[FairfieldLife] Re: Ethics and Spiritual Teaching
What is a saint? Start there. Then, what is conscionable? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, wrote : Article I published at https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/?post_type=post=126334. Slightly updated version below. Ethics and Spiritual Teaching By Rick Archer, with Jac O’Keeffe, Craig Holliday, and Caverly Morgan. Significant contributions by Timothy Conway. It’s a safe bet that everyone reading this article has read accounts of spiritual teachers engaging in questionable behavior. Many of you may have been on the receiving end of such behavior. It seems that almost every week, the transgressions of some prominent spiritual leader are exposed. This has caused confusion, pain, and disillusionment among spiritual aspirants. We don’t expect movie moguls or politicians to be paragons of virtue, but the spiritual traditions tell us their saints and sages were. We’ve all been inspired by stories of their lives. Were these stories hyperbolic? Is there a correlation between spiritual advancement and ethical behavior? Should teachers be expected to embody the time-honored principles of Ahimsa, Loving-Kindness, and the Golden Rule? If they appear not to, have they assumed the mantle of teacherhood prematurely? Can one be an enlightened scoundrel? Are Ethics Relative? Some argue that moral standards are cultural fabrications with no absolute or universal validity, but some values are universally agreed upon. No one considers rape and pedophilia acceptable, except perhaps those guilty of them. Many consider working on the Sabbath, eating meat, and polygamy sinful, but they are acceptable or even the norm in many cultures. Some cultures practice things that most of us would consider barbaric, such as female genital mutilation. Hopefully everyone reading this would agree that this should be universally unacceptable and forbidden. The fact that many people consider it part of their tradition doesn’t mean it deserves our respect or tolerance in the world we hope to create. So perhaps we can agree that although ethical standards may vary from culture to culture and age to age, they are not mere personal preferences, all being equally valid. As human beings, there are baseline standards on which we should insist, and ideals to which we might aspire. Ethical Behavior is Good For You Most spiritual traditions regard ethical behavior not only as a reflection of spiritual development, but as conducive to it. Most have some notion of karma and say that if we hurt others we will reap the consequences and impede our own spiritual evolution. Both Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism teach that practicing ethical behavior makes the mind more open and subtle and thus more capable of deep nondual insight. Modern neurophysiology, with its discovery of neuroplasticity, may eventually corroborate this teaching. The body is the temple of the soul, the vehicle through which the Ultimate may become a living reality. We handicap ourselves by coarsening or damaging it, as unethical behaviors tend to do. In Buddhism, students are encouraged to develop deep compassion even before beginning with teachings on emptiness. In "The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World", the Dalai Lama is quoted saying, "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion”. Reality is Different in Different States of Consciousness People often fixate on one or another of three different perspectives, the transcendent, the Divine, and the material. But these perspectives, even though they may seem opposed to one another, are paradoxically yet simultaneously true, each in its own domain. For the sake of argument, let’s define Enlightenment as a state in which one has learned to coexist simultaneously in all three. Failing to do so, if one fixates on the transcendent, one might say, "Only unity is real and important. The world is unreal, and there is no personal self.” Some Nondual teachers have acted unethically, and then claimed that no one was doing it and that it didn’t matter anyway because the world is unreal. Others might say that there is a world, but it is perfect just as it is. All is well and wisely put; it's all Divinely orchestrated. If you adopt this perspective exclusively, you may feel that you can do whatever you like. You’re not doing it. God is. If we focus exclusively on the material plane, for instance, on the countless injustices and forms of cruelty to living beings, we can become angry political fanatics, vindictive zealots always finding evil-doers somewhere and throwing them out of our heart with the constricted mind of scornful anger and venomous disgust over what "those evil persons" are doing. The transcendent, divine, and material perspectives all have their relevance, but none can be taken to the exclusion of the others without creating imbalance. The spiritual luminaries we most admire seem to have integrated
