Time to invest in spiritual expansion

clipped from www.nytimes.com Art world sophisticates may call the Greys’ project goofy, but in this scary time of economic implosion, their investment in spiritual expansion might just be the smartest of all.

Imaginal hygeine

clipped from www.realitysandwich.com The carrier or the medium of imagination is our attention. Attention is energy, one that can be exercised like a muscle. The high arts of its development include the one-pointed concentration that comes of meditation, the energized focus of unselfconscious creative activity, and the merging of awareness and action in the present moment (often known as “flow”)... A more visceral way to understand the imagination is as a clear or clogged channel, not unlike your intestines. When you feed yourself with junk ideas, become bloated with ideologies, create chronic constipation from identity fixations, and infest yourself with the parasites of media hype and its addictions, you cannot expect the nourishing flow of creativity to flow easily through your being and blush your life with its radiance.... Imaginal hygiene is the inner art of self-managing the imagination, to defend it from forces that compromise, pollute, colonize, shrink, and sterilize it, and to cultivate those that illuminate, expand, and nourish it.

Know Thyself or Denial --- It's Our Choice

clipped from www.realitysandwich.com I learned that when we are put into a crisis, we have essentially two choices. To either: a) use the opportunity to go deeper into self-understanding, the perennial tradition of “know thyself”; or, b) go deeper into denial, and allow other people think for us, which invariably sweeps all the shit that created the crisis under the rug for it to ferment, and create a bigger stink. No blame. Being human isn’t easy, and we are all capable, at some level, of making the choices of those we so readily judge.

Yet another blog from the Rev.Tai-Ping Monkey

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

~Charles Dickens

I found this quote while searching for a good chalice lighting with which to begin a board meeting earlier this week, and it has inspired me to create yet another blog. This one will focus on things I find inspirational, quotes that move me, and musings on my highest aspirations and the difficulty of bringing them to realization.

Cheers and merry Christmas!