Acting on Spirituality
Wise Activeness
Although our most powerful spiritual experiences and insights remain lifelong memories and points of reference, I think their greatest import is found in what we take from them and what we make of them. Recollecting them, engaging with them, consciously taking direction from them, is how, little by little, we become akin to them in our moment to moment existence. And that is who we have to live with, and who those around us have to live with, every day and night.
William Wordsworth spoke of the “wise passiveness” by which we are receptive and open enough to experience powerful watershed moments in our lives, or what he called “spots of time.” Yet without wise activeness, we are left with only interesting memories: frosting but no cake.
Although our most powerful spiritual experiences and insights remain lifelong memories and points of reference, I think their greatest import is found in what we take from them and what we make of them. Recollecting them, engaging with them, consciously taking direction from them, is how, little by little, we become akin to them in our moment to moment existence. And that is who we have to live with, and who those around us have to live with, every day and night.
William Wordsworth spoke of the “wise passiveness” by which we are receptive and open enough to experience powerful watershed moments in our lives, or what he called “spots of time.” Yet without wise activeness, we are left with only interesting memories: frosting but no cake.
Posted by Paul at 1:07 PM Permalink
28 Comments:
But I think what you may be pointing to is the fact that even active follow up involves deliberately going out and doing things likely to promote further experiences of "wise passiveness!"
HAZZBUZZ: Glad that worked for you. I notice that for a lot of us, contact with nature is involved with this stuff.
PEACECHICK: I also view development as mainly becoming aware of what's already there; then there are follow up processes of integration... and creativity. So I'm not sure it's 100% becoming aware of the preexisting. Or maybe this is just semantics and "integration" can get highly creative.
SUSIEQ: Me too, but when I was 23. And it's felt like everything has flowed from that.
It seems that there are people "built" that way - where there's a sudden turning point. For others it's more gradual. Either way, as far as I can see, the same general direction is taken over the course of spiritual development.
its following the signs isn't it?
we have to let our hearts lead us...sometimes we have sudden flashes of a memory we forgot a long time ago.......i try to understand what it says......
as paulo says the universe conspires in favor of you.....so what we want really is helped by the universe..thats why i believe there can be no coommon virtue..since each one has a mission and they have to follow it...
the person in paulo's post was killed...his mission may have simple been to write that letter to paulo who in trun has shared it us....everyone and thing have a voice...
We can't go back and change the past.
I tend to follow the dreams. If I dream about someone from my past over and over again, then there is something there I need to learn... something in my subconscious that I haven't integrated into my consciousness.
And I find that my soul is slow to learn from these experiences. It ponders and examines each issue, then approaches it from another angle, then sees how it relates to my current situation and how it relates to other past situations, and then ponders it some more. My soul likes to sit with everything much longer than my consciousness would like, but in the end, I learn a great deal.
I would love to see the world stop for an hour. How interesting it would be to see how everyone would react with nothing to do, no one to call, no work to do, all there is each other.
MARISSA: You and Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” At least I think he's the one who said that.
GAUTAMI: For sure there’s “unwise activeness" too, and dwelling on past regrets would be one of those.
SOULPEACE: I’ve noticed that about dreams – themes that are repeated over and over again seem worth looking at. And I know for me it’s also true that most of the work of processing seems to be done unconsciously. “But how could you possibly be aware of that?” one might ask, lol…
N2: That does sound like something similar.
REIKI: There’s a lot to that – and to Tolle’s The Power of Now. As to “every” moment holding such potential I’m always careful about making very broad generalizations. Well, maybe not always, but I always try. Well, usually…
ANONYMOUS: Maybe people would discover that money is time.
I totally agree!
Keshi.
pain does bring out the best in you...i believe it makes you a stronger person..since when i pain you talk to your self more and think more and start observing things and people...thus you understand the basic qualities of human nature...the way people will react to a given situtation.....it is almost like feeling from the skin....
KESHI: And worse, someone like Barbara Streisand may come along and sing about “Memories.”
VISHESH: What do you make of things in the news every day – a four year old left legless after a bombing (Somalia, last night, on the BBC news) a fourteen year old Iraqi girl raped and she and her family murdered (2005 or 06 by US soldiers). On a larger scale, the repeated genocides that have been allowed to happen again and again after the world said “never again” following Hitler. If greater joy comes out of every instance of human misery this is by no means readily apparent…
This isn’t to say that there aren’t many situations in which pain and adversity do, as you say, bring out the best in people. But from what I can see and have directly experienced, every day there are people, many of them, who face more adversity than it’s possible to deal with in a way that makes it possible to say: on the whole, that was really a good thing to have happened.
CRYSTAL: Actually (as with a lot of things I briefly encountered in school) I remember having a positive impression of St. I and those exercises - but I'm afraid that's all I remember. I may have only read about them rather than having read them.
Integration hesitation... you could give an example if you want, either real or hypothetical... unless it's that seventies disco tune you refer to...
Been running around outside the blog world
Nasra
small kids get punished for things in which they don't have any thing to do.If god was as people picture it,a super power,then i ask where the hell is it? It is all absolute stupidity to say we repay our sins and stuff.....in the name of god we have destroyed more than created.....in the name of god people committed crimes which even a god won't be able to stand.It is just that man is hungry to fill his lust and anger....
we cannot stop all this if we just talk about it..we will need action...a movement like never before..it needs to come from our hearts...and i think the time is coming soon when there will be a major change in man's faith..i don't mean to say a alien invasion or something rather a new leader.....a leader who will make things straight....
VISHESH: Anger is a topic in itself and I've had those feelings too - of outrage in reaction to outrages. I think you're right on about leadership. There is a tremendous need around the world for leaders in both government and business who care about something more that personal power, wealth, and prestige.
INSIDE: There's a lot that could and has been written about being aware of our own negative and upset emotional states. And it's always possible that put in certain situations we might behave much worse than we'd like to think.
That said, relatively few of us who have strong angry reactions to hearing accounts of torturers or murderers have actually done something similar. If such behaviors were that common, I'm not sure that human society could exist.
Well, in my one main "exerience", I think the info I got was that my happiness mattered to God, that he had a stake in it. But in real life, when things are going badly, it's hard to believe that.
Like you with St. Ignatius, hope I spelled that right, I'll mention William James' Varieties of Religious Experience again. A really systematic thinker whose book, as I recall, also feature lots of brief narratives written by different people describing their experiences first hand.
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