[FairfieldLife] Ethics and Spiritual Teaching
Article I published at https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/?post_type=post=126334. Slightly updated version below. Ethics and Spiritual Teaching By Rick Archer, with Jac O’Keeffe, Craig Holliday, and Caverly Morgan. Significant contributions by Timothy Conway. It’s a safe bet that everyone reading this article has read accounts of spiritual teachers engaging in questionable behavior. Many of you may have been on the receiving end of such behavior. It seems that almost every week, the transgressions of some prominent spiritual leader are exposed. This has caused confusion, pain, and disillusionment among spiritual aspirants. We don’t expect movie moguls or politicians to be paragons of virtue, but the spiritual traditions tell us their saints and sages were. We’ve all been inspired by stories of their lives. Were these stories hyperbolic? Is there a correlation between spiritual advancement and ethical behavior? Should teachers be expected to embody the time-honored principles of Ahimsa, Loving-Kindness, and the Golden Rule? If they appear not to, have they assumed the mantle of teacherhood prematurely? Can one be an enlightened scoundrel? Are Ethics Relative? Some argue that moral standards are cultural fabrications with no absolute or universal validity, but some values are universally agreed upon. No one considers rape and pedophilia acceptable, except perhaps those guilty of them. Many consider working on the Sabbath, eating meat, and polygamy sinful, but they are acceptable or even the norm in many cultures. Some cultures practice things that most of us would consider barbaric, such as female genital mutilation. Hopefully everyone reading this would agree that this should be universally unacceptable and forbidden. The fact that many people consider it part of their tradition doesn’t mean it deserves our respect or tolerance in the world we hope to create. So perhaps we can agree that although ethical standards may vary from culture to culture and age to age, they are not mere personal preferences, all being equally valid. As human beings, there are baseline standards on which we should insist, and ideals to which we might aspire. Ethical Behavior is Good For You Most spiritual traditions regard ethical behavior not only as a reflection of spiritual development, but as conducive to it. Most have some notion of karma and say that if we hurt others we will reap the consequences and impede our own spiritual evolution. Both Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism teach that practicing ethical behavior makes the mind more open and subtle and thus more capable of deep nondual insight. Modern neurophysiology, with its discovery of neuroplasticity, may eventually corroborate this teaching. The body is the temple of the soul, the vehicle through which the Ultimate may become a living reality. We handicap ourselves by coarsening or damaging it, as unethical behaviors tend to do. In Buddhism, students are encouraged to develop deep compassion even before beginning with teachings on emptiness. In "The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World", the Dalai Lama is quoted saying, "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion”. Reality is Different in Different States of Consciousness People often fixate on one or another of three different perspectives, the transcendent, the Divine, and the material. But these perspectives, even though they may seem opposed to one another, are paradoxically yet simultaneously true, each in its own domain. For the sake of argument, let’s define Enlightenment as a state in which one has learned to coexist simultaneously in all three. Failing to do so, if one fixates on the transcendent, one might say, "Only unity is real and important. The world is unreal, and there is no personal self.” Some Nondual teachers have acted unethically, and then claimed that no one was doing it and that it didn’t matter anyway because the world is unreal. Others might say that there is a world, but it is perfect just as it is. All is well and wisely put; it's all Divinely orchestrated. If you adopt this perspective exclusively, you may feel that you can do whatever you like. You’re not doing it. God is. If we focus exclusively on the material plane, for instance, on the countless injustices and forms of cruelty to living beings, we can become angry political fanatics, vindictive zealots always finding evil-doers somewhere and throwing them out of our heart with the constricted mind of scornful anger and venomous disgust over what "those evil persons" are doing. The transcendent, divine, and material perspectives all have their relevance, but none can be taken to the exclusion of the others without creating imbalance. The spiritual luminaries we most admire seem to have integrated all three. For more on this, see Timothy Conway’s article, “The Three Simultaneously True Levels of Nondual
