Ken Wilber

Great art grabs you, against your will, and then suspends your will.  You are ushered into a quiet clearing, free of desire, free of grasping, free of ego, free of the self-contraction. And through that opening or clearing in your own awareness may come flashing higher truths, subtler revelations, profound connections.  For a moment you might even touch eternity; who can say otherwise, when time itself is supendend in the clearing that great art creates in your awareness?

Saint Teresa was a great contemplative?  Yes, and Saint Teresa is the only woman ever to have reformed an entire Catholic monastic tradition (think about it).  Gautama Buddha shook India to its foundations.  Rumi, Plotinus, Bodhidharma, Lady Tsogyal, Lau Tzu, Plato, the Baal Shem Tov--these men and women started revolutions in the gross realm that lasted hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, something neither Marx nor Lenin nor Locke nor Jefferson can yet claim.  And they did not do so because they were dead from the neck down.  No, they were monumentally, gloriously, divinely big egos, plugged into a deeper psychic, which was plugged straight into God.

Sunday, Dec 7

Transcendence restores humor. Spirit restores humor. Suddenly, smiling returns. Too many representatives from too many movements - even many good movements, such as feminism, environmentalism, meditation, spiritual studies - seem to lack humor altogether. In other words, they lack lightness, they lack a distance from themselves, a distance from the ego and its grim game of forcing others to conform to its contours. There is self-transcending humor, or there is the game of egoic power. No wonder Mencken wrote that “Every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow citizens, usually by force; this messianic delusion is our national disease.” We have chosen egoic power and politically correct thought police; grim Victorian reformers pretending to be defending civil rights; messianic new paradigm thinkers who are going to save the planet and heal the world. They should all trade two pounds of ego for one ounce of laughter.

For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death.  The self is not made content; the self is made toast.

Change of state is not the point; recognizing the Changeless is the point, recognizing primordial Emptiness is the point, and if you are breathing and vaguely awake, that state of consciousness will do just fine.

Notice [in Quantum Questions] I was not saying that modern physics itself supports or proves a mystical worldview.  I was saying the physicists themselves were mystics, and not that their discipline was a mystical or somehow spiritual endeavor resulting in a religious worldview.  In other words, I disagreed entirely with books such as The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which claimed that modern physics supported or even proved Eastern mysticism.  This is a colossal error.  Physics is a limited, finite, relative, and partial endeavor, dealing with a very limited aspect of reality.  It does not, for example, deal with biological, psychological, economic, literary, or historical truths; whereas mysticism deals with all of that, which the Whole.  To say physics proves mysticism is like saying the tale proves the dog.

Meditation, whether Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, or Islamic, was invented as a way for the soul to venture inward, there ultimately to find a supreme identity with Godhead.

For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of  the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made content; the self is made toast

The ego is not a thing but a subtle effort, and you cannot use effort to get rid of effort - you end up with two efforts instead of one.  The ego itself is a perfect manifestation of the Divine, and it is best handled by resting in Freedom, not by trying to get rid of it, which simply increases the effort of the ego itself

We must forgive each other our arising, for our existence always torments others. The golden rule in the midst of this mutual misery has always been, not to do no harm, but as little as possible; and not to love one another, but as much as you can.