Nature

Biophilism

“Beyond atonement theology,
Let us BE at-one-ment Reality –
as Eternal LOVE.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries.

Without them humanity cannot survive.”

~ Dalai Lama
“There is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church where I kneel.
Prayer should bring us to an altar where no walls or names exist.
Is there not a region of love where the sovereignty is illumined nothing,”
~ Rabia of Basra
“I have learned so much from God
That I can no longer call myself
a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew”
~ Hafiz
“Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen.
Not any religion, or cultural system.
 I am not from the East or the West,
 nor out of the ocean or up 
from the ground, not natural or ethereal,
 not composed of elements at all.

I do not exist, am not an entity in this world
 or the next, 
did not descend from Adam and Eve 
or any origin story.

My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless.
 Neither body nor soul. 
I belong to the Beloved
 have seen the two worlds as one 
and that one call to and know,

First, last, outer, inner, only that 
breath breathing human.” 


~ Rumi, Only Breath
“I consider myself a Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, and Confucian.”

~ Mahatma Gandhi
“Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find
 all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.”
~ Rumi




Ron’s Introduction to “Biophilism”

Dear Friends,

“Biophilism” is a poetic essay which declares our urgent need for a universal religion of LOVE.  

The title “Biophilism” was derived from “biophilia”, which means “love of Life”. It’s interpretation is suggested by the above key quotations and by my following explanatory comments.

This essay is closely related to my Reflections on Religious Beliefs, which tell why humanity can no longer survive without universal ethical behaviors beyond conflicting religious beliefs.

Ron Rattner


Biophilism

The new millennium demands a new universal religion –

A religion of Love.

So, let us curb our dogmas
and park our hierarchies.

Let us leave atonement theology,
and live at-one-ment Reality.

Let us transcend our ism schisms
and live a Universal ism —

Biophilism –

The love of Life.

Let us live life
as love of Life.

Let us let go, and
let Life live us,

as

LOVE.



Ron’s audio recitation of “Biophilism”

Listen to



Ron’s explanation of “Biophilism”

Dear Friends,

Many years ago the then obvious threat of nuclear war catastrophe inspired composition of the foregoing poetic essay, envisioning a new universal religion of LOVE.

After the horrendous 1945 US atomic bombings of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and especially since the ‘miraculous’ resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis between the USA and USSR, I have been deeply concerned by obviously insane dangers of a nuclear war catastrophe which would end earth life as we’ve known it. So I’ve long realized the urgent need to abolish all nuclear weapons, and all wars.

The “Biophilism” poetic essay was composed after my midlife spiritual awakening, long before the doomsday clock of the bulletin of atomic scientists was moved to 100 seconds to midnight. Since then we’ve experienced increasingly violent and politically polarized times, beyond those which motivated this essay. So the essay’s message is more urgently imperative now than ever before.

In order to avert current catastrophic threats to Life on our precious planet, humanity needs egalitarian societal organizations – beyond hierarchical religious organizations; we need democratically participatory organizations which promote and practice coexistence, compassion and cooperation over insanely autocratic domination and unsustainable exploitation of people and other lifeforms.  
  
Though countless people have benefited from religions, it has become obvious that survival of Earth-life as we’ve known it urgently requires universal human ethics of empathy and LOVE, transcending current insanely polarized violence and turbulence. 

Thus, today’s essay declares our urgent need for a new universal religion of LOVE. Although some may consider this declaration impractical or Utopian, I deem it not just feasible but evolutionarily imperative that we end and transcend current human warfare insanity.

As lovers of God and Nature, let us communally remember, envision and experience our true spiritual Self-Identity, which is Universal and Eternal LOVE!

And so may it be!

Ron Rattner

Transcending Ego-Suffering

“Ego is the biggest enemy of humans. ”
~ Rig Veda



Introduction to “Transcending Ego-Suffering”

Dear Friends,

Perennial spiritual teachings ascribe all human suffering to “ego” – mistaken mental self-identity as life-forms separate from non-duality Reality. Thus “ego” is considered a psychological prison in which suffering is inevitable. However, ego-suffering can be karmically mitigated as we spiritually evolve, but not ended until it is totally transcended.

To reduce our suffering and advance our spiritual evolution toward ultimate Self-Realization ending “ego”, I have posted below a poem titled “What is Ego?”, a carefully culled quotation collection about ego, and my explanatory comments which help define and explain the fundamental spiritual importance of “ego”, and why reducing and transcending ego-suffering is especially important in these troubled times.

May these writings inspire and encourage us to let go of who we mistakenly think we are, so we can enjoy more and suffer less, until ultimately we realize and BE what we truly are.

Thus, they are deeply dedicated to helping us live with ever-growing happiness, until our ultimate transcendence of ego-suffering – as ego-free LOVE.

And so may it be!

Ron Rattner


What is Ego?

Q. What is ego?

A. Ego is what you think you are –

If you don’t self-identify with Universal Awareness, Nature or Divinity.

And your body is your ego incarnate.

As you learn what you really are,
you’ll change what you think you are –

Until without thinking what you are
or who you are,

You just ARE.



Ron’s audio recitation of What is Ego?

Listen to



Quotation Collection About “Transcending Ego-Suffering”


“Ego is the biggest enemy of humans. ”

~ Rig Veda


“Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.”

~ Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth



“I hold three treasures
 close to my heart.

The first is love;

The next simplicity;

The third, overcoming ego.”

~ Lao Tzu

“If you correct your mind,
the rest of your life will fall into place.”
~ Lao Tzu

“When I let go of what [I think] I am,

I become what I might be.”

~ Lao Tzu

“The mind is a bundle of thoughts.
The thoughts arise because there is the thinker.
The thinker is the ego.
The ego, if sought, will automatically vanish.
The ego and the mind are the same.
The ego is the root-thought from which all other thoughts arise.”
~ Sri Ramana Maharshi


“The foundation of the Buddha’s teachings lies in compassion, and the reason for practicing the teachings is to wipe out the persistence of ego, the number-one enemy of compassion.”

~ Dalai Lama


“The entire Buddhist path is based on the discovery of egolessness and the maturing of insight or knowledge that comes from egolessness.”

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche


“A spark of truth can burn up a mountain of lies. The opposite is also true. The sun of truth remains hidden behind the cloud of self-identification with the body.”

~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Personal entity and enlightenment cannot go together.”
~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj


”When all the false self-identifications are thrown away,
what remains is all-embracing love.”

~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Life is love and love is life.” 

~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Only if one knows the truth of Love, which is the real nature of Self, will the strong entangled [ego] knot of life be untied. Only if one attains the height of Love will liberation be attained. Such is the heart of all religions. The experience of Self is only Love, which is seeing only Love, hearing only Love, feeling only Love, tasting only Love and smelling only Love, which is bliss.”

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

“The way is not in the sky.
The way is in the heart.”
~ Buddha

“All bad qualities center round the ego. .. There are neither good nor bad qualities in the Self. The Self is free from all qualities. Qualities pertain to the mind only.”
“The mind is only a bundle of thoughts [with] their root in the I-thought. Whoever investigates the True “I” enjoys the stillness of bliss.”
“All unhappiness is due to the ego. With it comes all your trouble.
If you would deny the ego and scorch it by ignoring it you would be free.”
~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

“This perception of division between the seer and the object that is seen,
is situated in the mind. For those remaining in the heart, the seer becomes one with the sight.”
~ Sri Ramana Maharshi


“Nothing perceivable is real. Your attachment is your bondage. You cannot control the future.

