Read and digested. I appreciate the lineages you name. Experiential knowledge of the Self, or relationship of the Soul to her G*d, Creator Spirit, goes waaaay back, by many names. This piece gives me a sense of the scope of your intentions and why you are so busy.
The fact that we even have a capacity called attention, that we can intend how we direct and cultivate it—not just in prayer, meditation or ceremony but in everyday life— is a relatively new thing. This dawning awareness and longing is, I think, what the interest in mindfulness is all about. There are huge risks in the amoral, extractive approach to attention, something to monetize and manipulate. Taking the old extraction of physical resources model and applying it to subtle mind space. We are engaging, perhaps, in an evolutionary race between the old grab 'n go model vs cultivate and share.
Thank you for reading carefully and writing back in the register you wrote in. The G*d spelling is honoured here. The traditions that hold the Name with reverence — by whatever name — are the traditions the publication is filing inside of.
You named the thing I did not name plainly enough in the dispatch. Attention as a capacity we can intend. Not a given. A faculty that has to be discovered, then cultivated, then defended. The contemplative traditions have known this for thousands of years. The mindfulness wave you point at is the contemporary recovery of what those traditions held quietly all along. The recovery is fragile because the platforms are arriving at the same moment with the opposite intention. Your evolutionary race framing is right. Grab-and-go versus cultivate-and-share. That is the contest. The outcome is not decided.
The Self the dispatch names, the Soul the traditions name, the relationship to the Creator Spirit you name — different vocabularies, one substrate. The publication does not insist on a single vocabulary. It insists on the recognition the vocabularies are pointing at. You are already inside that recognition. That is why the dispatch landed for you.
Keep cultivating. Keep sharing. The contest needs both.
Read and digested. I appreciate the lineages you name. Experiential knowledge of the Self, or relationship of the Soul to her G*d, Creator Spirit, goes waaaay back, by many names. This piece gives me a sense of the scope of your intentions and why you are so busy.
The fact that we even have a capacity called attention, that we can intend how we direct and cultivate it—not just in prayer, meditation or ceremony but in everyday life— is a relatively new thing. This dawning awareness and longing is, I think, what the interest in mindfulness is all about. There are huge risks in the amoral, extractive approach to attention, something to monetize and manipulate. Taking the old extraction of physical resources model and applying it to subtle mind space. We are engaging, perhaps, in an evolutionary race between the old grab 'n go model vs cultivate and share.
Sister,
Thank you for reading carefully and writing back in the register you wrote in. The G*d spelling is honoured here. The traditions that hold the Name with reverence — by whatever name — are the traditions the publication is filing inside of.
You named the thing I did not name plainly enough in the dispatch. Attention as a capacity we can intend. Not a given. A faculty that has to be discovered, then cultivated, then defended. The contemplative traditions have known this for thousands of years. The mindfulness wave you point at is the contemporary recovery of what those traditions held quietly all along. The recovery is fragile because the platforms are arriving at the same moment with the opposite intention. Your evolutionary race framing is right. Grab-and-go versus cultivate-and-share. That is the contest. The outcome is not decided.
The Self the dispatch names, the Soul the traditions name, the relationship to the Creator Spirit you name — different vocabularies, one substrate. The publication does not insist on a single vocabulary. It insists on the recognition the vocabularies are pointing at. You are already inside that recognition. That is why the dispatch landed for you.
Keep cultivating. Keep sharing. The contest needs both.
Glen