Gaia: The Integral Pod - Inspirations, Influences, Pandits and Exemplars

Scott Sonnon - health, fitness, yoga, personal development

http://DaveRoel.gaia.com — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:28:56 GMT

The Integral community should know about Scott Sonnon: http://www.rmaxinternational.com/flowcoach/?p=579

and earlier:
http://www.rmaxinternational.com/flowcoach/?p=493

He's onboard with Integral. He should be invited to the next conference. Someone should make this happen.

Re: Thomas Berry

http://riversong.gaia.com — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:52:34 GMT

Here is a wonderful quote I found over on the Bonder's site just now.

Teilhard de Chardin on the non-difference of Matter and Spirit

"Until that time my education and my religion had always led me obediently to accept -- without much reflection, it is true -- a fundamental heterogeneity between Matter and Spirit, between Body and Soul, between Unconscious and Conscious. These were to me two 'substances' that differed in nature, two 'species' of Being that were, in some incomprehensible way, associated in the living Compound; and it was important, I was told, to maintain at all costs that the first of those two (my divine Matter!) was no more than the humble servant of the second, if not, indeed, its enemy. ...

"You can well imagine, accordingly, how strong was my inner feeling of release and expansion when I took my first still hesitant steps into an 'evolutive' Universe, and saw that the dualism into which I had hitherto been enclosed was disappearing like the mist before the rising sun. Matter and Spirit: these were no longer two things, but two states or two aspects of one and the same cosmic Stuff ... (The Heart of Matter, p. 26)

It really is the mist rising when we get this.... Thank you for all your comments.
It is summer here at last! and there is love in the air....daffodills and tulips in the garden....
Jane

Re: Thomas Berry

http://plums.gaia.com — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:47:40 GMT

Jane,

I shared a link to your wonderful post on Facebook, here, as I hope for many people to read this.

Re: Thomas Berry

http://plums.gaia.com — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:39:10 GMT

Jane, just wondrous! Your tribute testifies so beautifully to Thomas Berry and the awareness he hoped to help us all cultivate. Tremendous. Thank you.

"Still what took care of bringing us here, will take care of us
after. There is just no
problem. It is no problem."

(Was thinking of you this week because my aunt had a cardiac bypass performed by a lovely surgeon named MacGillvray. Not quite your spelling, I know. He was fantastic.)

Re: Thomas Berry

http://Mascha.gaia.com — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:22:16 GMT

Ah, yes. " I am a moment of
becoming and dissolving," she said.

Just when I think there's nothing I could read anywhere that would make the slightest bit of a difference, there comes Jane with a masterpiece of praise to the mystery that keeps us in-formed.

It's lovely to be humbled like this. Thank you, again and again, earthmother Jane.

Re: Thomas Berry

http://ADLIAC.gaia.com — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:26:00 GMT

Yes, Siona, I did something similar. It really was poetry, defined as not just the meaning of the words, but the sound and the rhythm as well, conveying something meaningful.

What a gift, Jane. Thank you again for sharing.

Blessings, OM Bastet

Re: Thomas Berry

http://siona.gaia.com — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:13:00 GMT

Oh, Jane. Thank you so much for this. I whispered it all, out loud, because the words felt so close to those in my own heart. Thank you.

And Mr. Berry... thank you.

Re: Thomas Berry

http://tikiliz.gaia.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:43:35 GMT

Beautifully written,Jane. I didn't know anything about Thomas Berry, but have been reading bits over the past week or so. Your tribute is so personal, you must be feeling his loss.
It was a joy to read, thank you

Liz

Re: Thomas Berry

http://riversong.gaia.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:54:20 GMT

oh, thank you everyone. I have been emmersed in the slow green march today....the sun is out and the movement is palpable... it is glorious.

here is a beautiful slide show about Thomas that Ann posted on another site:

http://vodpod.com/watch/1720666-earth-community-thomas-berry-slideshow-1

Re: Thomas Berry

http://jikishin.gaia.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:54:11 GMT

Jane,

(Here's the response I just entered over on your blog.)

