Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
#3109 - Tuesday, March 18, 2008 - Editor: Jerry Katz
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
In this issue a review of Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life.
Also and excerpt from the book.
I thought the book was a very substantial treatment of the journey of transformation. On the Nonduality Salon forum we've talked about how to explain nonduality to "everyone." To do that, I think you have to talk about experiences of non-separation "everyone" has had. The excerpt below talks about those kind of experiences, calling them transformational rather than nondual or non-separate.
Living Deeply: The Art & Science of Transformation in Everyday Life Edited by Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Cassandra Vieten, Tina Amorok
Amazon.com link: http://www.amazon.com/Living-Deeply-Transformation-Everyday-Harbinger/dp/1572245336/ref=cm_cr-mr-title New Harbinger Publications link: http://www.newharbinger.com/productdetails.cfm?PC=562
A review by Jerry Katz
Feed Your Hungry Heart
This book will nourish and guide the hungry heart. It is a diverse, balanced, full consideration of the art and science of transformation.
This is the book's goal: “Our single-minded focus was on the phenomenon of experiences people have, and practices they engage in, that stimulate and sustain a new worldview that may best be described as positive consciousness transformation.”
Theme - Find your own way:
The editors try very hard to be diverse and balanced while requiring the reader to be responsible rather than providing a program for transformation: “Ultimately, you need to find your own balance between convention and innovation, between the tried and true and the emerging forms of transformative practice.”
The reader is encouraged to discover ways to enrich, deepen, and find joy in each moment. Quoting George Leonard: “I can’t live the life of some teacher. I’m never going to get there the way somebody else did.”
Theme - Balance:
The theme of balance is addressed in different modes.
Throughout the book there is the return to theme of balance “between courage, determination, discipline, and choice on the one hand, and letting go, acceptance, and surrendering to the mystery of transformation on the other.”
The editors recognize that transformation can be painful, and they balance it by sharing the joy and liberation that come out of the transformative journey.
Medicine woman
Theme - Compassion:
Active compassion is part of transformative worldview. Psychologist Stanley Krippner says in this book that it requires “a love that actually gives people something to eat, something to wear, a place to live, self-esteem, self-empowerment.”
Using the best description of tonglen I have ever
read, you are invited to practice this technique and journal your
experience.
Exercises:
The exercises at the end of each chapter require you to write in a journal. You will investigate your life from all angles: your experiences, perceptions, practices, how they interconnect, and how all things in existence interconnect.
Last chapters:
The last chapter summarizes the whole book with the
intention of getting the teachings to stick and grow and evolve..
It is followed by a resource guide which provides detailed
information about The Institute of Noetic Sciences, and how to
get involved in it, which would be a very worthwhile way of
continuing your work and education in transformation. There is
also information about the companion DVD for this book and
e-courses you may take.
No index:
This book is limited as serious research tool by the
absence of an index. Even only a name index would be useful. I
was curious about finding out if Ken Wilber was included in this
book, but had to read every page to find out.
Exerpt from Living Deeply: The Art & Science of Transformation in Everyday Life
A copublication of New Harbinger Publications and Noetic Books
Copyright 2007 By Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Ph.D., Cassandra Vieten, Ph.D., Tina Amarok, Psy.D
New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
reprinted with permission
Finding the Extraordinary in the
Ordinary
You don’t have to be in an extraordinary place—in
an ashram in
For example, sports, martial arts, and other forms of physical
activity can serve as triggers fro transformation. Michael
Murphy, founder of the Esalen Institute—a center for
transformational learning in
For
thirty-five years, since I published that book, people have been
telling me about their extraordinary experiences on the golf
courses, and some of them resemble mystical or occult
experiences. By now, countless people have told me about their
telepathic experiences, psychokinesis, sudden visual acuity, or
other events that they cannot account for. So that’s led me
now to look at this in all walks of life. This transformative
process goes unnamed and unrecognized, because nobody thought to
do this with golfers. (2002)
Later in our interview, Murphy referred to these unrecognized
processes as “covert” transformational practices.
