There’s Meryl describing the boundaries that define her. Good for her. No apologies necessary. The world’s waiting for everyone to just be themselves like that.
Okay, after giving a woman the first word, now we’ve got these three old men, from three different parts of the world, from three markedly different experiences, and all of them share the same wisdom. It’s no coincidence. That’s the Truth. You keep searching for meaning. You want to accomplish whatever it is, collect your spiritual-psychological understanding and then go do that important thing that everyone feels compelled to do but are rarely sure about what it actually looks like. Well, it looks like your life. Because you don’t need a promotion, you don’t need to become someone, you just need to see that the only reason you saw yourself as too small was because your vision was limited, not because you were. Let’s start with holocaust survivor, psychologist and teacher, Viktor Frankl:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD1512_XJEw%5D
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Next let’s spend some time with the very humorous Anthony De Mello. Raised around Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus, De Mello became a Catholic Jesuit Priest and psychologist. Known for his affable manner and his willingness to actually shake his students awake, this talk is taken from a series of lectures that De Mello gave to a conference of Priest-Psychologists. These talks were later compiled into the excellent book Awareness.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y3Q7H2urto?list=PLEC25151943DE0F35%5D
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And let’s finish on a favourite of mine, philosopher Alan Watts suggesting to you that you are much bigger and more powerful than you realize. And you are never not connected. I sometimes use the metaphor of a disco ball. If the ball is the point of singularity and the light turning on is the big bang, then the early universe is where the light and where we are is where the light is. So it’s the same light, from the same source. Just as atomic science teaches us, we are all made from the same atoms that formed the early universe. The light is still travelling outward and we are its current manifestation. And after we “die” the light that is us just continues on in a new form. We are an epoch in that infinite beam of light. We are as big and as powerful as our idea of ourselves. It’s time we started living that way:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbWWT3X8Ebo%5D
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Have a fantastic Friday and a great long weekend everyone. Much love.
peace. s
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.