"I find I miss those less, when they go, who thoroughly gave themselves away, to us, while here.

It feels like I've seen two kinds of giants. One, larger-than-life, who weave a mysitque of uniqueness, and one, life-size, who're so completely embodying who and what they, and we, are that contact with them gives a lasting residual resonance able to turn us, again and again, to our own right size. A size with depth and dimension interdependent, pointing us to the only availible infinities.

Fr.Tom was life-size. His influence will have it's seasons long after he's forgotten.

Meanwhile, thanks for remembering him here!"

K

Re: Thomas Berry

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:18:51 GMT

Jane, what a gorgeous, moving, envigorating post. I can imagine no better tribute to Thomas Berry or his memory. Thank you.

Re: Thomas Berry

http://co-mason.gaia.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:02:33 GMT

jane, this is beautiful, touching and nourishing.
A refreshing reading to me as I tend to be pretty plain in conceptualizing these issues. Typically my style is: Life is. it's forms are under incessant change and mutual exchange.

Irmeli

Re: Thomas Berry

http://ADLIAC.gaia.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:27:27 GMT

YESSSS!!!!!!!

Thank you for this, Jane, from my heart and soul !!! Anything I might say would be superfluous and gratuitous, but here are a few thoughts:

I too have that perspective (among several other perspectives, haha) on the swine flu.

I've made myself aware of that flow wrt the food I am putting in my mouth, and my "saying grace" before a meal is to feel gratitude and awe for everything and everyone involved in bringing this food to nourish this body. I imagine and feel the growing and harvesting and processing and transporting, all that, all the people, all the natural substances and forces. How amazing!

And this flow is, as you say, not JUST the molecules, it is the energy patterns in the invisible realms, that organize and manifest the molecules in their patterns.

The magnificence of it all......

I will re-read and treasure what you wrote for years to come. It expresses so well. I am forever grateful to you for bringing it forth.

Blessings, OM Bastet

Re: Thomas Berry

http://riversong.gaia.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:57:29 GMT

Here is a Blog I just posted:

