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WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING “motorist” metaphors do you find more appealing: 1) Driving merrily along, lost in the buoyant beat of some smooth jazz station– oblivious to your toxic wake and the incalculable plant, animal and human sacrifice that allows you to fly across eroding rock trails made bump-less every night at 3:00 AM by more> IF ONENESS or “divine presence” is ever to become more than a flickering insight, we will need to find a way of converting the everyday ego-field into a Buddha field. That means consciously confronting our archetypal biases and learning–through self-inquiry, meditation and compassion practice–to have a steadier experience of divine intent. This psycho-spiritual more> THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS to justifiably protest against. But what, I ask myself, is the most fundamental, cross-cultural oppression — the “meme,” if you will — that gave rise to this rant against the great vampire squid called Corporatocracy? My guess: it has something to do with flawed community. Thich Nhat Hanh once more> A NEW ANARCHIST MOVEMENT is forming. The crimes they push against are so unspeakable, so urgent, that the cleverest, most media-grabbing protest sign would only defile and spit upon their cause. Impossible to co-opt and more frightening than the Black Bloc, these protesters do something far worse than destroy physical property; they deface the more> DO YOU BELIEVE IN ASTROLOGY? Careful how you answer: It’s a trick question — the sound of a disorientation-phobic mind attempting to induct you into its tidy, dualistic paradigm. My answer? “About as much as I believe in Hunter.” Why must The Mystery be so mercilessly and mechanically nailed down? Because ego feels so desperately more> THE ONLY healthy reason to peer at personalities through the lens of the astrological archetypes is that, upon doing so, we happen to find ourselves more compassionately attuned to their style of awakening– more able to hear and skillfully respond to their muted cries for love. Thankfully, as so many structures and paradigms topple more> PERHAPS THE SEARCH for a compatible partner is akin to the search for enlightenment: the most we can do is make ourselves vulnerable to its grace through regular, heartfelt witnessing of our otherwise excruciatingly automated body/mind (a.ka. meditation). As equanimity seeps deeper and deeper into our giddy agendas and we awaken from the collective more> I RECENTLY READ AN ARTICLE by a iconoclastic, young satsang teacher I had never heard about. He painted a picture of the world as a meaningless Darwinian drama. All concepts of eternal life were disparaged and all eternal life-promising teachers were portrayed as self-aggrandizing hucksters. To him, your best chance at tuning into the mystery more> MOST PEOPLE think astrology is a way of languaging the infinite shades and textures of personality. Astrology subdivides — and thereby makes more “real” — the illusion of separation. Astrodharma takes a different approach. There are only two shades of personality: the self-liberating hues, spontaneously dissolving themselves into love, and the dense, hard-edged hues, crying more> IT’S HARD TO LET GO of duality. Our ego doesn’t know who it would be without its judgments. Critiquing gives us coordinates. It also keeps us numb to our true nature. Judgment is simply a form of self-forgetting and it happens mostly in the mirror of our fellow mortals. Need a way to track your more> RECENTLY, I FOUND myself pacing inside a prison cell. Penned in by a grid of creepy world trajectories, all personal and planetary options looked bleak. Day after apocalyptic day, my automated Moon in Sagittarius would swing between preachy panic and adventure-junkie distraction. There was no way out and no way I was going to stop more> ARE YOU existentially brave? Are you willing to honestly feel into this sense that you are a separate person attempting to bridge a persistent, interpersonal gap? Does this separation-affirming worldview give rise to inner richness, ease and overflowing presence? Can you honestly say you are attracted to living in a psychologically chopped-up world and more> ASTROLOGY GETS a bad rap in meditative, nondual circles because it seems to focus on our differences and make personality — the ego’s seductive evidence of separation — even more solid and substantial. Good for those who want to manipulate and/or psychoanalyze the illusion, not for those who want to wake up from it. But more> IN A TIME of relentless mega-disasters, one thing is certain: every time we fail to harvest compassion and/or some personally relevant instruction from the cascading stories of horror and heartbreak we will — not might, but will — add to the sum of the world’s suffering. If it makes it to our eyes and more> AS MAGNETIC NORTH races toward Russia 25 miles per year (and accelerating) and earth’s changing magnetic flux lines fatally confuse more and more fish, birds and bees, one thing is clear: this is not a time for tepid transformation. With only one year left until the Sun (if not the earth) swaps poles, it’s more> OKAY, ONE YEAR UNTIL 2012. As the astro-predictions fly, remember this: 1) “We have to believe in free will. We have no choice.” -Isaac Bashevis Singer 2) All twelve signs are flashing neon inside you. Actionable insights are more likely to come from a personal reading. In light of this, I encourage you more> ADMIT IT: YOU’RE A SLAVE. Perpetually sucked into safely scripted behavior, roles and “signs” downloaded from the collective unconscious, you strive not to be shot through with the dissolving light of pure awareness, but to be impressively opaque and authentically self-expressed (a.k.a. true to your miserably secure stories about yourself). Even in the throes more> AH, THE EVE OF THE GREGORIAN NEW YEAR. What shall we make of this contrived, “pop transit?” Surely we can come up with a kinder interpretation than “co-opted Solstice.” If you’re like me, it’s hard to whoop it up about a unit of time so unstained by the intercourse of stars and nature. The more> IMAGINE GOSSIPING PASSIONATELY about the color yellow, making a pass at orange or displaying a spectacular indifference towards crimson. It would be crazy, insane. The colors of things are, after all, only a laminate—too delightfully ephemeral to take personally. Yet, it is just this kind of rainbow reactivity that taunts and haunts us every more> |
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