[FairfieldLife] We’re not far from the collapse of reality -- Maya goes Mainstream
Mind-warping Potential of Fake Video And the technology is evolving quickly https://gizmodo.com/deepfake-videos-are-getting-impossibly-good-1826759848 — via face-swapping software — a puppeteer [is realistically faked] for Obama’s face. Not too long ago, this type of software was limited to transferring simple facial expressions and mouth movements from an actor to a fake video. Now ... the software can account for wide-ranging head and eye movements without much obvious distortion. Combine fake audio with fake video and it’s not hard to imagine a future where forged videos are maddeningly hard to distinguish from the truth. Or a future where a fake video of a president incites a riot https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/the-terrifying-future-of-fake-news?utm_term=.feWkrAPWWk#.nqNAkL0NNAor fells the market. “We’re not so far from the collapse of reality,” as Franklin Foer summed up https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/realitys-end/556877/ at the Atlantic. But I fear it’s not just our present and future reality that could collapse; it’s also our past. Fake media could manipulate what we remember, effectively altering the past by seeding the population with false memories. The human mind is incredibly susceptible to forming false memories. And that tendency can be kicked into overdrive on the internet, where false ideas spread like viruses http://psych.wustl.edu/memory/Roddy%20article%20PDF's/Roediger%20et%20al%20(2001)_PBR.pdf among like-minded people. Which means the AI-enhanced forgeries on the horizon will only make planting false memories even easier. Doctored photos can change the way we remember history. And not just our memories for facts, but possibly even our recollections of what we saw with our own eyes. It means that bad actors may be able to prey on our political biases to change our understanding of world events. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/4/20/17109764/deepfake-ai-false-memory-psychology-mandela-effect https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/4/20/17109764/deepfake-ai-false-memory-psychology-mandela-effect
[FairfieldLife] Re: TM "growing exponentially" now
Yes, and an appreciation within this in particular to David Lynch, the DLFoundation, John Hagelin Bobby Roth and the focused workings of some many well-wishers who turned what had become the disorganized apparatus of teaching of TM in North America. There is a summer governor’s conference (™ teachers) going on now in Fairfield. Being Ten years now since the passing of the Guru, in the Resurrecting of a wreck of an organization from the Morris-Patterson era of administration it is Still to be seen how and where the teaching will go on to next generations. They hold a great asset in the module of the ‘seven steps’ of teaching ‘effortless meditation’. Adapting the character of how that asset is used is being worked at with some good results in some places. Jai Guru Dev. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, wrote : https://maharishichannel.in/archives/2014_mp4/2014_play_mp4.php https://maharishichannel.in/archives/2014_mp4/2014_play_mp4.php
[FairfieldLife] Re: Zero-point energy!
Hmmmaa-kaasha (akasha) might be related, if not identical with zero-point
energy
which shines (kaash) , vibrates, even at absolute zero...
kAz, (=kaash) kAzate (-ti) , pp. {kAzita} be visible, appear, shine, be
[[-,]] brilliant or pleasant. I. {cA3kazIti & cAkazya3te} shine bright; see
clearly, survey. -- {abhi} I. shine bright upon, illumine; look on, survey.
{ava} be visible, lie open. {nis} C {niSkAzayati} v. {kas. pra} be visible,
shine, radiate, appear, become clear or manifest. C. {prakAzayati (-te)} make
visible, cause to appear, show, unveil, explain, declare as (acc.). {saMpra} &
C. the same. {vi} appear. C. display, spread; illuminate, irradiate. l. pp.
{vicA3kazat} shining, beaming; beholding, perceiving. {sam} appear, behold.
[FairfieldLife] Zero-point energy!
There is enough [zero-point, aakaashic? --card] energy in the volume of a coffee cup to evaporate the world's oceans! https://youtu.be/vzY06MRzwPE?t=21m3s https://youtu.be/vzY06MRzwPE?t=21m3s
[FairfieldLife] Seelisberg 1979?
Seem to recall during the big YF course 1978-79 temperatures in Switzerland went as low as (around) - 40 degrees Celsius/Fahrenheit, as an indication of the "cooling down" of molecules in air. I guess no-one e.g. in Fairfield can corroborate or falsify this...