Thoughts of Thomas Berry and This Dream.
The spring has been slow in coming. Many of
us having been restless as the ebb of snow lingered on and on, brown on brown,
the colour holding itself hidden in that other place of
becoming-but-not-yet. These slowed-down
arrivings always make me pay attention.
Finally, I can no longer take it for granted, this plethora of slow,
painstakingly slow, oh-my-god-will-it-ever-get-here change. And when my impatience has reached a
crescendo, I am invited again into
watching the miracle, brand new….. the grand entrance of the most notorious
prima dona….
It happened again this weekend, this
miracle watching. Perhaps it was
also coloured by the recent passing of my beautiful elder, Thomas Berry. He saw the world like this, I know he
did, as an emerging /emergent moment.
The Dream of the Earth, he called it. Last year he said to me from his dwindling state of
decrepitude, “It is hard to imagine these later stages, when everything becomes
so limited….still what took care of bringing us here, will take care of us
after. There is just no
problem. It is no problem.”
No problem. Wait a minute! This late cold
spring, with the greenery hiding in that ‘other place’ away refusing to budge,
refusing to be enthralled or enticed
by the cold and slow chi of the earth stew….. I was feeling a problem to be
honest, well, until Saturday afternoon, when my friends came to help in the
garden, and I shovelled my year of compost into the wheelbarrow and hauled it
over for tilling into the back vegetable garden. And it struck me again, oh, and not for the first time, but
just as if it was the first time, what is really going on.
Energy is flowing around. It has been since forever, well, since
13.7 billion years. It is flowing here and there up and down, attracted and
repelled, bouncing hither and thither…organizing itself into patterns, patterns
of energy playing and defining and sculpting and shaping other patterns of
energy. Patterns are playing with
each other. Patterns are replicating themselves. Patterns are stomping and eating and crushing and growing
and loving and mulching other patterns…..And all the while, the energy is
flowing in and out of these patterns in a continuous endless flow. All the
patterns, themselves, like a tango waiting on the dance floor for some bodies
to fill it up and inhabit it, to dance it, and let it go again to wait. All of these patterns, what ever mode
they are, come and go arriving and
dancing their dance, releasing
their particular manifestation of the dance back into the frothy energetic
stew.
The compost bin is a wonderful molecular
stew. It speaks so clearly of this
molecular moment of being. It is
easier to recognize this chunky putrid porridge as part of the life stew, than
it is to recognize myself as that too, or you…. Or Rosie. There
is the grapefruit that gets caught on the pitch fork, and gives off that
grapefruit essence, there is the egg shells, the coconut shells, the rotting
apples…and other smells and slimes some revolting, some delightfully hinting at
an exotic past like a smell fossil…. But regardless, all of slated for reconstruction, all of it steep in on the
change and transformation curve.….Off to the garden with it, and into the
summer vegetables and so on. What
is harder to see, is that this is also exactly what is happening with each one
of us, not just when we die, but even more amazingly right now, while we are
living.
This entity that is me—I am a node in the
energy flow. This is not a theory,
or a metaphor, or an hypothesis. It is what I really look like stripped of the
meaning-making mind, stripped of all of the signifiers with which we paint each
other.   I am a moment of
becoming and dissolving.
There is that notion that if you want to
know what is really happening , follow the money… Well, I say, Follow the
molecules. Where did I come from,
where am I going to? Follow the
molecules. Resist being too
attached to the perspective locked behind your eyes and in your body, just
follow the molecules. Give
yourself over to seeing the real history from where you have been arriving
from, and where you are dispersing to!
The first time I was struck by this, I was
out on the ice fishing in Double Mer, a inlet north of Lake Melville. It was a beautiful day, blue and warm
and tingling in early spring. The
man I was with hunted partridges and brought them back to my perch out on the
ice. White feathers, a drop of red
blood where the shot went in, blue sky, white snow and ice, green trees. I opened one partridge up. Its crop, just above its breast was
filled with spruce needles and a red berries.   This little white partridge was reconstituted spruce
needles and red berries, and soon was going to flow into me and my friend. Reconstituted red berries and spruce
bows…..how amazing!
Here is something else amazing: Rosie eats
Purina Dog Chow and drinks water that I put in her bowl from the tap. She was out helping me with the compost
on Saturday, bringing her ball for me throw, barking encouragement….and as I dug away, I was thinking about
where Rosie’s molecules were a year ago, or even two. They have been mostly at an Alberta Beef farm, in cows,
flowing through calves, through cow milk, heading by transport truck to a
slaughter house, through a processing plant, off to the Purina Dog Chow
production plant, into a few bags, up the Labrador Highway in another transport
truck, doing pit stop at the Coop shelf, been plopped into my shopping cart,
and hauled back to my house.
Rosie’s molecules have then been mixed with water that has been in the
clouds, fallen into the Grand Lake, been filtered through the depths of the wet
lands, spouted up through the Artisian Well through the pump house and into the
pipes that come to my house. All
of these molecules have been mixed with Oxygen, that has been breathed in and
out by all us, probably everyone here reading has shared some of Rosie’s oxygen
at one time or another, you know those chance non-meeting at some airport, when
we walked by each other, and breathed each other in, without any conscious
recognition of our shared adventure.
Just as this is the recent history of
Rosie’s molecules, this history of mine is more complicated…… you would see me
smeared all over the earth in avocado
and pineapple trees, deep in the Atlantic ocean in the Salmon, you would
see some of me coming through the dread and sadness of the abattoirs, you would
see me rising out of the compost bin I was so happily installing into my garden
the year before….You would be able to see me coming together like a movie ofa
cake being baked, only played in reverse.   Really this is what I would look like--- a smear of
energy moving towards “me”, concentrating, thickening, focusing, refining, bringing acuity and clarity
to this MOMENT, a ha! A moment of me in the NOW and then smearing and smudging
and disintegrating again to what comes next. Ha! This is
really what we look like void of our importance and claims to autonomy. This is how intricately we are woven
into and out of this place.
We are articulation stardust.
Ahh, and we are so often confused by our self importance…not that we
aren’t important….but you know what I mean.
The H1N1 Swine Flu, as well as being ‘a
threat’, is really an amazing opportunity to follow the molecular flow of energy. It shows us how we are all connected in
this beautiful, sometimes horrible, display of Being/Becoming.   Swine flu is a tracer that makes
it completely apparent how all of us are connected, not only in this cyber land
where we flap around in a silly autonomous display of hide and seek nearly void
of a molecular imprint, but, more amazingly, in this dense and emergent molecular dream of the earth.
This notion we call LIFE is about these
self-organizing perpetuating nodes of flow.   It is kind of amazing when I think about it, that one
eruption of molecules (me) can wave and signal to another eruption of molecules
(Rosie) and she will come over to me, and sit and lie down, do the high
five….ha, that one pile of molecules has learned to boss another pile around!
Ha! What a trick!….. Imagine that!
Imagine that we all have the ability in our nodal form to direct the traffic of
this energy flow! It is our
intention….INTENSION….. Some of us can direct a lot of energy traffic with our
intention, some of us less so….. but beyond the discrepancies, imagine that we
can do this AND be conscious of all of this at the same time!
Thomas Berry said, “We are carbon
thinking! We are thinking
carbon!” He named my two children
in a ceremony on a lake side in 1991. Daniel Wolf, David Fire…. “Get water from
the lake,” he said before the ceremony. “This is not water as a symbol of
anything. Water, as itself is not
a symbol of something sacred. Water is sacred. Water as water. What could be more sacred than that!”
This dream of the earth, this dream of me,
this dream of you….this invisible scaffolding that holds my ears and eyes and
heart, and my own ability to perceive my self…. this dream!   How simple and silly and splendid
and sacred…..
So now the impetuous Beauty Queen of spring
has hesitated long enough, my breath is bated, I am paying rapt attention….. I
am watching… oh please, please show me, show me, show me again how you do that
dance!

