‘God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer….”

In this time of an almost complete lack of leadership in the UK, I found myself listening to Robert Kennedy’s speeches : he is marvellously articulate; he quoted these words on the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination, from his favourite poet, Aeschylus: “God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
It takes a lot of humility and courage to realise that we suffer because we are looking at the world through a viewpoint we experience as ‘me’ Read More

Learning to bear the beams of love….

William Blake writes that “we are put on earth a little space,. That we may learn to bear the beams of love…”
I have had times in meditation when the blinkers of the ‘mind-forged manacles’ (another quote from Blake)  fall away, and felt like a sinner welcomed into heaven, hardly able to believe my luck. This love is always there but we get so wrapped up in our sense of a seperate ‘me’ who believes the world is out there and antithetical to us, that we rarely experience grace. Read More

The Touchstone (By RL Stevenson)

This is a wonderful story by RLS – it points to the clear mirror of the heart we all possess but which is usualy covered over with images and pictures accumulated around a  sense of a seperate ‘me’.

“THE King was a man that stood well before the world; his smile was sweet as clover, but his soul withinsides was as little as a pea. He had two sons; and the younger son was a boy after his heart, but the elder was one whom he feared. It befell one morning that the drum sounded in the dun before it was yet day Read More

The Five Blind Men and the Elephant

What is all the turbulence and argument going on all over the world (I am thinking of the USA and the UK as I write)?  Why are people so desperately trying to impose their opinion on others?

Growing up as I did in the England of the 1950’s there was a sense (admittedly one I found stifling) of a collective agreement, of society adhering to a set of assumptions. Just as England is the only country that does not have its name on our stamps – because we invented them – so we have a similar relationship to England.

In this way there was an implicit sense of lining up behind certain codes which could not easily be spelt out Read More

The world as love in action..

I just loved this quote from Nisargadatta Maharaj – a beedi wallah in Bombay – who was extrordinarly incisive:
“Someone asks:
What can truth or reality gain by all our practice?
He uses truth and love interchangeably.  He says:
“Nothing whatsoever, of course.  But it is in the nature of
truth or love, cosmic consciousness, whatever you want to call it, to
express itself, to affirm itself, to overcome difficulties Read More

Is psychology wrong-headed?

I did an online course on ‘Buddhism and Modern Psychology’, and found it useful to write an essay for the course on just how wrong-headed evolutionary psychologists appear to be. I studied Social Anthropology years ago and was equally stunned at how little access it gave to the mysteries of the human heart. The human sciences (including psychotherapy, philosophy, sociology and academic psychology) wrestle with studying the human mind and desperately try to pin it down with a myriad of theories. What they do not understand – which the Buddha did – is that we can only penetrate the Mind by trusting the principle of awareness. Read More

What is the Mind ??

Nisargadatta Maharaj was an Indian guru who died in 1981. His book ‘I am that’ is one of the great spiritual classics – as you will see there is a pure Mind, which can only be found when we stop identifying with all the junk we think is me…Does internal family systems therapy draw on this pure Mind ? Well it can help to begin to align ourself with the power of knowing, of tuning into the felt sense of the body, of knowing what it is to step back and be the knowing, of being able to recognise trains of thought, and see them rather than be lost into them…Our culture is lost into the situation of the five blind men and the elephant and not knowing what is real….Maharaj is a good guide… Read More

In this world of the spiritually blind…

After Shakyamuni’s enlightenment, his first words were to someone called Upaka, to whom he said ‘In this world of the spiritually blind I go to Benares to bang the drum of the deathless.’  All of us – all humans – as we grow from infancy look in the mirrror of our parents, and take on board pictures of who they are and who we believe we are in relation to them. Rather like going to the opticians for an eye test, we end up with many lenses colouring our vision without even knowing it, we just take it for granted. Read More

The Child’s Dilemma

Fairbairn is one of my heroes  – as a child we have no choice but to greedily eat what our parents put in our mouths. But often we felt poisoned, but because we needed them so badly, it was easier to believe there was something wrong with us, and they must really be perfect.  It can take a long time to understand this situation, to feel our hunger, and dare to STAND our need and not just blindly swallow down what others offer. Read More