T S Eliot - Waking Spirals - Page 2

Quote of the Day – December 31 2012

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
― T.S. Eliot

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How do we find our way outside our comfort zone? To me, the idea of a zone presupposes a border, a barrier of sorts. In this case, the barrier might be made up of our definitions of ourself, how far if you will that we will go in any given direction given the circumstance. To grow and to evolve we need to push this, need to risk going too far even if it might mean breaking the person we are in order to become someone new.

Self definition by its nature seems limiting especially if it is a static rather than a dynamic definition. How far are you willing to go to expand your sense of self.? When is the last time you attempted to find out?

Blessings, G

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Indigo Flames by G A Rosenberg

Life Expansion by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day — September 6 2012

“I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
— T S Eliot

Tonight I found a lesson in breaking the fourth wall. I was talking to some friends in one FB group or another while listening to music and playing with art. One friend was talking about his enlightenment in a manner that some do as if they have moved beyond earthly thoughts and patterns and was somehow above it all. This tends to irk some and inspire others. I tend to feel a kind of bemusement at it. I feel that even in hard times when the path feels its hardest, I would still much rather feel like I have a far way to go than that I have arrived at a stopping point. What would be the purpose and where the fun in that? Which basically was the question I asked my friend. What do you do for fun? There was a long pause and then he started talking about his love of photography and we talked about capturing the moment that doesn’t come again and the conversation became to me a lot more interesting.

I realized that I had gotten my friend to break the fourth wall. In stage, television and movies where sets are three walls the two sides and back, the fourth wall is that invisible wall which separates the actors and the characters they play from the audience. The audience watches its window into the world of the play and sustains the belief that these are not actors playing characters but events unfolding. Likewise, the actors and the characters usually pretend that the audience is a non existent one. However, in some plays the actor or the character he plays breaks the fourth wall and for a moment breaks character and speaks directly to the audience. Groucho did it in a few of the Marx Brothers movies, George Burns did it all the time in his show. For just a moment, my friend had broken the fourth wall, dropped the character of enlightened master and spoke as an excited human. At that moment, he became so much easier to relate to.

It got me thinking. Who is behind our fourth wall? Does the universe (God) consciously watch and feel its parts acting out its myriad dramas? How about the part of our unconscious that Ken Wilber calls the witness, that part below the surface that dispassionately watches all the events of our life. The more we identify with our witness and the less with all the drama, the farther we have come. We connect the most with the universe when we pray and the most with the witness when we meditate. In this way prayer and meditation would be the two methods by which we break down the fourth wall and come down from the state.
Blessings, G

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Paths to and From the Centre by G A Rosenberg

Red Gray Waking Spiral by G A Rosenberg

Quote of the Day – February 6 2012

“Home is where one starts from. ”
–T. S. Eliot

I have always found home to be a difficult concept. Not that I come from a particularly unhappy home. For its time in 1960’s and 1970’s United States, I had a fairly typical family life, perhaps more functional and happier than most. Yes my parents were divorced but within seven months they were married to other people.
Due to this restructuring, I moved first from the home I spent my childhood in Connecticut to a new one in New Jersey. A year later we moved again one town over.
This played havoc with my sense of home and for quite awhile I roamed about like a gypsy for the next 3 decades spending anywhere from 3 weeks (my shortest stay) to three and a half years (my longest) with 5 months being about the average.
During this time of instability I felt very rootless. After leaving first my mother’s house (at sixteen) than my father’s (first at seventeen, than at 18) I found pretty quickly that in neither would I ever feel at home again. Not that I was made to feel unwelcome but they were never places I had rooted. It took me many years of searching both internally and externally until I finally gained an idea of what home means, to me at any rate.

Home quite simply means the place I can be centred within myself. Yes, the cliche that home is where the heart is has truth. Except that people tend to look at it in a very two-dimensional sense that it is where you are loved and where you love. In a greater sense tho, I find that home is where I can be loving, I can be centred and I can nurture and be nurtured and finally I feel that I can do this from within myself, my heart centre no matter where I may be located in physical space
I hope to grow to the point where I can do it irrespective of emotional space and mood as well. Namaste, G

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Circles of Inspiration by G A Rosenberg

Reality Check by G A Rosenberg