giving & receiving

At the spiritual heart of the great religions is a far deeper, post-conventional understanding of ethics. This perspective is based more on love than on fear, more on kindness than on guilt. At its center is a profound understanding of the way our minds work, which makes clear that unethical living is destructive to both oneself and others,’ whereas ethical living can bring happiness and also awakening. Ethical living heals our minds. When we give someone our love, that same love first flowers within our minds and then overflows into others, leaving its healing imprint on both. The great religious scholar Huston Smith, author of the superb book ‘The World’s Religions,’ summarized their impact, ‘In the final analysis, goodness becomes embodied in society neither through might nor through law but through the impress of a great personality. Whether we recognize it or not, each one of us has a central sacred question around which our lives circle. It may be apparently abstract, such as, ‘What is truth?’ or ‘What is wisdom?’ Or it may be eminently practical, such as, ‘How can I learn to love?’ or ‘What is my gift to the world?’ Whatever the question, how passionately we pursue and live it in large determines how fully and wholeheartedly we live and how peacefully and contentedly we die…….Roger Walsh

this code is not about idealizing the spirit…it’s about going down deep in knowing…rooting so that we are strong enough to ground our spirituality in awareness….when we know our own dark spaces, we then know others too….the path of depth lightens the psyche’s complexities into a sweeter mystery…may we give grace..

the spiritual intensity of sly judgments…..

The person who has discovered deep spirituality by entering through the mysteries of the soul is slow to judge another by conventional standards and can see precious individuality shining behind the screen of foibles. Here we run into another paradox in the spiritual life. The person who is comfortably and intelligently moral, neither egotistic about it nor perfectionistic, is the very one who is slow to judge another and stands up forcefully for his values…..Thomas Moore