Five Tenets to help you stick to the path

Andrew Cohen is an American visionary thinker committed to the transformation of human consciousness and culture. As a critic of the extreme individualism that characterizes much of contemporary spirituality, Cohen is awakening in people around the world a purpose for living that far transcends egoism: namely, a moral obligation to wholeheartedly participate in the evolution of consciousness itself.

Cohen was born in New York City in 1955. Raised as an atheist, his life was irrevocably changed by a spontaneous revelation of "cosmic consciousness" at the age of sixteen. Haunted by the experience, Cohen eventually abandoned his dream of becoming a jazz drummer and, at the age of twenty-two, began seeking spiritual enlightenment. Moving from the study of martial arts to Kriya Yoga to Buddhism, Cohen's search finally came to an end in 1986 when he met the Indian master of Advaita Vedanta H.W.L. Poonja. It was shortly after this life-transforming encounter, and with the encouragement of his guru (with whom he later parted ways philosophically), that Cohen began to teach.

For those of you who are looking for guiding principles to support you in your breakthrough to a new field of awareness the link below could be interesting. It deals with what Cohen calls the five fundamental tenets of enlightenment: clarity of intention, the law of volitionality, facing everything and avoiding nothing, the truth of impersonality, and for the sake of the whole.

http://www.andrewcohen.org/teachings/path.asp

The material in this post is abridged from the biography of Andrew Cohen:
http://www.andrewcohen.org/andrew/biography.asp

The Choice Before Us

by Starhawk

This piece was written on February 5th 2003 by a woman who calls herself Starhawk and has become the spokesmen for a contingent of men and women in the U.S. and all over the world, who want to replace the destructive, power hungry institutions which determine our fate today, with more organic structures based on peace and love. The piece from which the paragraphs below were taken was written at the height of the war waged against Iraq by the U.S.


The media and politicians tell us that this war is inevitable that we can’t stop it, that our pleas and protests make no difference. They murmur a constant incantation of our powerlessness, lulling us into a nightmare sleep.

But we can still wake up. We can choose to walk out of the nightmare, and dream a different dream.

All it takes is for each one of us, who cherishes the lives of our children, to refuse to be silent, to say no to war, to say yes to peace. And to ask ourselves, how have we abandoned our country, our fate, into the hands of callous men who have no compunction about wasting lives?

What spell has been cast that fogs our eyes and binds our hands? What lies have we believed? What power have we let slip away?

Replace the nightmare with this dream: that in the moment that one world power has amassed the unchallenged military might to make its bid for global empire its own people rise up and say “No. This is not what we want to be… we want to join hands with the people of the world and strengthen the institutions that are slowly and painfully learning to solve conflicts without bloodshed, and teaching us to respect our differences. We know that peace must be built on justice and we want peace.

For the complete article: http://www.starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/choicebeforeus.html

Give me four words and I'll give you a poem

pic: www.yankeegardener.com


He calls himself “Mockingbird”. It was a name that came to him during “a sort of vision quest” on which his teachers and mentors sent him. “In the old days“, he writes, “even sometimes today, a person is sent into the wilderness, with no food or water, for 4 days to access his vision of life but in this modern world, we adapt. So I sat at home, in the park, in the woods nearby, along busy sidewalks, everywhere, holding my vision close to me. One afternoon, while walking to class at the local college, I heard a bird singing, and so I stopped to listen as I was taught. After a bit, time and space began that melting away thing it does in the presence of the sacred, and I could suddenly understand, in English, what the bird was singing. It was lovely and my heart began to soar. Later, I told the story to my teachers and they agreed that it was a good sign and that the mockingbird could be my totem. Later in dreams it was confirmed and in the way we do things, I adopted the name mockingbird, whose symbolic power is to sing our true song and to help others sing their true soul song!

Well, Mockingbird (or MB as he is often called) and I have been exchanging notes with each other about a number of things for a couple of months now. He is married to a woman from India, and is working on projects to help educate young Indian girls. MB also writes poetry. Recently he offered to write me a poem based on any four words I gave him. So off the cuff I shot off these four words to him: tree, broken, infinite, dumb. Here is the poem he came back with in a short while:

“a broken tree
bearing such sweet fruit
maybe it is the infinite
playing dumb
or rather
some silent song
of blessing
whispering into the night
calling you home”

MB lives in Lafayette, LA. Check out his home page at Zaadz:
http://mockingbird57.zaadz.com/

The Earth waits for you

The Earth is always patient and open-hearted.
She is waiting for you.
She has been waiting for you
for the last trillion lifetimes.
She can wait for any length of time.
She knows you will come back to her one day.
Fresh and green, she will welcome you
exactly like the first time,
because love never says, “This is the last time”;
because Earth is a loving mother.
She will never stop waiting for you.

~Thich Naht Hanh

I picked up this quote from Mark Gehrke's blog "Earthharmony home". Mark lives in Hawaii where he operates a small guest house in Kauai. He has started a conscious leadership program for young teens with one of the local community organizatons on Kauai. http://everyday.zaadz.com/

Cherokee Indian Wisdom

An elderly Cherokee Native American was teaching his grandchildren about life.

He said to them, “A fight is going on inside of me… It is a terrible fight that is occuring between two wolves.”

“One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other wolf stands for joy, peace, hope, love, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”

“The same fight is going on inside of you and every other person.”

The children thought about it. Then one child asked, “Which wolf will win Grandfather?”

The old Cherokee replied, “The one you feed.”
~