Month: March 2012

Quote of the Day – March 23 2012

“You can always abandon a page, but if it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage. And that’s the truth. It takes work and discipline, but it also takes an incredible power of forgiveness and a desire to serve the music completely without any sort of cosmetic desire. Stripped and bleeding…baring your soul, so that someone else might feel exalted and able. You must learn to give if you want to pursue the arts.”
– Van Dyke Parks (American composer)

“Stripped and bleeding-baring my soul.”, “Go deeper.” Yes I will so I am learning. If its not real, if its only the truth of my experience of the events that happened and not my heart’s truth than it is only a half-truth and it will lie flat. What really matters is what made my heart sing and what made it cry and what made it grow. If I can give others my experience, than they can learn from it as well. If I settle for just recounting facts, it loses all real meaning.

Perhaps in my art, I have reached this point of honest communication with five or six of my pictures, in my writing even less. I feel it’s getting better tho. I have heard that many of us have our emotions hidden away; frozen over for the sake of survival. Yes we can survive without real emotion but we will never thrive. It is only by fully becoming aware of what we feel that we can transcend them. Still it’s taken a lot of pain to make us lock our emotions away. Facing that takes courage But never more than what each of us possess
Blessings, G

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Flowering Mandala by G A Rosenberg

Spring Equinox Mandala

Quote of the Day – March 22 2012

“What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else. ”
— Joseph Campbell

Back from an amazing holiday that enhanced my life in very many ways. I travelled with my partner and our son and yet it was evident from the beginning that each one of us was experiencing a ‘different’ holiday. I have accepted for a long time how different we find our worlds to be from each other (not just with my family but in each of us) We all enter into each day with different expectations, different hopes and different intentions and that colours every thing that we do. Who we are definitely colours what we see.
Yet knowing that enhances rather than diminishes harmony. I have seen so many people torn apart because they believe that their experience is identical to that of those around them. They become puzzled when they hear what the other person saw and heard. In many cases we feel threatened because if our experience is different does that mean the way we saw heard and felt it was wrong? If we go into things with the expectation that they will be unique for each of us, it gives us that much to share at the end of things.
Blessings,
G

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Goddess Night by G A Rosenberg

“And if every way is closed before you. The secret one will show a secret path no other eyes have seen”

–Rumi

In my darkest times when I did not know where to turn, someone has always shown up shining like a flame pointing to a new direction. Not all of these have been external people, sometimes they have been in my head and then sometimes it is just a voice or a moment of inspiration. These moments have inspired faith and have saved me from despair many times. Moments like these I consider both loans and gifts. Loans in that I feel the need to return it to any one in similar need and a gift in that I wish to share it.

Blessings, G

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Back to Freedom and Responsibility

‎”There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

– Carl Jung.

I’ve run from many things in my life. I have avoided a lot more. So very often, I’ve run from seeing parts of myself that I didn’t want to see. It seems I didn’t  run very effectively.  I would run, geographically and consciously into new circumstances that would bring another part of myself that needed to be faced, usually something I had been even more reluctant to deal with. If I decided to stay and deal with that part of my shadow, a feeling of amazing liberation would occur. Then the original thing I had run away from would show up in a new guise so that I would have to deal with it again.
I believe consciousness will out and that one’s shadow can only be suppressed for so long before it emerges.
I feel several themes in this blog seem to be converging and perhaps a more personal approach may be necessary. In the next few weeks, depending on my own high level of distractibility, I will be sharing more about my own experiences of facing and avoiding responsibility and my own shadow.

 

Travel notes. Today we fly back to Vancouver. I find that this trip has been fruitive on many levels. England and Ireland have amazing beauty and my spirit is renewed. Blessings, G

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Knight-Time Watch by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – March 20 2012

“I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.”
–Pablo Picasso

I have every intention tonight of returning to last night’s subject of responsibility and freedom and how they interrelate with compassion. Indeed i feel lately that most of my thoughts and meditation have been spent on those subjects. I have a bit of a side trip however. Something amazingly cool today that I wanted to share with you.

Today we went to the National Gallery in London. I went from hall to hall looking at some amazingly evocative art and was impressed as always by how you can look at some of the pictures and continually see something new whether it is something in the subject’s expression or in the colour choices or the light or the way that the various character’s interacted with each other, each picture spoke volumes.
Then I started watching the other people in the art gallery. I watched their body language and expression and how they interacted with each other. I started thinking about what their clothing styles said about them and what their lives were like. Gradually it dawned on me that what I was watching was art watching art and how much of a masterpiece each one of us are.

Next time I go to an art gallery, I would love to bring a camera, not to photograph art but to photograph the people looking at art. For what I saw there was beauty.
Blessings,
G

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Gallery Tour B by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – March 19 2012

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. ”
–Sigmund Freud

Fear of responsibility has been one of the biggest blocks in my life. I used to believe that taking on responsibility not only meant that I might be failing others but would also seriously limit my freedom.
Luckily since then I have gained much more of an idea of what both words mean.
It sounds cliche but none of us can have true freedom without helping as many others as possible find it as well. True freedom is self-actualization. Part of reaching our full potential is developing our compassion and realizing how interconnected we all our. In other words our responsibility to ourselves is interconnected to that of others.
Somewhere along the line too many of us have been taught that freedom comes mainly with money. If we earn enough we can be free to do whatever we want. Let’s see how that works. It seems far too many have done what they wanted distancing themselves more and more not only from other the suffering of others but from the suffering of the planet as well. Still, they find that they don’t have enough. They are not happy. They don’t feel free. But then how can you be free if you have locked away every bit of your true self? To Be Continued …
Blessings, G

