By now the question is who or what exactly is hearing that tiny little voice? Unless one finds the answer to that particular question life will continue for you much in the way it always has. A bit like Madhu’s current post. Same old, same old. The chattering of the mind, replete with tiny little voices.

I´ve been quite captured when reading this kind of Shakespearean ´Hamlet´ version of the topic – that quite easily happens in that virtual kind of communication ( BE or not to BE…).

THERE MUST BE ANOTHER WAY…murmured that tiny little voice inside – even then when I found myself almost drowned in some of the mind´s turbulence.

We all know some of that poor ´Hamlet´- mind inside, I guess, being born and growing up into the more than less dysfunctional (mad) family structure of a certain historical and socio-economic time.

Then in the thread here are these questions:
Does spiritual Life rule out injustice in the world?
Or is – as many teeachings say – everything all right as it is?!

Well, same, same: That tiny inner voice says: THERE MUST BE ANOTHER WAY.
To look at it, understand the ‘looking’, releae the pressure of our nervous system and its (mostly very robotic) re-actions. Find other-ones, other ways to respond.

As Humans are not only story-telling animals but also reading story-telling I found two of the stories in particular that gave me shelter for the moment(s). One is about tha Buddha meeting a mad mass murderer who was on a vengeance tour to get satisfaction from the very, very hard and violent upbringing he had had as a child.

When he was about to murder the ‘Buddha’, the voice of wisdom asked him to first cut up a big branch of a tree before murdering him.

Then – done – the voice continued: “And then – (one last thing more) join the cut branch again to the tree.”

The murderer said: “You musr be really mad; no one can do that. The branch is gone.”

“Destruction,” the Buddha said, “can be done by children, but to rejoin a branch to a tree a Master is needed. And what to say about human heads…?“

The mass murderer, as the story says, came to his enlightened senses (understanding). That tiny little voice inside reading the topic of ‘CREATIVITY’ (summing up THE ESSENCE) found a place at home, a shelter and its Belonging.

So good to have a pocketful of stories when sitting around a virtual fire.

With Love

and a summer Sunday breeze (and wish you all well!),

Madhu

And then all that is compounded by having been hurt if you will, had difficult things happen involving money, socially; and so he’s just saying people repress what they want, what they consider non-spiritual, and act out what they consider to be spiritual, although it just seems to me that’s part of the journey really.

A further point that I wanted to make, and in a way just seems blindingly obvious, but for whatever reason I’ve never really thought about this before (but I must have, I’m sure I did, I can’t believe I didn’t, but I would have experienced intense cognitive dissonance, torn between my upbringing, which I’d overridden and repressed, particularly in the, say, 10 years prior to Sannyas, while I was having a good time):
Because of having been given the injunction pleasure is wrong, money is immoral, drink and drugs are immoral, and the idea that truly spiritual people live alone in a desert, in rags, starving and thirsty, cold and isolated; and yet Osho was actively encouraging us to go against all those Christian ideas of spiritual, and I suggest that we, some of us, most of us to some extent or other, dealt with this by repressing either the spiritual or what we perceived as the non-spiritual, certainly at some point in our Sannyas lives.

And it‘s probably even harder for Buddhists because they don‘t have an Osho encouraging them to have a good time.

http://www.johnwelwood.com/articles/TRIC_interview_uncut.pdf

Is this prevalent among Buddhists now? Reminiscent of some of a certain other crowd of seekers…Rather brilliant…

https://youtu.be/Pbzs_5gD2DM

http://www.dailygood.org/pdf/dg.php?sid=1538

I was once not interested in awakening. I didn’t even know I was asleep, so no need for spiritual seeking. Then I was interested in spiritual seeking. Then I wasn’t. Now I’m not. Tomorrow, who knows?

I once identified myself as a separate object, with a body-mind self-image. Through spiritual seeking (non-drug experience) I realized that my self-image was an imaginary construct. I once identified as a spiritual seeker. Then I confronted that identification (instead of denying or bypassing it).

I do not deny my past ignorance, or my present ignorance, my past behaviour, or my present behaviour. It is all a delicious con-fusion. From the eagle eye view of old age I see it as perfection!

As Raphy Leavitt says in his salsa song, “Siempre Alegre”:

“Amo yo esta vida con loca pasión…
Vive la vida, mira que se va y no vuelve
Dicen que después de muerto uno vuelve, y,
¿si no reencarno na’? ¡Ah! ”

(“I love this life with crazy passion…
Live life, see, it goes and does not come back
They say that after death one returns,
And, if I do not reincarnate? Ah!”)

You can hear and dance to the song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlTiP9wfHLw