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LOTUS OF THE HEART
All is Welcome Here
Living in Love beyond Beliefs
The nature of Spirit is to differentiate. Why? Who knows? Yet, all Nature reflects this tendency of oneness expressing as diversity. The contemplative engages spiritual practice to learn to see others through the eyes of the Heart, and such seeing is able to look back onto diversity from oneness. With this occurs a shift in how one treats others. A theoretical idea and affirmation of oneness is not enough - we engage a disciplined wisdom path to transform to look from oneness onto diversity. All our talk of oneness, so popular among a plethora of spirituality today, is simply not enough - it all sounds good, but a disciplined path of transforming seeing is essential to turn theory into spontaneous living of our unity.
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I looked at the message, made quickly, and thought I had written wrongly. The note read, regarding a patient and to another chaplain: "she is dear soul." I thought, usually I would properly write "... a dear soul." Actually, musing on it, I got it right. I recalled how my work has addressed this important matter: we are not individual souls - individuality has to do with personality -, we are all and together one soul. So, yes, she is dear soul, and so are you and you and you and .... Now, there is a difference when we cease treating other persons as individual persons and treat them as soul, not a soul. And almost nothing in most of our cultures even addresses the importance of this essential matter - we cannot build unity based on individuality, only on a prior unity, a oneness before individuality and, so, before personhood - person being a lesser whole than soul, and derivative of soul, so oneness. In fact, I can better appreciate your individuality, as an expression of soul, when looking at your individuality through the lens of our likeness. This would be like appreciating the particular instrument in an orchestra through the oneness of the entire assembly as the context and ground of the expression of the instrument. Finally, possibly we will soon get this point - we cannot ground the edifice of unity on an ideology of essential separation, only through an appreciation of and living of essential oneness.
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*Move cursor over pictures for photographer and title.
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