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It’s an important question we don’t ask ourselves enough. Should we be full of mind or should we be focused?
The external world is unreliable, it will not avail us, especially when we are using an untrained monkey mind to interact with it. Training is the only answer, the only pathway to liberation which begins within, inside our own minds, the scariest and most dogmatic place of all!
Intuitively sensing that mind is trapped in matter, I wrote a sermon and then started reading Paramahansa Yogananda’s analysis of the Bhagavad Gita, where just now I came away with the astonishing statement: “all matter is thought.” And thought is an elemental aspect of of mind. It’s exciting to be here with you and share knowledge through words, but I will tell you, I’m starting to find that only deep meditation produces real knowledge. Everything else is just theoretical or conceptual knowledge which is often mistaken and deluded.
Three supplementary items here: a photo of where I was sitting when I wrote today’s sermon, a photo of the Bohemian cemetery mentioned, and a video by Sadhguru explaining the way the mind is a reality-creation-factory we must train so we can consciously and consistently manifest peace, joy, and love.
Vyšehrad Cemetery
Nice place to sit and write!
What indeed?
The sermon is long so this part is short.
Wishing for peace and liberation to come to all the beings of the many realms. Even though this is a tall order, the aspiration is sincere, the aspiration is the engine that can make this real.
We’re getting close to the most mystical time in the year. Get tons of sleep and spend a lot of time basking in starlight if you can.
Happy Sunday and en-joy the week.
Dancing and making personal choices about which energies to cultivate in ourselves are activities that go hand in hand. See what you make of it.
Plumbing the depths of our wounds can teach us a great deal about who we are and until we better understand who we are we can keep making blunders that hurt ourselves and others. Hence the logic of looking into this matter.
I’m convinced that if we reduce our consumption we can turn the ship around. It takes disicipline and awareness, though, and you can’t really have either of those when you’re operating from the sphere of unexamined ego desires. This is why evolving is a kind of work—it takes consistent effort.
Let’s see what we can do this week, eh?
Big love.
Offered with love, a heavy-duty, life versus death sermon. Which are you inadvertently choosing? Listen and find out.
The music for today is the first digital mixtape I ever made. My friend, Chris Lam, was showing me how to create a playlist on iTunes and burn it to a CD. These were the songs I picked for it. It has stood the test of time for it was made in 2005. I listened to it the other day in the car and had a lot of fun.
Hope you and yours are well. The world is growing more serious by the day and our involvement in it—the way we behave, the things we say and do and think—has rarely been more crucial.
We are responsible for all of it, not the politicians, not those we disagree with.
A free-style sermon today in honor of jazz musician, Wynton Marsalis.
Please remember, folks, that if you want to save the world you have to first rescue your own consciousness from the ideological propaganda systems that control it. Both sides are doing this to us so moving beyond binary systems has to do with more than just gender identity politics. It has to do with the politics of power in general.
I’m linking to this amazing interview with Marsalis from Friday night, you must see it. He talks about things in ways no one else is doing—profound, heavy-duty, grade-A truth.
For music this week, I only have one song because I want to encourage you to listen to Marsalis’ new album, The Ever Fonky Lowdown.
It’s so easy when you know how. Just let go and dance. Don’t think, don’t talk, don’t worry—just dance. It’ll change your frequency, and then, from that more refined energetic frequency, you can be more useful to your own life and to the life of the world. This is what rebirth means.
I think perhaps most people regard creativity as a process reserved only for artists. But actually, we are all creating things all day long with our thoughts and attitudes. This is why being peaceful is a creative act, one that, like every other creative act, begins somewhere and then grows and grows.
This is why this week I talk about making peace as a creative act.
A lot of amazing good music (shout out to Ted for supplying the first song on the mix!) this week, so close your eyes (and your mouth!) and dance.