There is no such thing as free will. Will is bondage. You identify yourself with your desires and become their slave.”

~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj



“In Hinduism, the very idea of free will is non-existent,

so there is no word for it.

Will is commitment, fixation, bondage.” . . . .

“To be free in the world you must be free of the world.

Otherwise your past decides for you and your future.”

~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj



“Time, space and causation are like the glass through which the Absolute is seen…
In the Absolute there is neither time, space, nor causation.”

~ Swami Vivekananda


“[T]here cannot be any such thing as free will; the very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by the conditions of space, time, and causation. Everything that we know, or can possibly know, must be subject to causation, and that which obeys the law of causation cannot be free.”

“The only way to come out of bondage is to go beyond the limitations of law,
to go beyond causation.”

“This is the goal of the Vedantin, to attain freedom while living.”

~ Swami Vivekananda – Karma Yoga


“To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe;
it cannot be found here. ….
The only way to come out of bondage
is to go beyond the limitations of [natural] law,
 to go beyond causation.”

~ Swami Vivekananda



“The world, indeed, is like a dream and the treasures of the world are an alluring mirage! Like the apparent distances in a picture, things have no reality in themselves, but they are like heat haze.”

~ Buddha


“A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion,

does not act as if it is real, so he escapes the suffering.”

~ Buddha

“A disciplined mind leads to happiness, and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering.”
“In Buddhism, ignorance as the root cause of suffering refers to a fundamental misperception of the true nature of the self and all phenomena.”
“We must recognize that the suffering of one person or one nation is the suffering of humanity.”
~ Dalai Lama



“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

~ Albert Einstein



“Space and time are not conditions in which we live,

they are modes in which we think”.

~ Albert Einstein



“It is true that we are not bound. That is to say, the real Self has no bondage. And it is true that you will eventually return to your Source. But meanwhile, if you commit sins, as you call them, you have to face the consequences. You cannot escape them.”

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi



“When you think or speak about yourself, when you say, “I,” what you usually refer to is “me and my story.” This is the “I” of your likes and dislikes, fears and desires, the “I” that is never satisfied for long. It is a mind-made sense of who you are, conditioned by the past and seeking to find its fulfillment in the future. Can you see that this “I” is fleeting, a temporary formation, like a wave pattern on the surface of the water?”

~ Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks



“As you grow up, you form a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. The term ego means different things to different people, but when I use it …it means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind. …..As long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life.”

~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

“

“As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot truly be at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled. Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications.”

~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now



“The individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with Nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is—rather literally—to be spellbound.

~ Alan Watts



“When the line between myself and what happens to me is dissolved and there is no stronghold left for an ego even as a passive witness, I find myself not in a world but
as a world which is neither compulsive nor capricious.”

~ Alan Watts



“The ego says that the world is vast, and that the particles which form it are tiny. When tiny particles join, it says, the vast world appears. When the vast world disperses, it says, tiny particles appear. The ego is entranced by all these names and ideas, but the subtle truth is that world and particle are the same; neither one vast, neither one tiny. Every thing is equal to every other thing. Names and concepts only block your perception of this Great Oneness. Therefore it is wise to ignore them. Those who live inside their egos are continually bewildered: they struggle frantically to know whether things are large or small, whether or not there is a purpose to joining or dispersing, whether the universe is blind and mechanical or the divine creation of a conscious being. In reality there are no grounds for having beliefs or making comments about such things. Look behind them instead, and you will discern the deep, silent, complete truth of the Tao. Embrace it, and your bewilderment vanishes.”

~ Lao Tzu



“The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle: Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses, it swings from one desire to the next, one conflict to the next, one self-centered idea to the next. If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life. Let this monkey go. Let the senses go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go. Let ideas go. Let the fiction of life and death go. Just remain in the center, watching. And then forget that you are there.”

~ Lao Tzu




“Free of ego, living naturally, working virtuously, you become filled with inexhaustible vitality and are liberated forever from the cycle of death and rebirth. Understand this if nothing else: spiritual freedom and oneness with the Tao are not randomly bestowed gifts, but the rewards of conscious self-transformation and self-evolution.”

~ Lao Tzu



“True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such a way as if you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience at this moment. This inner alignment with Now is the end of suffering.”

~ Eckhart Tolle



“The world is a prison and we are the prisoners:

Dig a hole in the prison and let yourself out!”

~ Rumi



“Why do you stay in prison 
when the door is so wide open?”

~ Rumi



“Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.”

~ Rumi



“The choice that frees or imprisons us is the choice of love or fear.

Love liberates. Fear imprisons.”

~ Gary Zukav



“Deep down, at our cores, there are only two emotions:
love and fear.

All positive emotions come from love,

all negative emotions from fear.

From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy.

From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt.”

~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross & David Kessler – When You Don’t Choose Love You Choose Fear



“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear” . . .

~ 1 John 4:18



“When fear becomes collective, when anger becomes collective, it’s extremely dangerous. It is overwhelming…
The mass media and the military-industrial complex create a prison for us, so we continue to think, see, and act in the same way…
We need the courage to express ourselves even when the majority is going in the opposite direction… because a change of direction can happen only when there is a collective awakening…
Therefore, it is very important to say, ‘I am here!’ to those who share the same kind of insight.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Power



“Many people are so imprisoned in their minds that the beauty of nature does not really exist for them. They might say, ‘What a pretty flower,’ but that’s just a mechanical mental labeling. Because they are not still, not present, they don’t truly see the flower, don’t feel it’s essence, it’s holiness-just as they don’t know themselves, don’t feel their own essence, their own holiness.”

~ Eckhart Tolle



“The fruits of the inner man begin only with the shedding of tears. When you reach the place of tears, then know that your spirit has come out from the prison of this world and has set its foot upon the path that leads towards the new age.”

~ Isaac of Nineveh, 7th C. Orthodox Saint and Persian Mystic



”One of the marvels of the world:

The sight of a soul sitting in prison

with the key in its hand.”

~ Rumi



“I long to escape the prison of my ego
 and lose myself in you.”

~ Rumi



“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner security.”

~ Albert Einstein ( N. Y. Times , March 29, 1972)



“One must elevate – and not degrade – oneself with one’s own mind, as the mind is both a friend and an enemy.

For those who have subdued and conquered the mind, it is the best of friends. But for those who fail to do so, the mind remains the greatest of enemies.”

~ Bhagavad Gita, Chapter Six, Lord Krishna to Arjuna



Q: “How much “ego” do
you need?

A: Just enough so that you don’t step in front of a bus.”

~ Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

Ron’s Comments on “Transcending Ego-Suffering”

Dear Friends,

Perennial spiritual teachings ascribe all human suffering to “ego” – mistaken mental self-identity as individually separate from non-duality Reality. Thus “ego” is considered a psychological prison in which suffering is inevitable.

