Counter to the prevailing trope of spiritual orthodoxy I don’t accept that our so-called true nature is loving and caring any more than it is hating and othering. Humans are complex animals with fathomless psyches. When we care and love we do so from bottomless wells of empathy and devotion. And yet we hate and other too from similar reserves of opposite emotion. When the time comes we do what we do. It is not only myopic but delusional to believe that one well of human behaviour is any more rich or better fed than another.
Tag: humanity
This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants, leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within …
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside: Doris Lessing on the Antidote to Self-Righteousness and Our Best Hope for Humanity
Putting wings on a caterpillar does not make it a butterfly…
Shiv is a lone but wise voice in the so-called spiritual industry. I always enjoy the way he punctures what Ordinary Mind Zendo’s Barry Magid calls our ‘curative fantasies’.
He reminds us, above all, of the full breadth and depth of our humanity – everything included, nothing left out.
I’m suspicious of claims of ‘our true nature’ good or bad, but particularly when it is stated as fact that fundamentally ‘we are love.’
Unless you’re in the depths of delusion or simply not being honest with yourself, this is just a delightful (curative) fantasy.
Is this what you think it means to be human? How little adept we are at living! We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life. And how much childish, shortsighted egotism lies in an intention! We believe that we can illuminate the darkness with an intention, and in that way aim past the light. How can we presume to want to know in advance from where the light will come to us?
— Carl Jung, The Black Books
What’s here now? 