The most important quotation I know, example is not the major thing in influencing people, it is the only thing. Albert Schweitzer Words, stories, religions, have their place, 5% or less of the solution. 95% is being living examples. Everyone wants the revolution, everyone wants to do the revolution, everyone wants to talk about Revolution, no one wants to be the revolution. I am not preaching at you. I'm sharing what my studies show me clearly are major reasons why prior well-intended efforts have failed.
By the way, no Tolstoy, no Gandhi. And yes it was tolstoy's book, the kingdom of God is within you, that turned the direction of Gandhi's life. But it is also true and I don't know how Central, that were as Gandhi said that the greatest example of a human being throughout history was the man Jesus, that the greatest living example in his age was Tolstoy who was walking his walk. Example. Example. We are dying we are starving for living examples.
1.03.2018
The most important quotation I know, example is not the major thing in influencing people, it is the only thing. Albert Schweitzer Words, stories, religions, have their place, 5% or less of the solution. 95% is being......
We need to f****** be really really clear about virtually all prior attempts at communities that were highly moral, sustainable, and created really joyful moral Souls. Many have tried and virtually all have failed. You......
We need to f****** be really really clear about virtually all prior attempts at communities that were highly moral, sustainable, and created really joyful moral Souls. Many have tried and virtually all have failed. You and I {Dave?} discussed several weeks ago I believe my understanding that denial of self worked for Gandhi but it is massively suboptimal. Maybe I had that conversation with someone else. We are not designed to be primarily creatures of avoidance. It becomes a fetish. This is the problem with religion. It tells us what not to do as we practice it. We don't work like that. We have to fill ourselves. When we don't fill ourselves with the right stuff we try to fill ourselves with the wrong stuff. We are essentially creatures of greed but in this culture unenlightened agreed, ignorant greed, mistaken greed. All hope depends upon being creatures of enlightened agreed, learning the Exquisite superiority of the experience of Joy, which comes only from selfless devotion to creation, and the comprable grotesque inferiority of pleasure, intoxication. Forever people have sought to set up intentional communities, to be moral, and they have all failed for the reason I have just vaguely outlined. I'm certain of this. I'm not trying to gain your agreement but I definitely hope you hear what I'm saying. The great athlete in any sport does not become so by avoiding television, by avoiding being lazy, by avoiding time spent away from training. With few if any exceptions they learn to love the sport, to love the pursuit, to Greeley have that Pursuit take over their lives. And the work you and I are talking about must be understood as the work of trying to save the few individual souls in the world that can be saved, in the same way the few seeds that fall in this desert might be cultivated to Life. By whatever words. Communities, practices, associations, must all every single breath be devoted to that end and yet always groups that set out in this direction lose sight of that, their own growth becomes the purpose, and it becomes one big circle jerk. Always. A fetish. A club. Spiritual masturbation. We don't have time to do this again. The work of the soul, the DNA given soul, of a plant, a mouse, and elephant, or human, the soul is devoted to the well-being of the collective. Not so the head and flesh. Everything depends upon rediscovering the taste for joy and thereby developing our skill to keep the soul in charge for the joy that it generates and keeping, for the greed of it, the head and the flesh under the control of soul. This has been my fuel, my rock, for 15 years now, and with different words it is the same with all of the few individuals throughout history that I Revere.
Important note. Start loving is tattooed on my forehead and wage love on my cheeks. 2007. This was correct, in the correct direction, and I'm glad of it every breath, but it needs Improvement, the direction, the idea. And the Improvement is along the lines.....