Before my 1976 spiritual awakening I was self-identifying only with my physical body and its story; not with Nature or our Universal Source and Eternal Essence. But since then I’ve become consciously aware that (like almost all other humans) I’m psychologically ‘imprisoned’ by mistaken ego thoughts of being separate from others, Nature, and SELF. And I’ve learned that while mentally ‘imprisoned’ by ego we inevitably suffer from karmic cause and effect.

Therefore, to reduce our ego-suffering and advance our spiritual evolution toward ultimate Self-Realization, I have posted the above quotation collection and poem, which define and explain the fundamental spiritual importance of “ego”, and how we can transcend it.

Reducing and transcending inevitable ego-suffering is especially important in these troubled times, because “ego” can be the greatest impediment to spiritual evolution and Self-realization.

However, as human consciousness ever evolves we are remembering our long forgotten true Self-identity, and universal Oneness with Nature and SELF. And thereby we are consciously reducing ego-suffering, with increasingly harmonious, loving and compassionate behaviors and emotions toward all Life everywhere.

Thus, today’s posting is deeply dedicated to encouraging our living with ever-growing happiness, until our ultimate transcendence of ego-suffering – as ego-free LOVE.

And so may it be!

Ron Rattner


Transcending Violence


“Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.”


“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent?
Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.
So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
~ J. Krishnamurti
“Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don’t see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.”


“The moment you put a mental label on another human being,
you can no longer truly relate to that person. . .
It then becomes possible to perpetrate any act of violence.”
~ Eckhart Tolle
“If you and I are having a single thought of violence or hatred
against anyone in the world at this moment,
we are contributing to the wounding of the world.”
~ Deepak Chopra


J. Krishnamurti ~ May 11, 1895 – February 17, 1986



Introduction to “Transcending Violence”

Dear Friends,

The following Q and A essay about transcending violence was first composed and published almost four years ago. Since then we’ve begun experiencing an extraordinarily stressful, turbulent, and polarized “new normal” post-pandemic period with widespread global human violence and threats to life on Earth and innate human rights never before imagined by most of us, including me.

Accordingly I’ve felt intuitively impelled to amend and update the essay, (and to supplement it with a collection of important spiritual quotations), thereby explaining why to transcend violence it is crucial that humanity must now elevate our behavioral and emotional energies beyond those which have long-prevailed prior to this unprecedented “new normal” post-pandemic period.

These writings are deeply dedicated to transcendence of current unprecedented global violence by our loving, compassionate, fearless, and forgiving behaviors and emotions, beyond prevailing disharmonious levels of human consciousness.

May they encourage our conscious harmony with Nature, and unconditional Love and forgiveness for all Life everywhere.

May we thereby help bless the world as LOVE.

And so may it be!

Ron Rattner

Quotation Collection concerning “Violence”


“I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.”
~ Albert Einstein

“The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one’s opponent.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi 

“Violence is not only impractical but immoral.” 
~ Martin Luther King Jr.

“Nothing good ever comes of violence.”
~ Martin Luther 

“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi

“Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart,
cannot come by an appeal to the brain.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi

“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi

“Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi

“Poverty is the worst form of violence.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi

“Intolerance is itself a form of violence
and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi

“ An unjust law is itself a species of violence.
Arrest for its breach is more so.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi

“Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things,
and generally return upon him who began.”
~ Lucretius

“Every leaf that grows will tell you:
what you sow will bear fruit,
so if you have any sense my friend,
don’t plant anything but Love.”
~ Rumi

“If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolute night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.”
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.”
~ Lao Tzu

“Violence should not be responded to with violence.
The only way out of violence and conflict is for us to embrace the practice of peace, to think and act with compassion, love, and understanding.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh

“To prepare for war, to give millions of men and women the opportunity to practice killing day and night in their hearts, is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration, and fear that will be passed on for generations to come. ”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct,
and tends to produce ferocity toward those
who are not regarded as members of the herd.”
~ Bertrand Russell

“It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation.
Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people,
but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people
who sit around and say, “Wait on time.”
~ Martin Luther King Jr.

“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence
but also internal violence of spirit.
You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.”
~ Martin Luther King Jr.

“Violence does not necessarily take people by the throat and strangle them.
Usually it demands no more than an ultimate allegiance from its subjects.
They are required merely to become accomplices in its lies.”
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Violence can only be concealed by a lie,
and the lie can only be maintained by violence.”
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“If you and I are having a single thought of violence or hatred
against anyone in the world at this moment,
we are contributing to the wounding of the world.”
~ Deepak Chopra



Transcending Violence

Q. We live in stressful, turbulent and crazy times, with widespread violence. How can we transcend such violence?

A. “Violence” has different meanings for different people in different societies. So we must first define violence to address this question.

From a spiritual perspective “violence” includes much more than just overt physical or emotional acts of violence. As long as we egotistically view the world and others conceptually, and not conciously, there is violence.

Subtly, violence is unconscious human mental separation from others and Nature. So all such mental separation “breeds violence”.

Thus, spiritually this is a world of inevitable “violence”, which can never be totally eliminated, but can be appreciably alleviated by harmoniously loving behaviors. Yet even individually “enlightened” loving beings living in mentally sick societies overtly experience societal violence.

Hence Jesus endured violent crucifixion, mockery and humiliation from ignorant crowds, because ‘heretically’ he preached “love your neighbors” and even “your enemies”; repudiated socially condoned hypocrisy, brutality and thirst for worldly power and gains; and even audaciously proclaimed the ultimate non-duality ‘forbidden mystical Truth’ – that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).

So as long as we abide in this space/time world, we can never totally transcend its inevitable violence and suffering. To transcend violence we must transcend this world of karmic cause and effect. We must BE choiceless Universal Awareness beyond all mental conceptualization, including the ‘transcendence’ concept.

“To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe;

it cannot be found here. ….
The only way to come out of bondage

is to go beyond the limitations of [natural] law,

to go beyond causation.”

~ Swami Vivekananda

However, as human consciousness inevitably evolves we will gradually reduce violence and suffering, individually and societally. Most earthly violence arises from human ignorance of our spiritual Oneness with Nature. So as human spiritual ignorance ends, violence will be appreciably alleviated as disharmonious behaviors and emotions are dispelled and supplanted with love and compassion.

And so it shall be!

Ron Rattner

Infinite Potential ~ Dawning of a New Age


“That which is truly alive in the living being is the energy of spirit,
and this is never born and never dies.”
~ David Bohm

“Space is not empty. It’s full.
It is the ground for the existence of everything,
including ourselves”
~ David Bohm

“Objective reality does not exist” ….

“the universe is fundamentally a gigantic … hologram”

~ David Bohm


Dr. David Bohm ~ December 20, 1917 – October 27, 1992


Introduction to “Infinite Potential ~ Dawning of a New Age”

Dear Friends,

We have reached a rare turning point in modern human history. Confronted by dire anthropogenic threats to extinction of life on Earth as we’ve known it, our species is awakening from eons of darkness to a prophesied new enlightened Earth age, as we realize our infinite potential as wholeness and oneness with our eternal spiritual Source.

Thus a “critical mass” of Humankind will soon be energetically uplifted to co-create a compassionate world, dynamically harmonious with Nature and all life everywhere – a “new reality” foreseen for millennia by non-materialist mystic seers.