Re: Thomas Berry

http://co-mason.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 05:29:46 GMT

Hi Jane,
It is inspiring to find again and again people who have reached to this level of realization.
In that sense there is a lot of hope for humanity, and humanity is progressing well.

Irmeli

Thomas Berry

http://riversong.gaia.com — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:10:08 GMT

Thomas Berry has been a most extraordinary person, and with the breadth of vision that is most required. What a truly wonderful contribution he has made to us all. I honour him deeply.

http://www.earth-community.org/

Re: I heart Adam Lambert

http://ADLIAC.gaia.com — Thu, 28 May 2009 01:19:05 GMT

I'm glad I read the post itself because you added some edits that were not in my Notification of the post.

Wow, I am so glad for you that you feel this way. I sometimes run across a public figure who inspires a similar "crush" in me, as I see in that person a spiritual depth and other wonderful qualities. What a marvelous job you did describing what catches you!!!!!!!!

And I can immediately see all you say about his effect on the world, and the sociological context for it all. Thank you thank you for your perceptiveness and the courage to share this personal response !!!!! I feel enriched and uplifted!!

I don't own a TV and am not inspired to find any video or pics of this guy online. I will take your word for it!!!!!

Blessings, OM Bastet

I heart Adam Lambert

http://gitanjali.gaia.com — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:37:19 GMT

So, I wasnt following American idol cos they arent playing it on Oz TV yet, but I happened upon a news headline on the internet something like "down to earthness beats out showmanship" and a picture of Adam Lambert, the runner up, and Kris Allen, the winner. And something didnt sit right with me about the headline - the runner up had an aura that was something deeper than just "showmanship" . And i could almost feel through the picture a connection between these two men - a loving connection.

So I checked it out - you can watch any clip you want on Fox online.

