When God Plays

What you call hell is you taking this all too seriously, and heaven is your full presence in the play; they are not realities but your perspective on what is! So, drop all this metaphysics; instead, make merry and enjoy the play.  … More When God Plays

There is nothing but Presence: Don’t try to be present; notice that you already are

In relegating the reality and presence of a thing to a substratum, to what’s behind it, I enter into a hopeless pursuit of reality, thinking presence comes from things instead of seeing that it really comes from me. It’s in my presence that the world is present.  … More There is nothing but Presence: Don’t try to be present; notice that you already are

Of Fratricide, Love, & Prayer: Pleas of a Restless Heart

To express and realize the desire of the heart, one must call the beloved into presence with one’s all being. All organs, subtle and gross, must call on the beloved: the heart by prayer, the tongue by speaking the truth, the eyes by seeing beauty, the ears by active listening, and the body by selfless service. When all of a man’s being calls on the same thing, that’s well-being and harmony; when there’s divergence and each organ wants something different, that’s disease. … More Of Fratricide, Love, & Prayer: Pleas of a Restless Heart

Exploring Authenticity: Perspectives from Jungian Psychology, Heideggerian Philosophy, and Sufism

Rumi, a renowned Sufi poet, emphasized the importance of love and the heart in the quest for authenticity. For Sufis, the heart is the center of spiritual knowledge and wisdom. Authentic living involves purifying the heart, detaching from external identifications, and seeking a deeper connection with the divine. Divinity in its pure, metaphysical form is nothing but the living, eternal present, the indeterminate Being. … More Exploring Authenticity: Perspectives from Jungian Psychology, Heideggerian Philosophy, and Sufism

The Child & The Walking Dead

There used be a child content in love and abundance, for whom one idea was enough, and that was his concrete Reality. But this modern semblance of a man, he needs one too many ideas, identifications, positions with regard to everything, swarming in podcasts and debates, only to satisfy an insatiable sense of belonging that is only truly satisfied by what is buried alive within himself. … More The Child & The Walking Dead

On Hell & The Late Afternoon Sea

They say memory is information grafted somewhere in the brain. But that’s not how I experience memory. My memories are living experiences of parts of me that are still living in the places and situations I have visited. I have left them there because they didn’t want to leave but they are still living. And it strikes me that if I am still living everywhere and at all times at once, then all places and times must be living within me!  … More On Hell & The Late Afternoon Sea

The Children of Cain

The elder, breaking his vow of silence after 146 years, said to Alexei, “you’ve come to my room and prayed at my feet more than the other monks in this monastery. Now, I shall speak to you, the son of Cain! It’s not your prayers that compelled me to speak; what compelled me to break silence is that which compelled you to ceaselessly pray; it’s rising wave in all of us, felt in the core of our Being, that compels the collective impulse. I, too, speak because this wave is reaching a threshold in our time.” … More The Children of Cain

Beyond The Shadows: Deciphering The Phenomenological Reduction – Part 2

What makes the phenomenological reduction unique, is that it’s not a suspension of an act or cluster of acts in favor of living in some other acts; it’s rather a total and complete suspension or putting out of play of all acts or all manners of being directed toward meanings through the stream of consciousness. It is unique both in its universality and its peculiar directionality: everything is suspended by an abrupt move toward the center of consciousness, the pure I, which will bring to view the total streaming consciousness. The phenomenological reduction is, as Fink has said, a persistent abstention from any participation in the stream of consciousness by making the streaming itself the theme, a streaming that throughout human history has always remained un-thematic and un-discovered for necessary reasons. To perform the reduction is to see the streaming, the Heraclitean flux, for the first time. … More Beyond The Shadows: Deciphering The Phenomenological Reduction – Part 2

Beyond The Shadows: Deciphering The Phenomenological Reduction – Part 1

The things that we experience, including our own human self, its history and its fundamental situatedness within a context, i.e. the world, are nothing but shadows compared to what’s truly real: they derive their sense of Being and reality from something else outside of the cave, from what Fink calls the Light-World. However, being chained to our mundane self-understanding, we falsely attribute reality and existence to these shadow-appearances. We are fundamentally oblivious to the possibility of the true dimension of Being. That’s why Fink argues that insofar as we see and interpret ourselves as humans in the world, we cannot break free from this beginingless imprisonment. Rather, we must turn away from the shadows and step outside the cave, a movement accomplished by the performance of the reduction, and this reduction which is a persistent abstention from belief needs to be performed from a deeper level of self than our human self which itself is nothing but a shadow. … More Beyond The Shadows: Deciphering The Phenomenological Reduction – Part 1