center in the physical universe? Consciousness is the vehicle of all value and meaning. It is the ontological fountainhead, not just of the means to attribute significance, but of significance itself. Without it, there could be no meaning or value in the universe. It is then, in a certain sense, all that really matters. Such centrality sits uneasily with our competing suspicions of the insignificance of life in the cosmos. Despite our intimacy with consciousness, it seems no less astonishing that within us the universe has evolved a means through which it experiences itself. The existence of this inner dimension is so imminent to us, and yet it is perhaps the deepest mystery we face. Is consciousness an atomized illusion of biological organisms in a doomed and meaningless universe, or is it an extension of nature’s ongoing creative process? Are we mere spectators of reality, or are we active participators? There has never and will never be a question deeper or more consequential than the question of consciousness. Beyond our personal beliefs, how we collectively respond to this question has far reaching implications to our civilization in the values it holds, and the choices it makes. Our answers are the basis of our religious and spiritual beliefs, the structure of the institutions we build around us, and the values we pass to our children. It deeply informs our relationships to each other, the environment, and other species. We will explore how the question of consciousness has continued to resist all attempts at explanation through the standard reductive materialism that has characterized science of the last three hundred years, and how this has led a growing number of respected scientists and philosophers to argue that an expansion of science will be necessary to understand it. We will explore how a trend in scientific thinking is now moving toward deeper views of mind, to regard consciousness or awareness as an intrinsic rather than incidental feature of the natural world. I will refer to this modest, though growing shift in secular thinking as the intrinsic consciousness movement. It is a movement leading both to a radical new understanding of the mind and a profound new understanding of reality.
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Post by Admin on Nov 14, 2015 18:16:53 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 14, 2015 16:15:32 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 16, 2016 6:55:43 GMT
Differential Diagnosis - www.spiritualcompetency.com/dsm4/lesson5_1.htmlDifferential Diagnosis of Spiritual Crisis & Psychotic Disorders The DSM-IV highlights the need for cultural sensitivity when clinicians assess for schizophrenia in socioeconomic or cultural situations different from their own: Ideas that may appear to be delusional in one culture (e.g., sorcery and witchcraft) may be commonly held in another. In some cultures, visual or auditory hallucinations with a religious content may be a normal part of religious experience (e.g., seeing the Virgin Mary or hearing God's voice). (p. 281) Criteria for making the differential diagnosis between psychopathology and authentic spiritual experiences have been proposed by Agosin [1], Grof and Grof [2] and Lukoff [3]. There is considerable overlap among the proposed criteria. Ken Wilber argues that confusion in distinguishing intense spiritual experiences from psychosis has been created by failing to make the critical distinction between pre-rational states and authentic transpersonal states. This "pre/trans fallacy" has been perpetuated: Since both prepersonal and transpersonal are, in their own ways, nonpersonal, then prepersonal and transpersonal tend to appear similar, even identical, to the untutored eye. (Wilber, p. 125 [4]) [Rest in Link]
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Post by Admin on Apr 22, 2016 6:34:15 GMT
Once upon a time, scientists assumed they had the keys to absolute knowledge. The last hundred and fifty years has brought us to acknowledge there is no such thing within the realm of standard human perception and reason. When it comes to facts alive and well in the real world, we can make some pretty good stabs at the truth. When it comes to questions of the future, we can make limited speculations. When it comes to knowing the origin of things, empirical materialism is completely out of its realm. Perhaps we are ready today to recognize a place for the inner vision of the prophet and the mystic.
- Tzvi Freeman
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Post by Admin on Jun 4, 2016 17:29:26 GMT
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