“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain Truth has often been a long time sufferer. Under dictatorships the comedians, journalists, artists, and educators, who are often some of the most poignant truth tellers, are first to disappear from
The Nullification of Truth (Part 1) Read More »
“The ultimate question for a responsible man [sic] to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation shall continue to live.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on February 4, 1906 in Germany. He possessed a great intellectual capacity and faced a promising academic career
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Conversation with Nonviolence; What We Can Learn Read More »
There is a danger to these times we live in, and that is the ease with which we can let ourselves off the hook. Violence is in its glory, and we, by comparison, can look pretty good. It’s the ole’ good apples, bad apples thing….we certainly don’t belong in the bad apple basket so we
“I’m not a violent person…” Read More »
We can’t possess anything anyway, so it is funny to me how hard we try. We use things and people to prop our insecurities on. It is like putting chains on these things and demanding them to never move, never change, and be available when we need them to make us exceptionally happy. We attempt
Aparagraha – non possessiveness Read More »
Like truthfulness, Brahmacharya is another “go all the way” yama. In other words, restrain from settling for anything less than wonder, awe, and the sacred. And restrain from anything that keeps you from this place. It is easy to grab our work, sweets, a good movie or romance novel, or get lost in the web.
Brahmacharya – non excess Read More »
Non-stealing is restraining from taking what doesn’t belong to us, what we don’t need, what is more than our share, and what depletes the future. It is restraining from doing others work for them, rescuing them, fixing them, and worrying about them. It is restraining from making ourselves smaller or bigger than we are, or
Asteya – non stealing Read More »
I am intrigued that the restraint here is a restraint to stop at anything short of the full truth. This is a significant leap from the tendency to land in a partial truth and be satisfied. If we begin in the internal landscape, it becomes clear that there are three of us that live here.
We are afraid of outer attack, but the real brutal attacks come from within. Where do we find more violence than what we do to ourselves in the hidden corners of our mind where abusive thoughts run on automatic replay? We are caught up in a cultural myth of self-lack that is keeping us in
