Marc Gafni on the possibility and necessity of a World Spirituality

Excerpt from the blog "Spirit's Next Move"

For the first time in the history of planet Earth, in the history of consciousness, a World Spirituality is utterly possible and utterly necessary. A World Spirituality is one that trance-ends. It ends the trance of any particular religion or nationality. It weaves together the best medicines of every great system of knowing into a larger whole.

The most urgent need we have today is to participate in the gathering of all of us who want to participate in this great evolutionary unfolding. It’s already happening all over the world.

Spirit Exploration in the Modern Age

I am excited to attend three great expansive events in the coming year.  

Wisdom 2.0 Youth
Sept 17 2011
Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California

Teachers, educators, parents, mindfulness teachers, and others discuss the need to balance the "inner technologies" of wisdom, awareness, and compassion with cell phones, computer games, and social networks.

While pushing away and renouncing all modern technology is seen as pointless and unnecessary, likewise does a life where family members spends the majority of each evening glued to their individual screens, and where kids cannot sit still and need constant external stimuli to keep them entertained.

The Wisdom 2.0 Youth Conference explores this balance and asks the question,

"How do adults embody the very qualities we want to pass along to the youth in our life?"

Integral Spiritual Experience 3 (ISE3)
Dec 28 - Jan 1
Pacific Grove, Ca

This extraordinary event is the largest Integral Spiritual practice event ever created. Featuring over 60 hours of live event content including keynote addresses, plenary sessions, morning & evening practice sessions, entertainment & live performances, large and small group activities and shared meals. ISE 3 curriculum and design is held within the integral spiritual framework – the most inclusive and robust evolutionary spiritual teaching humanity has ever produced.

Identify and examine major stages of evolutionary creativity as it manifests in individuals and in the larger integral community.
Examine how creativity arises when we begin to disengage from the mind, yet requires the skills that only a disciplined mind can cultivate.

Discover the many facets of personal and collective creativity, and look at the way creativity manifests in the evolution of consciousness itself.
Explore how creativity appears to a visual artist, a musician, a writer, or any other artistic pursuit.
Explore the nature of integral creativity and how ideas actually emerge from integral consciousness.

"Be my creative partner in the healing and transformation of the world. Evolve consciousness, and fix the broken places with Me – because I cannot do it without you. I need your service. My gift to you in love," whispers God in our ear even as She caresses our heart, "My gift to you is to make you my partner and allow Myself to be – at least in part – dependent on you!" - Marc Gafni

Wisdom 2.0 Conference
Feb 23 - 26 2012
Mountain View, Ca

The Wisdom 2.0 Conference is a one-of-a-kind event in Silicon Valley that brings together people from a variety of disciplines, including technology leaders, Zen teachers, neuroscientists, and academics, to explore how we can live with deeper meaning and wisdom in our technology-rich age.
The conference addresses the great challenge of our age: to not only live connected to one another through technology, but to do so in ways that are beneficial to our own well-being, effective in our work, and useful to the world.

Roshi Joan Halifax at Newark Peace Education Summit

Love and compassion are not luxuries, they are necessities for the human species to survive.

H.H. The Dalai Lama

Related articles

• Newark Hosts 3-Day Peace Education Summit With Keynote Speak Dalai Lama
• At Newark peace summit, Dalai Lama urges ethics education in America's schools
• Newark looks to apply peace strategies from weekend's summit 

Jim Carrey Introduces Eckhart Tolle

well said

The Presidential Address is worth a listen. You can hate his policies, but you have to admire the integral nature of the address.

Space Zen

Will Humans' Brains Change During Space Travel?

In February, 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced the little understood phenomenon sometimes called the “Overview Effect”. He describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. Without warning, he says, a feeing of bliss, timelessness, and connectedness began to overwhelm him. He describes becoming instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and to every other atom in the Universe. He described experiencing an intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species, and systems were all one synergistic whole. He says the feeling that rushed over him was a sense of interconnected euphoria. He was not the first—nor the last—to experience this strange “cosmic connection”.

Rusty Schweikart experienced it on March 6th 1969 during a spacewalk outside his Apollo 9 vehicle: “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change…it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man.” Schweikart, similar to what Mitchell experienced, describes intuitively sensing that everything is profoundly connected.

