February 2021 - Compassion Group Notes
“We come of age as masks.
Our true face never speaks.”
Spiritual Practice - Intellectual Contemplation
Reading great literature by great minds is a teaching about life - provides inspiration, connection, teachings and guideposts for the journey. It enriches your lives and makes you friends - do not ignore this aspect of your development and growth
Rudyard Kipling - read all about him, and all he wrote - his is an inspiring life… a role model in many ways
I include his poem “If…” here - very Zen in a very British way…
Read The Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke - see this excerpt… and contemplate it in the light of the work we are doing
No one lives his life.
Disguised since childhood,
haphazardly assembled
from voices and fears and little pleasures,
We come of age as masks.
Our true face never speaks.
Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.
Maybe all paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things.
from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, pg. 165.
Read the story of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde - a short but profound story of the incongruence between the inside and the outside
Really Terrible Orchestra having fun
Facing Shame
How many of you, as children, were forced to play a musical instrument? Either you were expected to live up to unreasonable standards and shamed for not doing it well enough, fast enough, enough…., or you lacked talent and your parents, and you, gave up - because of course, the only goal is excellence in our superficial and ego driven world, not enjoyment. How many of you never went near an instrument again in an attempt to avoid feeling humiliation and shame? It is a common story and so very sad that you are now robbed of the sheer joy of playing an instrument.
Watch the “Really Terrible Orchestra.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXZIp87oISI
Read the book, “Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music by James Rhodes
Pride in Defenses
We have all been taught to be “proud,” when we accomplish something. What we fail to realize is the accomplishment was attained in order to avoid feeling shame and believing ourselves to be losers. It was attained out of terror of judgment, criticism and rejection. What we have managed to achieve through an accomplishment is the avoidance of the shame and terror, the judgments, demands and expectations. The accomplishment is actually to side-step suffering by giving others what they want. It is not rooted in our intrinsic worth, but an expression of our conditional worth as bestowed by others.
For Advanced Study
Read this poem as an external and internal relationship with Love and Truth (God) as related to the above reading of Pride in Defense
Tired of Speaking Sweetly (excerpt)~ Hafiz
Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
break all our teacup talk of God.
If you had the courage and
could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
he would just drag you around the room
by your hair,
ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
that bring you no joy.
Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
and wants to rip to shreds
all your erroneous notions of truth
that make you fight within yourself, dear one,
and with others,
causing the world to weep
on too many fine days.
God wants to manhandle us,
lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
and practice His dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes wants
to do us a great favor:
hold us upside down
and shake all the nonsense out.
“I Always seem to be Paying for the Mistakes of Others”
“It is an occult law moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings without lifting, be it ever so
little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of
sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as 'separateness' and the nearest approach to that selfish state
which the laws of life permit is in the intent or motive.” ~Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
“Listen through your Gut” ~Charisse Lyons
You have all been trained to listen with your ears which means “listen,” to the other person and comply with what they need because of how they are feeling. This is called obedience to external forces.
To listen with your gut is to listen to your own feelings and needs and to comply with what you need and feel. This is called self-empowerment and self-responsibility to internal forces.
Humility
It is not humility to act the victim - that is to trump up your self importance and value through allowing yourself to be persecuted.
The Church says “Divorce is Wrong” (For Catholics - and Lutherans…)
“The central issue in the marriage is not well-being or happiness. It is, as this book has tried to demonstrate, salvation. Marriage involves not only a man and a woman who happily love each other and raise offspring together, but rather two people who are trying to individuate, to find their soul's salvation.”
~ Adolf Guggenbhuhl-Craig, Marriage: Dead or Alive
