“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied together into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality . . . Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality. “
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
1967 Christmas Sermon on Peace
dioceseofvenice.org/pope-fran…-a-love-story/
There is a Zen story that needs telling here:
A Zen master had become famous for the special tea he brewed, and another master, having heard about this wonderful tea, sauntered into his room one day carrying a cup of his own tea. “I’ve heard people rave about how delicious your tea is,” he announced. “I’d like to try it for myself.”
“Very well,” said the Zen master, “You are welcome to it. But first you must empty your cup of tea before I can fill it with mine.”
There are a few men of science, it seems, who don’t get the point of the story. They stand in the doorway of religion, their cups sloshing over with whatever it is they’re drinking, and then presume to judge the beverage that’s being brewed deep inside the room.
It isn’t as if they come prepared to render a disinterested opinion. No, they reached their conclusions long before they approached the door. They examined the dregs they found in the Zen Master’s garbage and, regarding themselves qualified to apply inductive methods, they determined that their reconstituted beverage was by nature distasteful. Of course, what was good about it was coursing through the veins of the Zen Master. But when you’ve already decided that what is garbage always was, there is no need to investigate further.
Ming Zhen Shakya
“We do not fundamentally want to have and to do; we only want to be, and we use the having and doing for that purpose. Further, our will to be is not content with anything; it seeks its goal beyond the irksome limits of having and doing. Man will not be really happy until he is consciously one with God, and shares the freedom of that one Reality.”
“Knowing is not thinking. Knowing begins when thinking ceases, having finished its work. Every new knowing is a joy, for it is a new experience of unity.”
“It becomes necessary to realize that the body is not conscious, but we are conscious of the body, also that the mind is not conscious but we are conscious of the mind.”
“All things are the same at their core but clinging to one and discarding another Is living in illusion. A mind is not a fit judge of itself. It is prejudiced in its own favor or disfavor. It cannot see anything objectively.”
- Seng Tsan, Third Chan Patriarch
Only that last and highest act of the mind in which it is poised in its highest flight, in which it knows its own inadequacy, and surrenders. We are reminded that we are seeing the dawnlight and not the full sun, but oh what a marvel that dawnlight is, arising over a dark world and illuminating every part of it."
“In thus allowing God to work in it, the soul … is at once illumined and transformed in God, and God communicates to it His supernatural Being, in such wise that it appears to be God Himself, and has all that God Himself has. And this union comes to pass when God grants the soul this supernatural favour, that all the things of God and the soul are one in participant transformation; and the soul seems to be God rather than a soul, and is indeed God by participation; although it is true that its natural being, though thus transformed, is as distinct from the Being of God as it was before.” St John of the Cross
Evil is something we create and created, not something we are but may become, mans nature is fallen and through habit and vice of the external temptation, man internally and externally cooperates with and cooperates with the external evil already created. And this too reverberates back and forth and through mankind and wages battle with the collective conscious illuminated in God.
The “I” isn’t collective and is reduced to the “me” and the “we” is at risk. That’s what has occurred with our backward thinking in modern psychology. Along with 25% of world population in prison in the US, what was done in the period of social transition, responsibility and accountability have been lost, we have created “victims” by grounding souls to a product of their environment. Its time for a fresh look and admitting our modern psychology is in fact ancient history and has been relegated to antiquity. I’m not even sure it keeps in pace with science or technology anymore.
