💭Spirituality & Philosophy

• The world we know cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent… What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it — if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.

• Defining attention as “the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists,” he writes:

• The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.

• Attention is not just another “cognitive function”: it is… the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something — or don’t attend to it — matters a very great deal.

• But while there is a distinct difference between how nature and art each effect unselfing, Murdoch argues that what separates great art from the bad and the mediocre is precisely this capacity for stripping down the self rather than inflating the ego — a notion evocative of Tolstoy’s insistence that a real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.

• With our senses alive and the insight that we and the earth are literally one, we recognize that our healing and transformation are only possible alongside the healing and transformation of all beings and of the planet itself. Our practice takes on urgency when we realize that the converse is also true: the healing of the earth is only possible when we heal ourselves.

• Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.

• Breathing in, I am aware of my skin. Breathing out, I am aware of the contact my skin makes with the soil, the air, and my clothing.

• Breathing in, I am aware of my nose and the wonderful fragrances in nature: the smell of earth, the fresh air after rain. Breathing out, I smile to the wondrous scents of the natural world.

• Breathing in, I am aware of the taste in my mouth. Breathing out, I smile to taste sensations.

• Breathing in, I am aware of sound: the song of birds, the babbling of a brook, the wind rustling leaves. Breathing out, I smile to the wondrous sounds of life.

• Breathing in, I am aware of the millions of colors I see with my eyes. Breathing out, I smile to the brilliant colors of nature.

• Breathing in, I’m aware of my thoughts. Breathing out, I smile to my mind.

• When Linnaeus devised his landmark classification system, he divided nature into three kingdoms: two living (plants and animals) and one nonliving (minerals). The scientists of his generation gave fungi no special attention, brushing them under the conceptual carpet of plants. Darwin ignored them altogether, even though we now know that fungi are the fulcrum by which evolution lifted life out of the ocean and onto the land — they greened the earth, helping aquatic plants adapt to terrestrial life by anchoring their primitive roots, not yet capable of acquiring nutrients on their own, in a mycorrhizal substrate of symbiosis.

• Perhaps we are on the brink of living Butler’s prophecy because we modeled our machines on the wrong kingdom, modeled their intelligence on our own, only to find that they are as parasitic and predatory as we are, as they parasitize and prey upon us. What if the correct model was always there, hidden beneath our bipedal overconfidence — all this time we have been building and walking and warring over Earth’s original networked intelligence, this planetary übermind transmitting the signal of life via the hypertextual protocols of hyphae, through the mesh topology of mycelium. What if our worship of binary logic is what warped Wonderland? Who would we be if our “artificial” intelligence turned natural, built on the nonbinary logic of symbiosis, restoring the unity of life into a perfect circle with no sides to take?

• Due to my own exhausting skepticism, I am still not entirely sure what my relationship to God and prayer is. But my nightly reviews have increasingly been accompanied with the wish that “Thy will be done.” I have zero confidence that I have sufficient self-knowledge to manifest exactly the right path for myself, and the more I’ve leaned into surrendering control the better my life has gotten. But this surrender always seems to come with a fear of my family falling into material insecurity. The good news is that specific fear’s also a path back to the main quest.

• Because money tends to be one of the biggest barriers on our path to a life we truly love, our money triggers are critical indicators of precisely where we need to integrate our consciousness. Put another way: money often makes us do things that are out of integrity.

• As we move further from fear, he shows us how to create from an increasingly loving and authentic place. It’s one of the most interesting and useful conversations I’ve had. He concluded his masterclass with fifteen steps on the path to making the transition from fear to integrity. This helps shift you from the black magic of “my will be done,” to the more subtle miracles of “Thy will be done.” If love is one of the most powerful forces in the Universe, coming into ever greater integrity with it will enhance the creative potential of your thoughts.

• Your job is to find the place you're out of integrity and align so that you can continue to be like a larger and larger conduit of this wildly loving, fantastically intelligent consciousness that ultimately we all are.

• Martha Beck

Maybe in this world of supremacy of “taste,” this is helpful to keep in mind.