Amazingly, when a community practitioner was invited to associate into high frequency emotions like joy, gratitude, and compassion, he stated, “I’d like to go there, but joy is above my …
Joy is NOT above our pay grade: Compassion practices, self-observing, and joyful living.
UNLEARNING the Myth of Duality in Service to Movement-building
Come to the edge, he said. They said: We are afraid. Come to the edge, he said. He pushed them and they flew. ─Guillaume Apollinaire We are indeed at the …
Practice Outcomes & Self-pacing: Diffuse glow? OR, Laser beam transformative accuracy?
Introspection and observation of our internal landscapes in any form is generally helpful. However the highest quality practice outcomes are a function of: 1) sustained intent, 2) focus, and 3) …
There is Nothing New Under the Sun: May we Transcend the Sun
At the “micro,” nuts and bolts level, our practices offer nothing that hasn’t already been brought forward 5000 years ago by seers and sages, and more recently by scores of …
Inner Landscapes Activists’ Community-of-practice
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____Activists attempt to move socio-political reality from point A, to an improved point B.
____Physicists create models of reality. Quantum mechanics and digital physics in particular have arrived at the same non-material understanding of reality as a probability distribution in which consciousness, not “bits” of matter, is the fundamental stuff of reality.
___Mystics tap into and experience a much wider swath of reality than most — including non-material reality.
____Contemplatives employ the practices and tools that facilitate arrival at a broad, mystical, exerience of reality.
____We are all now standing in the same space, sharing the same understanding and experience of reality. There is a confluence of wisdom and experience that activists, enabled by discoveries in physics, neuroscience, and using contemplative tools, are bringing to bear on their social transformation work from a wide-angle perspective and a vantage point of unprecedented clarity.
Neuroscience Context for Practice I.
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Mastery of our minds is essential to living in alignment with our highest, selves, i.e. with Love. Such mastery involves working intentionally, creatively, and consistently with our brains.
We can train our minds to change the physical structure and the function(s) of the brain. If we continually pay attention to, and purposefully direct our thought processes we can gain tremendous self-knowledge. Until we begin to consistently work with the dynamics of our longstanding habits, belief systems, points of reference, and patterns, these processes run us. The brain defaults to what is familiar, not necessarily to what is healthy and growth producing.
We can shape, reshape, and mold our malleable brains like modeling clay to deliberately foster optimal growth and transformation. The terrain of the brain stands at the ready. We just need to pick up the tools and work methodically.
Community-of-Practice Democratizes “Esoteric” Quaker Mysticism
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Quaker Friends speak of a state of “unity.” Mystics worldwide describe resting in and obtaining guidance from undifferentiated consciousness as the ultimate state of bliss.
The Quaker Pathways Forward community-of-practice takes the mystery [but not the awe] out of “mystical.” We usher the mystical experience out of the esoteric closets of the few by participating together in practices which democratize the opportunity for ALL interested Friends to co-create with spirit. The community-of-practice cultivates Friends’direct, frequent, and sustained experience of the light —the undifferentiated field.
A “Mystical experience” is where deep contemplative practice melds with reality as a probability distribution as explained by quantum science, digital physics, and neurobiology.
In community, Friends foster and hone ongoing, conscious alignment with universal intelligence lived daily, for their evolution, and that of society.
The Fire of Fox in You
By Marisol Cortez
Cross-posted from Deceleration
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We had gotten wind of this talk at a meeting on climate organizing in San Antonio, where we had picked up a flyer describing Boyce Simms as “an engaged Eco-Buddhist” who “works to transform anger and despair into compassion toward neighbors, communities, and the environment.” Given Deceleration‘s concern not just with questions of climate justice but with the affective (or inner/emotional) work required to sustain effective action in the face of mounting climate and social crises, we were intrigued.
Quaker Pathways Forward Ministry
By Pamela Boyce Simms
Quaker Pathways Forward
Seminal, Henry Cadbury
FELLOWSHIP PAPER
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Friends it’s time to shed the vestiges of outworn caterpillar thinking. Our planet faces an existential crisis. Climate change, resource depletion, and income disparity are now hastened by an unhinged political landscape, and we are racing toward the edge of a cliff!
Throughout history Quakers have repeatedly held and activated the equivalent of transformational “imaginal cells” which have triggered metamorphoses in American social norms and behavior.