Hello Friends,
A few ideas hit me on the train today and yesterday, one of them being I hate when inspiration hits me on the train and I have no pen and paper and I just so happen to be sitting next to some rather annoying people. But you know as is said wherever we are and whatever we are doing we are in The Presence. Thats what got me actually thinking, about how connected we are even though we may be seeming outwardly to be antagonizing or helping each other. There is a higher order to things I have started to notice lately that makes the term good and bad almost meaningless. I feel as long as we think in terms of what is good or bad for us we will forever miss. We are given enemies to learn compassion is what comes to mind. Check out this quote from Bulent Rauf the teacher of Reshad Feild.
Bulent Rauf
Finally there comes a time when you are so in love, so absorbed in the presence of God, that you welcome all that you are given, for you know that it comes from One Source of All. With this different understanding, suffering becomes conscious. This conscious suffering isn’t eh same as pain; nor does it mean enjoying pain, or believing that suffering must be good for you because it hurts. Conscious suffering comes about in the knowledge of what is necessary for the reciprocal maintenance of the planet. This earth was created for mankind, and we are responsible for it. The world needs certain kind of food in the same way we do. It needs the rain and the sun, and the seasons so that it may bring forth fruit, and it need other types of energy that mankind does not yet understand.
Whenever someone comes into true knowledge, a certain type of energy is released, made available for this great process of reciprocal maintenance. Normally this energy is released in sufficient quantities only during moments of great crisis, and particularly at the moment of death. But now we have reached the point in the life of the planet when we must learn to die to ourselves each moment, to be reborn each moment, to live and die consciously, so that the earth may continue to evolve.
Some of us can live in one neighborhood and never venture to other states let alone another country. Once we are comfortable we dont move very much unless we are provoked or visited by calamity. But what is the environment? The environment, all environemtns are connected: teh emotional the inner the mental the physical etc. Fixing one without addressing the imbalances in the other is only a small patch on a large problem.
Captn Planet - The Power is Yours!!!!!!!!!!!
I have heard that our planet is in crisis many a times. Again this election here in the states focused a lot about the global community. I can remember a growing push for environmental awareness and change since the 80′s. It was everywhere, from really bad cartoons like Captn Planet and The Toxic Crusader,to a the host of environmental science classes and majors that sprung up throughout academia, books in the children’s young adult section and adult section of the library.
Looking back on things now I see that few things make you feel more removed from a global sense of community like in my case growing up and living in a big modern metropolis, especially never being able to visit the country where my parents and family came from.
In NYC we just walk down the block to get our gas and food. Everthing, even the plights of other people outside our immediate sphere of operation is like a dream. We see images on the TV, and in the newspaper.
In the course of my readings ove rthe years I have come across this concept of reciprocal maintenance. Look at this example from O.M Burke, in his Among the Dervishes:
Sufis are to be looked upon as one whole:a community of people who act like a sort of electrical battery which accumulates and discharges a certain sort of energy essential for human progress. This progres is, however, evolutionary; it leads towards the growth of a higher form of man. All other human enterprises have to be attenuated (some of which because we prize so much as nations, cultural groupings so on and so forth) because they are producing a force really hostile to real human growth.
I wanted to do a series of post that looked at Reciprocal maintainence from many different angles and its relationship to our day to day like, and this esoteric idea about ‘The Completed Man” I figure every friday I would post the next installment in addition to the stuff i normally post.
Tell me your thoughts, or if you have anything to contribute:-)
Dave
You have hit on many good points, including the place of humans in the evolutionary ecology of the planet, and mystics as part of that evolution, by the love energy they bring forth. Keep the thoughts flowing
Ya Haqq!