Today’s posting commemorates the imminent advent of this awakened new age by posthumously honoring Dr. David Bohm a brilliant theoretical physicist, philosopher and author, who Einstein called his “spiritual son” and the Dalai Lama his “science guru”. Dr. Bohm’s groundbreaking theories may soon scientifically confirm ancient spiritual wisdom, and support humankind’s “critical mass” realization of our previously unimagined infinite potentiality.

This posting includes an introductory outline of Dr. Bohm’s history, followed by a carefully culled collection of key Bohm quotations, and a highly recommended embedded documentary video titled “Infinite Potential The Life and Ideas of David Bohm”.

It is intended to help us intuit, envision and co-create the dynamic new reality we want to see.

Infinite Potential The Life and Ideas of David Bohm

Embedded below is a highly recommended documentary film about Dr. David Bohm. Here is an almost verbatim summary of the filmmakers’ description of its contents, followed by a brief addendum of relevant facts about Dr. Bohm’s historic relationship with Albert Einstein.

The Life and Ideas Of David Bohm

An incredible journey into the nature of life and Reality with David Bohm, the man Einstein called his “spiritual son” and the Dalai Lama his “science guru”.

A brilliant theoretical physicist, Bohm got the attention of the greatest minds in science, including Robert Oppenheimer, who became his thesis advisor.

Bohm’s scientific insights into the underlying nature of reality and the profound interconnectedness of the Universe and our place within it are ground-breaking and transformational.

But his revolutionary ideas were way ahead of their time and posed a threat to the scientific orthodoxy, which dismissed him and forced him into exile.

His questioning of the scientific orthodoxy was the expression of a rare and maverick intelligence. He shows us that the nature of reality is infinite and believed in a “hidden” regime of reality – the Quantum Potential – that underlies all of creation and which will remain beyond scientific endeavor, an idea echoed by many mystical traditions.

We are all participants and observers in the emergence of a reality…the Observer is the Observed. Bohm shows us that we are all co-producers of a possible future in which personal and global transformation is possible.

He invites us on a journey into the heart of our being, into consciousness itself…

Addendum re Dr. Bohm’s historic relationship with Albert Einstein.

For the last twenty two years of his life Einstein was a fellow at the Princeton Institute For Advanced Study where he met and befriended Dr. David Bohm, then a young member of the Princeton University physics department. Dr. Bohm became Einstein’s Princeton protégé who Einstein called his “spiritual son”, and with whom he exchanged letters after Bohm’s forced departure from Princeton during the notorious McCarthy era of American politics. Perhaps better than anyone else Dr. Bohm learned how Einstein had intuitively formulated his revolutionary theories.

With that understanding, Bohm conceptualized reality as “undivided wholeness”. And Bohm realized that the profound implications of Einstein’s insights have not yet changed mainstream physicists’ predominantly Newtonian mental models of solidity, invariance, and three dimensional space/time, influenced by their benefitting from immense weapons industry investments.

And in his writings, Bohm (a rare scientific maverick) explicitly explained how a new mode of dynamic thinking beyond physics was required to enable recognition and resolution of the many anthropogenic difficulties causing insane and dire threats of extinction of Earth-life as we’ve known it.

Thus Bohm used many new words for the holistic principle of “undivided wholeness”, such as “implicate order”, “quantum potential field”, and “holomovement” to express that nothing is static; that everything is in “universal flux”, a dynamic interconnected process of infinitely becoming.

Bohm’s innovative conceptualizations of “undivided wholeness” were intended to radically shift our thinking about reality, away from terms of separation, to motion or process. Similarly Bohm also tried to imagine ways of using language which emphasized verbs, rather than separate subjects and objects.

Despite his immense achievements, Bohm is still relatively unknown because of Robert Oppenheimer’s influential opposition to Bohm’s theoretical work, which Oppenheimer could not mathematically refute. Realizing that Bohm radically challenged mainstream physics, Oppenheimer called Bohm’s ideas, “juvenile deviationism,” saying that, “if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him.”


Dr. David Bohm, Quotations Collection Concerning Physical Reality, Spiritual Philosophy, and Cosmology



“That which is truly alive in the living being is the energy of spirit,
and this is never born and never dies.”

”The essential quality of the infinite… is its subtlety, its intangibility.
This quality is conveyed in the word spirit, whose root meaning is ‘wind or breath.’ This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy to which the manifest world of the finite responds.”

“Consciousness is never static or complete but is an unending process of movement and unfoldment.”


“Space is not empty. It’s full. It is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves”

“We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive.”

“To change your reality you have to change your inner thoughts.”

“Thought creates our world, and then says ‘I didn’t do it”

“If our troubles originate in a kind of ‘ocean’ of thought and language, in which we are submerged, but of which we are only dimly aware, it would seem reasonable to begin immediately to inquire into the actual function of our thought and language. To do this requires, of course, that we give this function our serious attention. We do give such attention to a vast range of things, including nature, technology, politics, economics, society, psychological problems, and so forth. Why should thought and language be the one field left to function automatically and mechanically, without serious attention, so that the resulting confusion vitiates most of what we try to do in all other fields?”

“Objective reality does not exist” ….
“the universe is fundamentally a gigantic … hologram”


“What appears to be a stable, tangible, visible, audible world, is an illusion.
It is dynamic and kaleidoscopic — not really “there”. 
What we normally see is the explicit, or unfolded, order of things, rather like watching a movie.
 But there is an underlying order that is mother and father to this second-generation reality.”

“It is proposed that the widespread and pervasive distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, etc., etc.) which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival, have one of the key factors of their origin in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and “broken up” into yet smaller constituent parts. . . . . Each part is considered to be essentially independent and self-existent.”
 
“The notion that all these fragments is separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.” 
 

“Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it.” 
 


“Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.”

“some might say: ‘Fragmentation of cities, religions, political systems, conflict in the form of wars, general violence, fratricide, etc., are the reality. Wholeness is only an ideal, toward which we should perhaps strive.’ But this is not what is being said here. Rather, what should be said is that wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to man’s action, guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought.”

“From the point of view of the species, death is part of this whole process. You could say that species have evolved in such a way that individual members last a certain time. Perhaps a certain kind of species would be better able to survive if the individuals didn’t last too long. Other kinds could last longer.”

“Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.”

“During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts.”

Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale.

“We are all linked by a fabric of unseen connections. This fabric is constantly changing and evolving. This field is directly structured and influenced by our behavior and by our understanding.”

“We are internally related to everything, not [just] externally related. Consciousness is an internal relationship to the whole, we take in the whole, and we act toward the whole. Whatever we have taken in determines basically what we are. Wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. If we can have a coherent approach to reality then reality will respond coherently to us.”

“Ultimately, the entire universe…has to be understood as a single undivided whole.”

“The question is how our own meanings are related to those of the universe as a whole. We could say that our action toward the whole universe is a result of what it means to be us.”

“[T]here is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of our whole and unbroken movement.”

“We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive.”

“The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.”

“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy.”

“Ultimately, all moments are really one, therefore now is an eternity.”

“Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls it. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us.”

“In Nature nothing remains constant. Everything is in a perpetual state of transformation, motion and change.”

“In the long run, it is far more dangerous to adhere to illusion than to face what the actual fact is.”

“Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness.”

“Dialogue is a space where we may see the assumptions which lay beneath the surface of our thoughts, assumptions which drive us, assumptions around which we build organizations, create economies, form nations and religions. These assumptions become habitual, mental habits that drive us, confuse us and prevent our responding intelligently to the challenges we face every day.”

“Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture.”

“Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don’t see this, it’s because we are blinding ourselves to it.”

“In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. We are enfolded in the universe.”

“There is a difficulty with only one person changing. People call that person a great saint or a great mystic or a great leader, and they say, ‘Well, he’s different from me – I could never do it.’ What’s wrong with most people is that they have this block – they feel they could never make a difference, and therefore, they never face the possibility, because it is too disturbing, too frightening.”

“Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our ‘sense’ than we would care to believe.”

“Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter… Yet at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven, just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation.”

“…consciousness is a coherent whole, which is never static or complete, but which is in an unending process of movement and unfoldment.”

“If you engage in positive thinking to overcome negative thoughts, the negative thoughts are still there acting. That’s still incoherence. It’s not enough just to engage in positive thoughts when you have negative thoughts registered, because they keep on working and will cause trouble somewhere else.”

“Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it’s creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates.”

“Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society – as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.”

“When you are thinking something, you have the feeling that the thoughts do nothing except inform you the way things are and then you choose to do something and you do it. That’s what people generally assume. But actually, the way you think determines the way you’re going to do things. Then you don’t notice a result comes back, or you don’t see it as a result of what you’ve done, or even less do you see it as a result of how you were thinking. Is that clear?”

“Dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively. We haven’t really paid much attention to thought as a process. We have engaged in thoughts, put we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process. Why does thought require attention? Everything requires attention, really. If we ran machines without paying attention to them, they would break down. Our thought, too, is a process, and it requires attention, otherwise its going to go wrong.”

“We have the idea that after we have been thinking something, it just evaporates. But thinking doesn’t disappear. It goes somehow into the brain and leaves something-a trace-which becomes thought. And thought then acts automatically.”

“We haven’t really paid much attention to thought as a process. we have engaged in thoughts, but we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process.”

“In nature nothing remains constant. Everything is in a perpetual state of transformation, motion, and change. However, we discover that nothing simply surges up out of nothing without having antecedents that existed before. Likewise, nothing ever disappears without a trace, in the sense that it gives rise to absolutely nothing existing in later times.”

“The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.”

“Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement.”

“If we can be cheered up by positive images we can be depressed by negative ones. As long as we accept images as realities we are in that trap, because you can’t control the images.”

“It is proposed that a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated.”

“Ego-centeredness is not individuality at all.”

“Thought reflexes get conditioned very strongly, and they are very hard to change. And the also interfere. A reflex may connect to the endorphins and produce an impulse to hold that whole pattern forther. In other words, it produces a defensive reflex. Not merely is it stuck because it’s chemically so well built up, but also there is a defensive reflex which defends against evidence which might weaken it. Thus it all happens, one reflex after another after another. It’s just a vast system of reflexes. And they form a ‘structure’ as they get more rigid.”

“What is needed is to learn afresh, to observe, and to discover for ourselves the meaning of wholeness.”

“Thus, in a dialogue each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it can be said that collectively they are making something in common”

“Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale.”

“Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.”

“The system [of thought] doesn’t stay with the difficult problem that produces unpleasant feelings. It’s conditioned somehow to move as fast as it can toward more pleasant feelings, without actually facing the thing that’s making the unpleasant feeling.”

“Another problem of fragmentation is that thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different.”

“Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.”

“This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn’t know it is doing something and then it struggles against it is doing. It doesn’t want to know that it is doing it.”

“My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc.”

“individual thought is mostly the result of collective thought and of interaction with other people. The language is entirely collective, and most of the thoughts in it are. Everybody does his own thing to those thoughts – he makes a contribution. But very few change them very much.”

“We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent “elementary parts” of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independent behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole.”

“And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call ‘sustained incoherence.”

“There is no reason why an extra-physical general principle is necessarily to be avoided, since such principles could conceivably serve as useful working hypotheses. For the history of scientific research is full of examples in which it was very fruitful indeed to assume that certain objects or elements might be real, long before any procedures were known which would permit them to be observed directly.”

“Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement. That is to say, one can feel a sense of flow in the stream of consciousness not dissimilar to the sense of flow in the movement of matter in general. May not thought itself thus be a part of reality as a whole? But then, what could it mean for one part of reality to ‘know’ another, and to what extent would this be possible?”

“A new kind of mind thus beings to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue.”

“Real dialogue is where two or more people become willing to suspend their certainty in each other’s presence.”

“People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning which is capable of constant development and change.”

“We can’t simply take the way things seem and just work on that, because that would be another kind of mistake thought makes-taking the surface and calling it the reality.”

“Anybody can use science and technology without fundamentally altering his own frame of mind which governs how they are used.”

“The treatment of the indeterminacy principle as absolute and final can then be criticized as constituting an arbitrary restriction on scientific theories, since it does not follow from the quantum theory as such, but rather from the assumption of the unlimited validity of certain of its features, an assumption that can in no way ever be subjected to experimental proof.”

“The question of relevance comes before that of truth, because to ask whether a statement is true or false presupposes that it is relevant (so that to try to assert the truth or falsity of an irrelevant statement is a form of confusion).”

“If each one of us can give full attention to what is actually ‘blocking’ communication while he is also attending properly to the content of what is communicated, then we may be able to create something new between us, something of very great significance for bringing to an end the at present insoluble problems of the individual and of society.”

“In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined.”

“One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness.”

“Thus, in scientific research, a great deal of our thinking is in terms of theories. The word ‘theory’ derives from the Greek ‘theoria’, which has the same root as ‘theatre’, in a word meaning ‘to view’ or ‘to make a spectacle’. Thus, it might be said that a theory is primarily a form of insight, i.e. a way of looking at the world, and not a form of knowledge of how the world is.”

“But what is [the] quality of originality? It is very hard to define or specify. Indeed, to define originality would in itself be a contradiction, since whatever action can be defined in this way must evidently henceforth be unoriginal. Perhaps, then, it will be best to hint at it obliquely and by indirection, rather than to try to assert positively what it is.

One prerequisite for originality is clearly that a person shall not be inclined to impose his preconceptions on the fact as he sees it. Rather, he must be able to learn something new, even if this means that the ideas and notions that are comfortable or dear to him may be overturned.

“But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent – not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.”

“A corporation is organized as a system – it has this department, that department, that department… they don’t have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.”

“So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction.”

“From the outset, however, this whole controversy has been plagued by tacit assumptions, very often of a philosophical rather than a physical character.”

“This kind of overall way of thinking is not only a fertile source of new theoretical ideas: it is needed for the human mind to function in a generally harmonious way, which could in turn help to make possible an orderly and stable society.”

“violence doesn’t stop merely by saying, ‘we’ll act based on love’, because that can become just an idea that gets absorbed into the system.”

