Our Mission
We are a center for experiential education, rooted in the Gospels, encouraging the transformation of human consciousness through contemplation, and equipping people to be instruments of peaceful change in the world.
July 19, 2011
You Can See the Honey, by kakisky on morguefile.com
Loving the Two Halves of Life:
The First Half
Identity questions, security questions, and boundary questions are basically concerns of the ego. That does not make them bad, but they are just a starting point. The soul has different concerns. Our politicians continually assure us that they will keep us safe, and this is usually enough to get them elected, because most people are not yet asking higher questions in the hierarchy of needs—things like education, low-cost housing, ecology, justice, the arts, immigration, penal reform, the morality of war itself.
Bill Plotkin speaks of the first half of life as doing our “survival dance.” The second half of life can then become our “sacred dance.” Most of us never get beyond our survival dance to ask the deep concerns of the soul (we are too busy “saving” our souls, whatever that means!). Money, status symbols, group identity, and security are of limited value, but to the soul they are a distraction, and finally they become the very problem itself.
However, don’t misunderstand me—and I say this as strongly as I can—you’ve got to go through this first half of life and its concerns. Every level of growth builds on the previous ones. The principle is this: transcendence means including the previous stages. So now that you see the limited value of the early stages, you will not put much energy into just looking good, making money, feeling secure at all costs, and making sure you are right and others are wrong. That’s what it means to grow up.
Adapted from Loving the Two Halves of Life: The Further Journey
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How big is my God?
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