 

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Stonehenge Visions by G A Rosenberg

I got some amazing pictures of Stonehenge today and the above picture came from a bit of play with one

Quote of the Day – March 18 2012

Three quotes tonight but they all dance around a common theme that has been on my mind quite a bit lately and perhaps more and more in my heart:

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”
–Dalai Lama

For the sake of discussion, let’s define compassion as the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes and thus gain an understanding of them and their needs. Perhaps what empathy aspires to be when it grows up or perhaps when we grow up.
When we feel compassion for someone, it does not mean feeling sorry for them tho it does mean feeling their suffering. It does not mean we give them our agreement as much as our understanding. Often when practicing compassion, it means we are there suffering with them yet we know to spoon feed them what they need to stop their suffering, we are cheating them out of a lesson they will now have to find a new way to learn.
Blessings, G

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Bunratty Castle in County Clare Ireland

One from the archives:

Krishna Playing to the Heart by G A Rosenberg

Still travelling, now back in England. Tomorrow Stonehenge then Tuesday home.. THis trip has been a great one and as I hoped as much an internal one as it has been an external one

Quote of the Day – March 17 2012

“The disciple is not hankering for knowledge; he wants to see, not to know. He wants to be. He is no longer interested in having more knowledge; he wants to have more being.”
–OSHO

When I was younger and reading everything in sight, I wanted to know as much as possible. “Fill me up” The subject matter did not matter. All I wanted was more knowledge. Then as I entered young adulthood I began to realize the futility of that ambition. Our knowledge was always opening up further and there will always be more to know.
At that point my questions became deeper. I wanted to understand. I wanted to understand our purpose for being. I wanted to understand how such suffering can exist in this world and what I could to stop it and why only some people seemed to suffer? I wanted to understand other people as I understood myself. I wanted to understand how I came to be, how others came to be and why we all feel so isolated when we are part of the same thing? I wanted to understand the heart of another being. So many things i wanted to understand. Even when I thought that i had left the path i kept on it, still struggling to understand.
These days once again changing my intentions. Knowledge is awesome. Understanding is bliss. What I want more than anything else these days is to be. I wish to be myself in full potential. I wish to shine forth the divine spirit from within myself and inspire others to do the same. I wish to remove all the nonsense that blocks me from being myself and I wish to be in full alignment with the highest truth and the greatest good.
Blessings, G

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Purple Cloud Lattice Mandala by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – March 16 2012

“You may never understand
how the stranger is inspired
but he isn’t always evil
and he is not always wrong”
–Billy Joel, The Stranger

Who is the stranger that Billy refers to in the song? He is our shadow self. The unexpressed side of our being that many of us keep a tight lid on out of fear. What am I so afraid of? I used to ask myself this all the time. Occasionally I would examine my fears. I am afraid that people will see me for who I am and they will reject me? It took me a long time to realize that what I was afraid people would see was that stranger, that shadow side of myself. The side of myself that sometimes disapproved of others or who got angry or demanded attention. I was so afraid that I kept throwing myself into situations where I was forced to either acknowledge those parts of myself or bury them deeper. Far too often I did the latter.
That’s the thing about repressing our shadow side however.The more we repress it; the stronger the shadow becomes and eventually if we don’t acknowledge it, it breaks free around the edges and causes all kinds of potential harm. Where does this fear come from? We all have this hidden side and if we can see it in ourselves then surely we can give others room to show theirs as well. If repressing our shadow makes it stronger, what happens if we bring it into the light?

‎”To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.”
Carl Jung
“Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology” (1959). In CW 10. Civilization in Transition. P.872

Somewhere along the way, after finding myself in situation after situation where i was forced to confront myself both what I showed and what I tried to hide away, I grew tired of trying to force the genie back in the bottle. These days when some new aspect of myselhe pops up, I find it interesting rather than frightening. I know that acknowledging that these parts of myself exist doesn’t mean that I have to act on them. I can just say “Hmmm, look at that” That doesn’t mean that I have a perfect handle on it. there are still parts of myself I don’t necesarily like. It has just become a bit easier to acknowledge them.
Blessings, G

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Quote of the Day – March 15 2012

“On my tombstone, I really hope that someday they will write: He was true but partial…”
–Ken Wilber

I love the integral approach of Ken Wilber that “everybody is right” in their beliefs yet doesn’t fall into the post-modern trap that says all beliefs are relative therefore each person can have their own truth. It’s not that this is false just that they miss that most important part, that it is just one take on a much larger whole that integrates the truths. When we take an integral approach, we look at each person’s truth and the greater truth of which it is a part.
Far too often it seems, people “pretend” to accept that “everybody’s entitled to their truth “and its as good as everybody else’s so i don’t have to listen to others”. The reason i say pretend is that if they really felt that way they wouldn’t be sharing their beliefs with so many they would cling to it…we only share what we wish to have out in the open and test what we are willing to give up. When a child shares candy, he is not looking to keep it.
So yes I have faith (another theme of the evening and day) that my explorations bring me into more and more a fuller awareness of a greater truth. But as Ken Wilber says above, I hope I never believe that I have more than a part.
Blessings, G

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Eagle’s Flight by G A Rosenberg

Poulnabron Dohlman