Their experiences, along with dozens of other similar experiences described by other astronauts, intrigue scientists who study the brain. This “Overview Effect”, or acute awareness of all matter as synergistically connected, sounds somewhat similar to certain religious experiences described by Buddhist monks, for example. Where does it come from and why?

Life is just a dream.

Enjoy yourself. Stop worrying. Stop being scared. Go after what you want, even if what you want seems beyond the realm of possibility. Make it happen. You are god here on Earth, whoever you are. Even if you have to crawl out of the dirt to make it happen, you CAN make it happen. Never surrender to your own fear and never lose the energy you have inside.There is no god, there is no ending, there is only just here and now.

anon

what is it?

it's certainly not available on e-bay.

it's undescribe-babel, but anyone who makes that journey, rich or poor, strong, weak or clever, black, white, red, yellow, day glo lime green, gentile and jew, muslim and hare krishna code warriors, if they really strip away all of that crap we call ego, and stand naked before the playa, clothed or not, and come to terms that this is ALL WE ARE, AND THIS IS WHAT WE ARE TO RETURN TO....fire and ashes and dust.....

to dust....


this is it....love one another, feed the poor, be kind to strangers, be as children, and play with fire,


and, most importantly, KEEP GOING UNTIL YOU FIND "IT"...

whatever it is, i'm sure there is a camp for it at burning man....

Thanks Ami - This is unreal

Happy Oster

Spring Equinox, also known as Ostara, occurs in the middle of March. It marks the beginning of Spring and the time when days and nights are of equal length. The Goddess manifests as Ostara or Eostre with her basket of eggs. She is accompanied by the Hare or Rabbit, a manifestation of the God. Green has been sacred to this Sabbat since ancient times, because it represents the greening of the land with vegetation. This is a festival of new growth.

Krishna Das

Friday night I had the pleasure of chanting with Krishna Das. It was amazing. He is a powerful force. It was exactly what I needed.

His closing words:

"If we know anything about a path at all, it's only because of the Great ones that have gone before us. Out of their love and kindness, they have left some footprints for us to follow. So, in the same way that they wish for us, we wish that all beings everywhere, including ourselves, be safe, be happy, have good health, and enough to eat. And may we all live at ease of heart with whatever comes to us in life."

BBC Buddha Doc

The Ten Commandments of Mindfulness

1. Yearn not for a body free of disease and suffering, because without going through pain and illness, sundry desires are easily awakened.

2. Wish not for a life free of mishaps and obstacles, because without them one tends to become arrogant and egotistic.

3. Pray not for a quick shortcut regarding spiritual introspect, because without excruciating effort, one becomes short-learning.

4. Fear not the haunting disturbance of evil while accumulating spiritual strength, because without them one’s determination does not grow solid strong.

5. Hope not for easy success in one’s work, because without difficulties and failures, one tends to undervalue others and become overly proud.

6. Build not relationships on selfish gain, because a relationship based on profit has lost its genuine meaning.

7. Look not for a universal consensus regarding one’s personal opinion, because complete adoption to a single opinion will render narrow mindedness.

8. Expect not repayment or reward from others for one’s services, because calculation and expectation contradicts true service.

9. Engage not irrationally into profitable attractions, because jumping too quickly into temptation may well blind wisdom.

10. Stir not at being victim of injustice, because eagerness to clarify reputation belongs to an ego too attached to loose.

Translated into English by Tam Lac Jessica A. Tran

Where's Matt?

The Drum Cafe was sweet. I've got a bunch of video and pictures. And I've got the entire recorded as an mp3. Lots more on this when I get home...

Changing the Present

Here is a great service.

Carnage on Capitol Hill: Iraq fatally wounds Republicans

In this stunningly beautiful American autumn of 2006, there is the whiff of fin de régime in the air - or rather of the end of two regimes. On Tuesday the United States votes in the most closely fought, and closely followed, mid-term elections in memory. Not only could they signify the end of Republican dominance on Capitol Hill which, apart from a hiatus in the Senate in 2001 and 2002, has lasted without interruption since Newt Gingrich and his shock troops over-ran both House and Senate in 1994, forcing Bill Clinton to protest forlornly that the Presidency was "still relevant". The other probable casualty is the era of George W Bush.

article

Wow