“If you are going to ask what state of feeling goes with understanding, I am afraid that it will have to be described by the word “love”. This word has unfortunately been used in so many false ways that it hardly means anything nowadays. Yet, I think that by implication, the meaning will come across. For example, some parents claim they “love” their children, but do not understand them. Is this really possible? If they do not understand what their children actually are, then the beings for whom they feel love must be imaginary, just projections of the parent’s own minds. Thus, what the parents actually “love” is not their actual children, but rather, some projections of themselves. Such a love is evidently false. Evidently, there can be no real love without understanding. Vice versa, can there be understanding without love? If we hate something, we reject it and do not understand it. . . . If we are indifferent to something, we will never undertake the arduous task of understanding it. If something pleases us, we will be afraid to look at its dark side, and again we won’t understand it, i.e., see it wholly and totally. So it seems that the only feeling that will lead to the action of understanding is love.”


Infinite Potential – The Life & Ideas Of David Bohm

https://youtu.be/0SATbcUAF7g

Synchronicities Are Reminders

“Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.”

~ Carl Jung
“I am open to the guidance of synchronicity,

and do not let expectations hinder my path.”

~ Dalai Lama
How can the divine Oneness be seen?

In beautiful forms,
breathtaking wonders, awe-inspiring miracles?

The Tao is not obliged to present itself in this way.

If you are willing to be lived by it, you will
 see it everywhere,

even in the most ordinary things.

~ Lao Tzu
“Remember God,
forget the rest.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings




Introduction

Dear Friends,

The following sutra/poem declares metaphorically that synchronicities are reminders of Cosmic Consciousness, which is our ONE true Source, Self identity and Ultimate Reality.

Explanatory comments following the poem suggest that synchronicities can advance our spiritual evolution and transcendence of illusory and disempowering ego-mind self-identity, by helping us remember again our once known, but long forgotten, true Divinity.

If ever you’ve wondered about ‘miraculous’ synchronicities or “coincidences”, this sutra/poem is shared to further our understanding of their spiritual significance.
Please enjoy it accordingly.

And so may it be!

Ron Rattner


Synchronicities Are Reminders

In our wonderful world
of space/time causality reality,
everything’s impermanent –
arising from and melting into Mystery.

The Mystery of an Infinite Potentiality Reality:

Beyond conception,
Beyond description,
Beyond comprehension,
Beyond imagination.

Some call it Cosmic Consciousness.

Cosmic Consciousness is
the Essence,
the Origin, and
the Witness
of the world.

It is our ultimate Reality.

Our ever impermanent world
of apparent appearance and disappearance –
of infinite forms and phenomena –
is only a play of Cosmic Consciousness.

All such appearances are but
interdependently interconnected forms
of Cosmic Consciousness.

So synchronicities are manifestations of Cosmic Consciousness.

They are noteworthy forms and phenomena in space/time,
reminding us of ultimate Reality beyond space/time –
and of mysterious and timeless interdependent interconnectedness
of everything in space/time.

So synchronicities are reminders
of timeless Mystery beyond all appearances:

Reminders of our universal essence, origin and witness;
Reminders of our ultimate identity;
Reminders of Infinite Potentiality Reality;
Reminders of Cosmic Consciousness.

As mysterious synchronicities appear in our lives,
let us ever more reverently recall and become
their Source –

Our universal essence, origin and witness;
Our ultimate identity, and
Infinite Potentiality Reality.

And so may it BE!



Ron’s audio recitation of “Synchronicities Are Reminders”

Listen to



Ron’s Reflections on “Synchronicities Are Reminders”

Dear Friends,

For millennia mystics have revealed that most of humankind (except for rare Avatars), are disempowered by illusory ego-mind self-identity, as supposedly separated from each other, Nature, and Cosmic Consciousness. So we’ve forgotten our (once known) true Self identity as infinitely omnipotent Divine beings, ONE with Nature and Source.

The foregoing sutra/poem metaphorically declares my view that synchronicities are empowering reminders of our true Self identity as Cosmic Consciousness.

Remembering that we actually are much more than we’ve thought or imagined, can help us transcend illusory, misleading and disempowering ego-mind self-identity as separated mortal beings existing only in space and time. It can help us rediscover ultimate Reality beyond space/time, and realize the mysterious and timeless interdependent interconnectedness of everything within space/time.

Since my midlife spiritual awakening, I’ve been blessed with many experiences of meaningful or noteworthy synchronicities from which I’ve determined that our Earth-life experience has been largely predetermined as part of the divine mysterious Natural order of the universe.

And I consider synchronicities to be scientifically significant spiritual experiences impelling us to reconsider mainstream materialist science which fails to recognize overwhelming empirical evidence that consciousness and mind are independent of physical bodies; that our physical bodies and brains are not originators of consciousness and mind, but their receptors, tuners and transducers; that synchronicities are signs of subtle and ordinarily imperceptible dimensions into which we are evolving individually and collectively. 

Mystics reveal that as we evolve to subtler vibrational dimensions, we transcend time; that all is NOW; and that increasingly our compassionate thoughts and behaviors bless our existential experience.

According to Albert Einstein, our space/time

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

“Our separation of each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.”

“Space and time are not conditions in which we live,
they are modes in which we think.”


So for Einstein space and time are “only a stubbornly persistent illusion”; a way of thinking rather than a reality in which we live.  I concur with Einstein’s ideas.
 
Without supposedly being separated monads in space and time, we can’t have any coincidence in space or time; without time there can be no premonition or fear of ‘future’ events, nor remembrance of ‘past’ events.   

As explained in other related Silly Sutras posts, I consider ‘miraculous’ synchronicities or “coincidences” to be significant spiritual experiences that can spur an inner search for a new “reality” paradigm, ultimately leading to our transformational discovery that ever changing three dimensional space/time “reality” isn’t really Real; that timeless Cosmic consciousness is our true Reality. That life is timelessly NOW ever Now, never then.

Thus, this “Synchronicities Are Reminders” posting is dedicated to advancing our transcendence of illusory and disempowering ego-mind self-identity, by helping us realize and remember the immense spiritual significance of noteworthy synchronicities.

And so may it be!

Ron Rattner

Synchronicity Inquiry

“Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.”
~ Carl Jung
“There is no such thing as chance;
and what seems to us merest accident
springs from the deepest source of destiny.”
~ Friedrich Schiller
“People … who believe in physics, know that
the distinction between past, present, and future
is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
~ Albert Einstein




Synchronicity Inquiry


Q. What are synchronicities?

A. Synchronicities are noteworthy “premonitions” or “coincidences” in time mysteriously arising from unexplained causes and conditions which connect events, actions and thoughts; and, which show us that in Nature, there is no time and there are no “coincidences – that everything that is, was, or will be is NOW; and, that everything is inter-connected and happens in harmony and synchrony – concurrently, not coincidentally.

Q. Why are synchronicities in time often noteworthy or meaningful?

A. Synchronicities in time are often noteworthy or meaningful because as we live in linear time they remind us of our unchanging timeless consciousness – which is our true Reality. And they can show our complicity in co-creating our ever changing world “reality”.

Time is how human mind tries to measure the immeasurable NOW.

As Einstein observed:

“Space and time are not conditions in which we live,
they are modes in which we think.”


Space and time are but convenient conceptions of thought.

Though convenient, time is not congruent with Nature’s way –
the timeless Tao.

