Just picked it up, and it was heavy going, but it was an important book. It's about evolution, in the widest sense of the word. Not just biological, but cultural and moral. And I'm not sure how practical it is but I'm glad I kept it and finished it. It's now over a week overdue from the library.
- biological: testostrone -- fuck it or kill it; oxytocin -- relationship hormone; induces feelings of attachment, relationship, nurturing, holding, touching.
- holons -- all the way up, all the down. Whole/part.
- secret impulse of evolution -- transcends and includes.
- Good news of modernity -- differentiate the Big Three; bad news -- not yet learned to integrate them; rapid advance in the "it"/location-based domain (science/empiricism).
- Big Three of consciousness, culture and nature; but it-language is value-free, no quality; flatland -- flattened Big Three into one - science.
- 1-2-3 fulcrum -- identify, dis-identify, integrate; or fusion, differentiation, integration; or embed, transcend, include.
- Changing views: ladder and its basic rungs; self or the climber and its fulcrums, and the changing views. Ladder, climber, view. -- model of consciousness development.
- On the way to global: interior transformation -- shift towards continuing decrease in egocentrism; evolution vs. egocentrism.
- in most cases of depression -- people have false scripts or beliefs, (script pathology); keep repeating these myths/lies as if they were true.
- The problem is most individuals you treat with universal coverage do not share your universalism. They are still egocentric or ethnocentric to the core.
- Common lies that sabotage authenticity -- we lie about the responsiblity for our choices, preferring to see ourselves as passive victims of some outside force; we lie about the richness of the present by projecting ourselves backward in guilt and forward in anxiety.
- In place of the authentic self or actual self, we live as inauthentic self, false self.
- Lack of meaning. Nothing is worth pursuing anymore, not because we failed but precisely because we acheived them and found them wanting. Brink of transpersonal.
- Superconscious: observing self becoming aware of both mind and body, beginning to transcend them. The great mystics and sages say that this observing self goes straight to God, to spirit, to the very Divine. Observing Self eventually discloses its own source, which is Spirit itself, Emptiness.
- From matter to body to mind to Spirit.
- Find out for yourself. Perform the interior experiment, get the data, help interpret it. Common interpretation is: you are face to face with the Divine.
- Then Who am I??? All those objects you describe when you "describe yourself" are not actually your real Self at all. List of lies, mistaken identities, list of who you are not. Who is this real Seer? Who or what is this observing Self?
- Witness, the I-I. Aware of the individual or self but cannot itself be seen. Seer is vast Emptiness, vast Freedom. We identify the Seer with puny things that can be seen. And that is the beginning of bondage and unfreedom. Anything you can see is not it. Release from all that.
- It is as it is; it is ever-present and unvarying. It is not an object out there, so it never enters the stream of time, of space, of birth, of death.
- Vast Emptiness, this great Unborn, you can gain liberation from born and created, from suffering of space and time and objects.
- Look up: Father Thomas Keating, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomin, Dalai Lama.
- Nondual: dis-identified with the Witness; moved from causal to Nondual. Seer or Witness or Self vanishes. Awareness is no longer split into seeing subject in here and seen subject out there; there is just pure seeing. Consciousness and its display are not-two. (nondual).
- Real world not given twice. You are that, there is no you. Separate self is no where to be found. Immediate experience. Awareness itself. Bodymind drops. One Taste.
- Nondual traditions aim not to bring about this state, bc it's impossible but simply to point it out.
- Nondual traditions, you take a vow not to disappear into cessation, not hide out in nirvana; vow to ride the surf of samsara until all beings are caught in that surf can see that it is just a manifestation of Emptiness.
- the Ascending and Descending currents need to be integrated in the nondual Heart.
- Wisdom and Compassion: the path of Ascent from the Many to the One is the path of wisdom; Path of Descent is the path of Compassion; sees that the One actually manifests as the Many, so all forms are to be treated equally with kindness, compassion, mercy.
- wisdom and compassion -- their union in the nondual Heart of One Taste is the source and goal and ground of genuine spirituality.
- Ascenders and Descenders in brutal conflict.
- brain is part of nature but the mind is not part of the brain. the mind is an I, the brain is an it. you can talk to the mind; you can look at a brain.
- Fallacy of simple location: simply can't locate consciousness and values and meanings and morals. Ghosts in the machine.
- Search for a more integrated vision, all-level, all-quarant vision. Not the usual Ego vs. Eco. We live in the Descended worldview. Ego-Enlightenment (science) vs. the Eco-Romantics, but they are both stuck in Flatland.
- Ego - control nature; Eco - not control it, calculate it or dominate it but become one with it.
- Kantian notion of the necessity of transcendence. How can you reconcile the necessity to rise above nature with a necessity to become one with it?
- Historical gridlock between Ego and Eco.
- Spirit is the only reality. Nondual synthesis, one timeless act of self-knowledge, of Spirit directly knowing itself as Spirit, says Schelling.
- Spirit that was present all along during the entire process of evolution, unfolding a bit each step of the way.
- Great Idealists -- their first failure: no transpersonal practice to reproduce their insights.
- The Net -- like all technology and Right-Hand structures are value neutral.
- Global problems demand global consciousness. Interior growth and transcendence.
- Need Spirit in all four quadrants, not just your own particular awareness.
- Ecological wisdom does not consist in how to live in accord with nature, but how to get subjects to agree on how to live in accord with nature. The noble state of global care is the product of a long and laborious and difficult process of growth and transcendence.
- We seem to want to claim the rights and not the responsilbities. We want to be a whole without being a part of anything.
- Spectrum -- matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, to exercise it in self, culture, and nature, ie in an integrated way.