Clearly, you don’t have to have what we think of as a
classical or mystical experience to find a door that opens to
consciousness transformation. Transformation can and does occur
naturally in the course of everyday experiences. These
transformative experiences are more akin to the peak experiences
that Maslow believed people encounter throughout their
lives—precisely because the doorways to transformation are
everywhere.
TIME IN NATURE
For many of the people we interviewed, just being outdoors held
great potential for a shift in consciousness. In a house nestled
in the northern California redwoods, Anna Halprin—expressive
arts originator, choreographer, dancer, teacher, and pioneer in
the use of dance as a healing and transformative art in the
contemporary Western world—shared with us her great love for
nature:
Especially
now that I am eighty-two, when I dance with tree, or ocean, or
wind, I feel transposed. It takes me to a place beyond life,
beyond death. And it helps me to accept death, and that’s a
big one for me—to find a way to look at death as a cycle of
life. I find that transformative quality when I relate to the
natural environment. I can’t explain why, but it’s a
partnership that changes my consciousness. (2002)
Drawing on cross-cultural perspective and her Basque ancestry,
Angeles Arrien’s program, The Four Fold Way, integrates
ancient but universal practices into the modern world.
Incorporated into the program is an archetypal wilderness
experience (a period of solitude in nature) of three days and
three nights to help people experience the way that nature can
mirror our inner state if we look carefully and quietly. Arrien
explained:
Each individual is touched by nature and in
silence in their own unique way. There’s no magic
formula—it’s arrogant to assume that there is a
formula. One factor is the willingness of each individual to
spend some time contemplating where they are in their life. What
has meaning and what doesn’t? On our three days-three nights
wilderness experience- often known as a vision quest among
traditional societies of this continent- the transformational
crucible is the outer world. In many ways the outer is really a
mirror of what the person is doing internally. (2002)
Being a sacred and mysterious force unto itself, nature often
reveals new self-knowledge to us, and thus serves as a catalyst
for transformation. Physician Gerald Jampolsky described to us a
simple but transformative moment of inner reflection he had while
contemplating a leaf floating down a river:
Maybe twelve years ago, I spent a month in
James, a respondent in our survey study, similarly reported:
I was in the woods, sitting next to the river,
reading, and I looked up. Everything looked immensely beautiful,
like I’d entered another world. Leaves sparkled with golden
light, the sun was brilliant, and sounds such as bird calls, and
the flowing of water were magnified. I was in awe at the feelings
I experienced. It left quite an impression on me for the rest of
my life, and made me a seeker. (Vieten, Cohen, and Schlitz
2008).
Nature can provide a quiet, reflective place to listen to your
inner voice and your way of being. Looking deeply into simple
natural events- a leaf floating in a river, sunlight sparkling
through trees- can tell you about your own life journey.
Nature can also teach us about the interconnectedness of the
universe. Lakota elder Gilbert Walking Bull explained to us that
it’s when you see the sacred energy that infused all of
creation that you come to know true religious or spiritual power.
According to Walking Bull, this awareness of interconnectedness
is what gave birth to the Lakota tradition of becoming a sacred
human being:
True spiritual power exists in the world. In our
Lakota world, we call it “taku skan skan”—something
that moves. What this refers to is how the energy of the Great
Spirit, Wakan Tanka Tunkasila, is connected. The atom world is
connected to everything Grandfather created. We call it “the
Fire Within All Things Moving Alive”—the atom world is
this. True spirit is the atom. It is in everything. When you know
how everything is connected to everything—I grew up knowing
this—out of this comes the seven sacred principles connected
to our tradition. (2006).
For Walking
Bull, nature isn’t only an entry point to the sacred,
it’s sacred in itself.
Pg 55-58, Living Deeply Schlitz, Vieten, Amorok
~ ~ ~
Living Deeply: The Art &
Science of Transformation in Everyday Life Marilyn
Mandala Schlitz, Cassandra Vieten, Tina Amorok
Amazon.com link: http://www.amazon.com/Living-Deeply-Transformation-Everyday-Harbinger/dp/1572245336/ref=cm_cr-mr-title New Harbinger Publications link: http://www.newharbinger.com/productdetails.cfm?PC=562