Important note. Start loving is tattooed on my forehead and wage love on my cheeks. 2007. This was correct, in the correct direction, and I'm glad of it every breath, but it needs Improvement, the direction, the idea. And the Improvement is along the lines...... of soul and more particularly I think Pitirim Sorokin's concept of a Supra consciousness. The 80% of the nervous system that Einstein said we don't use but we can learn to tune into, conscience, innate morality, empathy, compassion, wisdom, vision.... if by heart or loving that is what is understood than the words on my face are adequate. All joy for the individual and hope for the world depends upon each individual placing their heart, Supra Consciousness, in charge each breath, with the mind and flesh instruments thereof. By the way, each breath that any individual does this they experience what it would be like to be United with the Divine, the ultimate Human Experience, creators rain, unconditional loving. Each breath therefore is heaven, the ultimate Human Experience. This is what Jesus knew.
Were I 25 years old, and had the choice I might devote myself to the study that Tolstoy undertook, the original Greek gospels and the ethics they're in.. But I'm 66 and there's no time. I've read......
Were I 25 years old, and had the choice I might devote myself to the study that Tolstoy undertook, the original Greek gospels and the ethics they're in.. But I'm 66 and there's no time. I've read his important works on the subject, the kingdom of God is within you that created Gandhi, the law of love and the law of violence that largely created King, the root work of it all the gospel in brief which I've read many times and I'm rereading again and again. Also his confession, what I believe, I hope to find his analysis of the Gospels. I'm interested in Jesus, and now I discover the original Christian ethicists as well, for the same reason that if I were interested in physics I would want to understand everything that Einstein had understood about physics. I think the Tolstoy given the little time we all have, Tolstoy is probably our best window. As I've said often, and I think to you, adulthood taught me early on that in critical situations I needed to look first at those that were showing promising results and when I found such individuals only then be interested in what they had to say. We typically do the reverse and waste our lives doing so. Tolstoy's writings created King and Gandhi. That's pretty good indication for me that I need to understand what he understood.
I'm pretty sure that those who have come to the most full sustainable Humanity the majority were inspired by Jesus and early Christian moral thinking. My study.....
I'm pretty sure that those who have come to the most full sustainable Humanity the majority were inspired by Jesus and early Christian moral thinking. My study..... these recent days have been to get to the original words of Jesus which are actually much more spare than I thought. And the words that have inspired Tolstoy Gandhi King Schweitzer and others many are from early Christian followers to my surprise, but that's okay. It would have been easier if all of that came from Jesus as a way of communicating to a larger group. But it is not so. One of the greatest intellect's of all time, Leo Tolstoy, spent the last 40 Years of his life entirely understanding, studying, embracing, and putting in his life what he learned from the original ethics of Christianity. He detested the church by the way. He had zero interest in Miracles Etc. To my surprise but gratitude I expect now to be diving in deep again into Tolstoy's writings. When internet access is strong I expect to be putting up an archive in a Google drive folder that I will make accessible to some people including the materials I'm studying.
Pope Francis. Forget life's useless baggage. Work for peace.
Pope Francis. Forget life's useless baggage.
You are a soul, that has a body. Moral, spiritual, emotional, mental health can be achieved by deeply living this. All of the preventable problems in the world including the destruction of everything decent now, are a consequence of not doing this.
You are a soul, that has a body. Moral, spiritual, emotional, mental health can be achieved by deeply living this. All of the preventable problems in the world including the destruction of everything decent now, are a consequence of not doing this.
1.01.2018
Joshua Tree. Near Zero Internet. Broken motor. Friends assisting. deep in study of the ethics of Jesus, informed by Jesus seminar, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy. Honest, serious, important question for us: If instead of feverishly building stuff these last two thousand years, we had been feverishly building our human capacity for extreme morality, would we be in a different place right now? Now that everything is imploding, isn't it time to redirect our Energies? Everything material is lost now, But there are certain spiritual opportunities.
Joshua Tree. Near Zero Internet. Broken motor. Friends assisting. deep in study of the ethics of Jesus, informed by Jesus seminar, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy. Honest, serious, important question for us: If instead of feverishly building stuff these last two thousand years, we had been feverishly building our human capacity for extreme morality, would we be in a different place right now? Now that everything is imploding, isn't it time to redirect our Energies? Everything material is lost now, But there are certain spiritual opportunities.