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#2544 - Friday, August 4, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
Excerpts from books by Christopher Alexander, Jed McKenna, and Bernadette Roberts.
Christopher Alexander from The Nature of Order: The Luminous Ground
A massive building or a small one, a seat, an ornament, a
simple beam, a room, has life, is deep,
affects us, moves us to tears, to awe, exactly to that extent
that it is a picture of that God
behind all things. If you see a watery pale yellow sunlight
shining behind dark gray clouds, with
the pale blue of heaven shining in between some wintery morning,
and you see, in that light, the
original light of the universe-then, you may say, in still
different terms, that sometimes, very
occasionally, an artist who weaves a carpet, or who shapes a
building, or who paints a tile,
manages to make something which has this same light in it, where
this same Self is shining out ...
he has made something as close to a picture of God or Self as it
can be, and it affects us, like
the light of morning does, because it seems to show us directly
to the heart of this self, and
connects us with it, almost to the point of pain.
The Nature of Order: The Luminous Ground may be ordered at http://snipurl.com/ufz8
Jed McKenna from Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment
Am I pro-truth? No. Do I hate delusion? No. Do I consider the dreamstate evil? No. I'm not opposed to all the teachers and teachings that keep us so effectively narcotized. I don't think anyone or anything is other than perfect. I'm not a warrior for truth. I'm not at war with the armies of the lie. I like the lie. I'm all for it. Maya and her magnificent Palace of Delusion have no greater fan than I. Having myself escaped from the confines of delusion, I'm able to appreciate its strengths and its vulnerabilities. Its greatest vulnerability is that it has no mass, no substance. There is no it, and all you have to do to see that for yourself is look for yourself. Its greatest strength is that looking for yourself is the last thing anyone, say what they may, really wants to do.
Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment may be ordered from http://wisefoolpress.com/
Bernadette Roberts, from What Is Self?
The extraordinary and unsuspected aspect of the no-self experience is not the falling away of the phenomenal self-experience, which was inconsequential anyway; rather, it is the falling away of the divine and the experience of "life." It is as if the Ground of Being had been pulled out from under the entire self-experience. For many long years the unitive experience had been our deepest self-experience, thus its dissolution is not merely that falling away of a superficial, conditional little self-experience; rather, it is the falling away of the experience of divine life and being which, in the unitive state, IS self's deepest experience of existence. Though this event might have been called the "experience of no-divine," this would not be wholly true to the experience and definitely not true to its reality. In the unitive state the divine IS the deepest experience of self and the singular experience of being; thus to dissolve the experience of the divine is to dissolve the deepest experience of self. Calling this the "experience of no-self" is not a name or title given after the experience; it is not a mental deduction or an approximation; rather, "no-self" IS the experience. This is its exact nature and an exact statement of its truth. No other experience in the journey lends itself to such an accurate statement of truth.
What Is Self may be ordered at http://www.sentientpublications.com/catalog/what_is_self.php