And i confirmed for myself, that something else was going on.  Adam Lambert...well I now have a girl crush on him (I'm 43).

To me, I see in him a dark angel. His androgyny is delicious. His eyes are an old loving soul. His voice is a mere huge gift with which to play on earth, the range is rare, the falsetto is full and ethereal, the baritone is sexy and firm. He astonishes and I love that state.

At 27, he seems to have come to terms with himself to a stronger degree than most; and started to express who he is, from his thick shock of emo hair to his fancy tight pants. There's a comfortableness in his smile, in his resting back in himself.

At 43 I feel I am only starting to go into that world of outer manifestation and artictic self expression in a deeper way and I honour anyone who courageously inspires me on that journey. He dazzles, and glimmers, and I love the radiance in him. I feel his big heart and deep sweetness. I like his playful sneer.

I love that he came up through the establishment of popular culture - American idol. i love that contrast of that and the coming together of opposites.  In that conseravtive context he shook up the way people were feeling, woke a deeper current in many. He highlighted the conventionality of the mainstream - other talented singers suddenly looked "good but somehow a bit same old same old"

I love his potential "outcast" archetype and the odd juxtapsition of that with kindness and connectivity.  I like the complexity of that, the integrality of that.

I love that America almost made him number 1 - it had an obama-style oddness about it - you guys are gittin wierd and I love it.

G

Re: Resonance

http://co-mason.gaia.com — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 09:56:19 GMT

Hi Tely!

This quote from Jae Jah Noh comes closest so far to my interpretation of the 'no I' experience.

Here I have described that kind of awakening this way:
"The irony is that when I at age 16 had my first conscious awakening
shift, I hadn't consciously felt any desire to merge with God. After
this awakening I saw and felt that there is subtle deep intelligence
permeating and beyond everything. It is responsible for evolution and
also for the inner growth and evolution of us humans. My trying to
become something or being something disturbs the workings of this
intelligence in me. If I try to become something my conscious awareness
cannot stay in tune with this deep intelligence beyond all manifest
nature.
I also saw that life or this deep intelligence
accepts me just as I am with all my defects. Trying to be or become
something means denial and non-acceptance of what is. I think this
applies also to trying to get enlightened.
The basis for
growth and real transformation is in accepting and then gradually
penetrating what is, not by putting your attention elsewhere.
Just
be present and observe your deep motives, emotions, and energetic
states as sincerely and as truthfully as you can, even if it might feel
painful. Don't avoid feeling painful and heavy emotions. This avoidance
is most potent in creating suffering and stagnation. "

This awakening appeared without words. It was of permanent quality. There was no returning back to the old "I". It radically changed my life. It felt like huge iron doors had been closed behind me to the old way of functioning. In retrospect I can see that all seeking to be or become something ended there. Life is my path that unfolds on every step I take. And those steps are pretty much intuitively guided. It is open ended where the path leads to. However my discriminating intelligence observe my feelings, emotions, thoughts etc.and through that process clearly strongly influences often in subconscious ways the steps I take.

However all the interpretations through words came later, when I tried conceptually understand what had happened. Therefore I find it pretty telltale, if there is a rigid conceptual attachment to 'no I' words. 'No I' was never my perception, and if I tell this to 'no I' people they dismiss this shift of mine to something lesser.

There was "no I" anymore in the sense that I did not anymore identify with an image of myself. I have felt this concretely each time I have happened to participate in a guided meditation, where I have been instructed to form a picture of myself. That is IMPOSSIBLE for me.

This kind of awakening clearly does not correlate too well with higher stages of development. It maybe an advanced one in the self line, but does nothing to the other lines, that can be at amber.

Irmeli

Re: Resonance

http://ADLIAC.gaia.com — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:56:55 GMT

Yep. Sounds good. The description toward the end appears to me basically, more or less, what Tony captured by the term "freefall." It's marvelous to compare descriptions !!

Thanks for the resource, Tely !

Blessings, OM