As thought, time is always then, not NOW; so living in time is living in the past.

As we transcend living conceptually in past time, and begin living authentically in timeless Presence, we notice more and more “synchronicities”.

And the more frequently we see synchronicities, the more they show we’re in the Flow – the Tao; the Eternal NOW.

So, when events seeming random happen in tandem,
it’s then we’ll know we’re in the flow

the Tao; the Eternal NOW.

Thus, because humankind almost always live in time, synchronistic signs of timeless Reality often seem so noteworthy or meaningful.

Q. How do synchronicities appear in our lives?

A. Synchronicities originate in now hidden depths of mind – at transpersonal and seemingly ‘chaotic’ quantum levels of existence. The more we intuitively entrain with those higher levels of consciousness, the more we are in harmony with the natural order, and the more we see synchronicities manifesting in our lives.

We live in an ever changing participatory vibratory relative “reality” wherein creation is vibration and oscillation, and where we are creative oscillating, vibrating vortices – interconnected and interdependent with all of Nature.

Thus, everything we think, do or say changes this world in some way.

Synchronicities are resonant exteriorations or manifestations of our subtle higher vibrations – our thoughts, intentions and emanations. The higher, subtler and more focused our vibratory frequencies, the more luminous our emanations. And as we become more luminous, our synchronicities become more numerous and more numinous.

Q. How shall we interpret synchronicities?

A. Synchronicities, like dreams, can be meaningful metaphoric messages that help guide us from deep levels of consciousness; and they can present us with evolutionary opportunities, if we recognize and act on them. Even the Dalai Lama has said: “I am open to the guidance of synchronicity, and do not let expectations hinder my path.”

Synchronicities also can be seen as positive “biofeedback’ signs that we are in harmony with the natural order.

Synchronicities reveal the harmonious ONENESS of the Universe – both manifest and unmanifest, implicate and explicate. And the more we see that ONENESS, the more we see synchronicity as normality.

Thus, synchronicities can be seen as significant signs and reminders that temporal linearity is a cosmic irregularity, that “reality” isn’t mechanistic, and that the universe doesn’t work as we’ve thought or been taught.

And so, synchronicities can spur an inner search for a new “reality” paradigm, ultimately leading to the transformational discovery that our ever changing world “reality” isn’t really Real; that our unchanging timeless consciousness is our true Reality.

Q. How can synchronicities inspire us?

A. Synchronicities can infuse us with feelings of awe and gratitude for all miraculous and mysterious Life on this precious planet.

As we see each synchronicity as a mysterious, miraculous and numinous sign and reminder of our interdependence with all Life, we are inspired to BE – in sympathy and harmony with all Life.


Q. Can synchronicities help us harmonize with Nature?

A. Yes. To harmonize with Nature we must intuitively and reverently commune with our natural environment. Synchronicities can help us awaken from misconceived dreams of separation from Nature, so as to honor intuitive insights over mistaken or misguided mental processes.

Mistakenly thinking ourselves separate from our observations and perceptions, we try to explain them with thoughts and logical analyses. This mental process often leads to such preoccupation with details and minutia that we lose a reverent, holistic and macrocosmic view of our miraculous space/time natural environment. And we have thereby become alienated from Nature, and have ignorantly created ecological crises.

Synchronicities can remind us of the limitations of thought, and of the dangers of alienation from an intuitively participatory way of being in this world; that as thinkers, we do not and cannot understand Nature; that we are part of a participatory natural order in which everything/ everyone is interdependent; and, that everything we think, do or say changes this world in some way.

With this awareness we are spurred to harmonize with Nature.

And so may it be!

Ron Rattner

Synchronicity and Spirituality

“Synchronicity is choreographed by a great,
pervasive intelligence that lies at the heart of nature,
and is manifest in each of us through what we call the soul.”
~ Deepak Chopra, Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire
How can the divine Oneness be seen?
In beautiful forms, breathtaking wonders, awe-inspiring miracles?
The Tao is not obliged to present itself in this way.
If you are willing to be lived by it, you will
 see it everywhere,
even in the most ordinary things.

~ Lao Tzu




Synchronicities and Spirituality

Q. Why are coincidences and synchronicities in time and space noteworthy spiritual experiences?

A. Synchronicities and coincidences in time and space are noteworthy reminders of ONE Divine spiritual Reality, where there is no time or space, and where all that ever was or will be is eternally NOW.

Great mystics and scientists tell us that planet Earth’s space/time duality “reality” is a persistent mental illusion, like a mirage; that without our illusionary perceptions and egoic thoughts of separation, there no separate experiencers of separate space/time “coincidences” and “synchronicities”.

Thus, coincidences and synchronicities are like Nature’s ‘radar’ signals’ reminding us that: “Our separation of each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.” and that “space and time are not conditions in which we live, they are modes in which we think.” [Albert Einstein]

Therefore, synchronicities and coincidences in space and time are noteworthy spiritual experiences reminding us that WE ARE ONE; that in Reality we are inseparable from Nature and eternal Divine Source.


Ron’s discussion of “Synchronicity and Spirituality”

Dear Friends,

In 1992 my beloved Guruji, Sri Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas, asked that I write and publish spiritual memoirs to “inspire many people.“ To honor that request, in 2010 I launched SillySutras.com, with “Ron’s Memoirs” as most important and tab-highlighted website category.

Also, similarly tab-highlighted is the “Synchronicity” category, because I’ve realized that my life has been guided by synchronicities, which I now notice with amazing frequency. [“Synchronicity” postings include definitions and explanations, followed by many of my favorite synchronicity stories.]

I’ve realized the spiritual importance of synchronicities, not only from my own experiences but from those of others. Many people commonly experience and wonder about synchronicities because they can’t be explained rationally or statistically. So that opens us to consider their possible spiritual or psychical causes.



For reasons explained in numerous posts on SillySutras.com I have concluded that synchronicities are signs of subtle and ordinarily imperceptible dimensions into which we are inevitably evolving, individually and collectively.



So I regard synchronicities as significant spiritual experiences, impelling us to question skeptics and mainstream materialist scientists who fail to recognize overwhelming empirical evidence that consciousness and mind are independent of physical bodies; that our physical bodies and brains are not originators of consciousness and mind, but their receptors, tuners and transducers.



Thus according to scientifically trained Dr. Deepak Chopra:

“Synchronicity is choreographed by a great,
pervasive intelligence that lies at the heart of nature,
and is manifest in each of us through what we call the soul.”
~ Deepak Chopra, Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire


Especially if you have ever wondered about ‘miraculous’ synchronicities or coincidences in your life, I hope that you’ll find this post helpful in your further reflections on their spiritual significance.

And so may it be!

Ron Rattner


Beholding Divinity in a Weeping Willow Tree
~ Ron’s Memoirs

“Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.”
~ Jonathan Swift

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
~ Antoine de Saint Exupery

“People think that they see, but they don’t.”
~ Henry Moore
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
~ Michelangelo
“True Vision is insight, not eyesight.
Eyesight is mind-sight; insight is soul-sight.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Reality’s essence is Divine luminescence.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem 

Appareled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;

Turn wheresoe’er I may, 

By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see not more.”
~ William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality




Beholding Divinity in a Weeping Willow Tree

Dear Friends,

In early 1980’s I experienced at Wilbur Hot Springs, an unforgettably revelatory experience of perceiving luminescent Divine light streaming in a weeping willow tree. (*See Footnote) I was attending a week-end Board and staff retreat of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), as Board Chairman.

