Satir Hologram

Comment by Pat Sciacca on August 14, 2008 at 6:23pm

Tell me about an exercise to get to Expectations and Yearnings . I remember behaviors, feelings, and perceptions

Comment by Nynke Etk Fokma on September 26, 2008 at 5:49pm

We all have yearnings. We yearn to know the truth, about things, about ourselves, about others. And there seems to be a deeper truth to that: our yearning for truth always leaves us an open space between the truth we yearn for and the truth we get in the moment. Learning how to live in that in between in peace, is what it means to be a mature and compassionate human being. More fully humane ...

We can easily probe/explore/exercise such universal yearnings for intimacy and tension between longing and belonging by reading poetry.

For example, Jelaluddin Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic, is an excellent teacher for the spiritual practice of yearning. In The Essential Rumi, Coleman Barks presents the best of his Rumi translations, many of which express a desire for union with God.

Art as Flirtation and Surrender

In your light I learn how to love.

In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,

where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,

and that sight becomes this art.

We all have yearnings. And yearnings cast shadows ...

Roger Rosenblatt looks at the shadow side of yearning — consuming desires driven by the engines of capitalism and the ecstasies of consumerism.

All the love,

Nynke

Comment by Nynke Etk Fokma on October 4, 2008 at 8:27pm

From chapter 8 of the Nature of Order, "The mirror of the Self", by Alexander

• http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0972652914
• http://www.pricescan.com/books/BookDetail.asp?isbn=0972652914

1. The things we like (from the heart) make us feel wholesome when we are near them.

2. We also feel wholesome when we are making these things.

3. The more accurate we are about what we really like, in this sense of liking from the heart, the more we find out that we agree with other people about which these things are.

4. What we like from the heart coincides with the objective structure of wholeness or life in a thing. As we get to know the "it" which we like from the heart, we begin to see this is the deepest thing there is. It applies to all judgements - not just about buildings and works of art, but also about actions, people, everything.

5. There is an empirical way in which we can help ourselves to find out what we really like from the heart. Nevertheless, it is not easy to find what we really like, and it is by no means automatic to be in touch with it. It takes effort, hard work, and personal enlightnment to understand it and to feel it. It requires liberation from opinion and concepts and ego to experience deep liking.

6. The reasons for the existence of this deep liking are mysterious, not obvious. To plumb them we shall have to examine the nature of things - even, ultimately, the nature of matter itself - very carefully. Nevertheless, the reasons are empirical. We may determine empirically, to what extent a thing has the ability to rouse this deep liking in us. It is not a private matter.

7. Somehow, the experience of real liking has to do with self. As we find out which things awaken real liking in ourselves, we find ourselves more in touch than before with our own selves.

Comment