One morning I awakened early before any scheduled meetings, and meditated on a wooded hill above the lodge level. After descending I walked with a silent mind on a nature trail near the lodge. Whereupon, I discovered and crawled into a tiny cave where I again sat in deep meditation for a while. (Later, I learned that cave had long been considered a sacred place by original indigenous people there.)

On emerging from the cave, and while unknowingly still in an ‘altered’ state of awareness, I walked to the bathhouse, removed my clothes, stepped outside, and immersed my body in a large shallow hot springs pond.  

While standing alone in the stilled pond with a stilled mind, I gazed at a beautiful weeping willow tree beside the pond on the side furthest from the bath house.  Instead of seeing the tree as it appeared during usual waking consciousness, I beheld it marvelously transfigured as ever streaming lines of white light, more beautiful than any imaginable Christmas tree.

Unaware of my exceptional state of consciousness, I kept gazing at the tree in awe. After a while Tara, a CIIS staff member, entered the pond.  Then, innocently I addressed her: “Tara, look at the lights in that tree.  Aren’t they beautiful?”  Puzzled, Tara responded “What lights?”.   And immediately the lights disappeared for me, as I was abruptly returned to my usual state of waking ‘un-consciousness’.  

But I can never forget the flowing tree lights, nor the insight which they confirmed:  That there is much more to our “reality” than meets the eye; that “Reality’s essence is Divine luminescence”.

Later that day, I recounted my experience to Dr. John Broomfield, then CIIS President, who cited me to this similar experience of author Annie Dillard:

“[O]ne day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it.  I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame.  I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed.  It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.  The lights of the fire abated, but I’m still spending the power.  Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared.  I was still ringing.  I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” 
~ Annie Dillard, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 


Like Annie Dillard’s tree vision at Tinker Creek, beholding the transfigured weeping willow at Wilbur Springs was for me an unforgettably inspiring and transformative experience for which I remain ever grateful.

May these and similar stories ever remind us that “Reality’s essence is Divine luminescence”; that we are all Divine beings of light, gradually remembering and co-creating ever more luminous and numinous Earth lives.


And so may it be,

Ron Rattner


Footnote* Other memorable experiences of Divine light, beginning with an epiphany in Yosemite, are recounted elsewhere in these memoirs.



Wean Yourself ~ by Rumi

You were born with wings.
Why prefer to crawl through life?

~ Rumi
The world is a prison and we are the prisoners:
Dig a hole in the prison and let yourself out!

~ Rumi
Why do you stay in prison 
when the door is so wide open?

~ Rumi
I long to escape the prison of my ego
 and lose myself in you.

~ Rumi
You have been a prisoner of a little pond,
I am the ocean and its turbulent flood.

Come merge with me, leave this world of ignorance.

Be with me, I will open the gate to your love.

~ Rumi




Wean Yourself

Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.

From any embryo, whose nourishment comes from the blood,
Move to an infant drinking milk,
To a child on solid food,
To a searcher after wisdom,
To a hunter of more invisible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo,
You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheat fields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.”


You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.

Listen to the answer.

There is no “other world.”
I only know what I’ve experienced.
You must be hallucinating.



Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi translated by Coleman Barks

Undo Ego!

“Ego is the biggest enemy of humans.”
~ Rig Veda
“The foundation of the Buddha’s teachings lies in compassion,
and the reason for practicing the teachings is to wipe out the persistence of ego,
the number-one enemy of compassion.”
~ H.H. Dalai Lama
In the pursuit of learning every day something is gained.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.
~ Lao Tzu
“Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find
 all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.”
~ Rumi
Q. How much “ego” do you need?
A. Just enough so that you don’t step in front of a bus.
~ Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
“Undo Ego!
Use it to lose it.”

“As ego goes,
consciousness grows,
until it Knows
– Itself.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings

Lau Tzu


Undoing

Undoing

There’s nothing to do
but undo,

Until you’re through and undone.

Then, when nothing’s undone,
there’s nothing to do,

But to BE –

Free and

ONE!



Ron’s audio recitation of “Undoing”

Listen to


Ron’s explanation of “Undo Ego”

Dear Friends,

For millennia spiritual teachings have identified “ego” as a fundamental impediment to spiritual evolution and realization. Thus, the ancient Vedic seers told us that “Ego is the biggest enemy of humans.” (Rig Veda ) And the Dalai Lama says that ego is the “number-one enemy of compassion.”

Spiritual teachers refer to “ego” as mistaken human self-identity as a personality separate from eternal Infinite Potentiality – our true identity. 
Ego is often described as a psychological prison, causing inevitable karmic suffering. 

“The world is a prison and we are the prisoners:

Dig a hole in the prison and let yourself out!”

“Why do you stay in prison 
when the door is so wide open?”

~ Rumi


I have posted the foregoing quotations, sutra sayings and poem about undoing ego to remind us of our critical need to let go of who or what we think we are, so we can realize and BE what we really are – ONE with Nature as Infinite Potentiality. 

Every Human – except for rare Buddha-like beings – knowingly or unknowingly is in some evolutionary stage of undoing mistaken ego identity – a process indispensable to our spiritual evolution.

For example, in spiritual memoirs I tell how (after many years of reciting and following prescribed prayers and practices) I became an “Uncertain Undo” looking within to discover and discard remaining ego impediments to spiritual evolution and realization – as eloquently advised by Lao Tzu and Rumi.

“In the pursuit of learning every day something is gained.

In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.”

~ Lao Tzu



“Your task is not to seek for love,

but merely to seek and find
 all the barriers within yourself

that you have built against it.”

~ Rumi



Whimsically I’ve suggested that everyone should “seek relief from belief”; because “on the path of Undo we’ll never be through ’til we’re an undone ONE”. So as an “Uncertain Undo” I’ve gradually been letting go of previously accepted beliefs and concepts about humanity, self-identity and reality.



My present paradigm is that we live earth-lives to learn from experience our essential common self-identity as LOVE – each from a unique karmic perspective. 

That each of us is here to transcend suffering by uncovering and undoing our unique barriers to Self realization – our mistaken ego identities and tendencies. As we mindfully identify those mental mistakes, it becomes possible for us to use ego, to lose ego. As revealed in the Bhagavad Gita, Hinduism’s best known scripture, it is possible for our mind to become our “best friend”, rather than “worst enemy”


One must elevate – and not degrade – oneself with one’s own mind, as the mind is both a friend and an enemy.

For those who have subdued and conquered the mind, it is the best of friends.

But for those who fail to do so, the mind remains the greatest of enemies.

~ Bhagavad Gita, Chapter Six, Lord Krishna to Arjuna


Dedication


This posting is respectfully offered to help remind us of our critical need to let go of who or what we mistakenly think we are, so we can realize and BE what we really are – ONE with Nature as its Eternal Source. 



Also, these undoing ego writings are sincerely intended to help us live ever happier lives, until we all become “an undone ONE”.



And so shall it be!


Ron Rattner