What ruins romantic affairs?

The jumping to conclusions is what ruins romantic affairs.  Never assume you know how things are between you and your lover as there is a danger you may be lost in your mind, where anything is possible and delusion is common!

It’s important to remain in the state of "not knowing" and to be open to what arises between you both, particularly when you are together, but also when you are apart.  Your perceptions will only be accurate when you are in this state of "not knowing", which ensures you are not lost in a mental dream where you already think you know how things are between you both and then impose this idea on the relationship.  Instead, by keeping your awareness poised and present in this state of "not knowing" you can pay attention to the feelings that arise between you both which tell you about the current state of the relationship and what may be required to improve it.

Subtle feelings are what signal truth, not thoughts about a subject, and to be open and aware of these subtle feelings we must be "out of our mind", meaning: not lost in thought!  This is difficult to do when we have spun a romantic dream around the subject of our lover.  This makes clear perception of the situation very difficult and this dream is fed by continual thinking about the lover with rose colored glasses.

To remain present and in touch with the true situation between us both we must not fall into a romantic dream.  Such a dream is likely to end in a rude awakening when reality fails to meet our romantic expectations, particularly when previous signs of emotional disconnection have been ignored or misread by us!

Sharka Todd

Truth is prior to thought

Thoughts are the story we tell ourselves about a thing and not the thing itself.  The closest we can get to understanding or connecting with a thing is through observing it without thought.  As soon as we begin to think we place a screen between ourselves and the thing we are observing and are no longer in touch with the thing, itself.

This message has been shared by sages throughout the ages with a recent example being Krishnamurti, the idiosyncratic Indian mystic.

Zen Buddhism also focuses on the importance of thoughtless perception which is why they are hesitant to label things and promote a doctrine.  Instead, Zen teachers encourage students to hone their own perceptive ability through meditation and to come to their own conclusions about life.

Sharka Todd

See also: Using subtle feelings to navigate through life by Stuart Wilde.

The problem with placing REASON on a pedestal

Many people lionize reason above all other human attributes but the problem with reason is that it can be used to justify anything, as it is totally free of any moral grounding.  When everything is seen as relative and there are no moral absolutes then everything is up for grabs and, therefore, anything goes!  We see this operating everyday when people use reason to justify immoral acts.  For almost any action, good or evil, can be justified with recourse to reason.  Therefore, we need more than reason if we are to live a productive life that is helpful and not harmful to our fellow beings!  We need moral values that come from our feeling nature and our ability to empathize, in addition to our ability to reason things out.

Sharka Todd

See also: The end of the world, not the earth by Barry Long

Thinking v. feeling one's way through life

 "Trust your feelings, you must!" Yoda

The two approaches to living are to think your way through life and to feel your way through life.  Thinking looks at the past and projects it onto the future when making decisions whereas feeling involves a moment by moment decision making process.  Feeling your way through life is a process of sensing the force around and within you and acting from there.  Thinking ignores the living force and acts on old programs, instead.

For a more detailed view on this topic: Using subtle feelings to navigate through life - STUART WILDE

Sharka Todd

Science has its realm, as does philosophy and art

Science is king of the measurable, outer, “objective” realm but it is a pauper in the unmeasurable, inner,  “subjective” realm, which belongs to the artists, poets and philosophers!

Sharka Todd

Observation without thought and analysis

Some people believe the key to understanding life is in gaining a theoretical perspective of it, like a scientist or philosopher does, whilst others believe understanding lies in paying attention to the present moment without thought, as the unmoved observer.

There are those who say that once a label is attached to something the label is false because it is a label and not the thing itself.  In other words, the description of something is not the thing itself.  This seems obvious but is ignored by the scientist who deals in abstract concepts and acts as if they are the real thing, themselves.  In this way, the whole universe has been reduced to an intellectual abstraction in the mind of the scientist. 

In contrast, the serious meditative observer realises that the thing they observe is truly unknowable, but that it can be seen and felt in the present moment through the mechanism of one's consciousness, and not in any abstract thought about the past!

SHARKA Todd

Yoda v the Skeptics

“Trust your feelings, you must!” YODA

“Do not trust your feelings, trust the doctor or the scientist, for they are the experts, not your feelings, for they are unreliable!” THE SKEPTICS

Sharka Todd

Science, myth, reality and knowledge

Science is a way of describing the world, a “myth” if you like, and just one among many.  Those that say it is the “truth” don’t understand the nature of language or human knowledge.  Every type of human knowledge is just a lens we place upon reality in an attempt to understand or limit it, but is not reality itself.  A description of something is not the thing itself, and never could be!  Reality is much larger than that!  In the same way, the description of an experience is not the experience itself but just an attempt to communicate some shareable attributes of it to others.

Reality is unknowable in its fullness, however by applying all our senses and feeling nature to our current situation we can experience it as fully as is possible by us.  That is the most we can do!  Having purely an intellectual understanding of something is a poor thing indeed compared to an open-hearted- and minded- experience of something!  And such an open-hearted experience is not something that can be accurately translated into words which our shared knowledge depends upon!  And, for those who don’t grok the word open-hearted, it means having no resistance in our body/mind that would shut us off from experiencing the moment and the world around us.  Basically, it means to not see ourselves as separate from the moment or the thing we are focused upon.  That is the nature of being open-hearted: a soft stance towards life where we don't seek to separate ourselves from it!

(For a more detailed analysis see the work of Mary Midgley and Thomas Kuhn's landmark work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.)

Sharka Todd

Rationales used by “machine men” to justify destructive action

If I didn’t do it, someone else would.
It has to be done to keep the economy strong.
It will grow back/repair itself/recover in time.
I need to do it to feed my family.
It’s always been done this way.
This is the economically/scientifically efficient approach.
It doesn’t matter- trees/birds/wildlife etc. don’t really count.
It's just the way of the world!

Sharka Todd

Machine man v feeling man

 
There are “machine men” - those who ignore or shut down their feeling nature and “feeling men”- those who feel and act on their feelings, when appropriate.

Almost all the terrible things that happen in the world- to people, animals and mother earth- happen because of machine men.

The intellect, acting alone, is a dangerous thing.  Only when coupled with the feeling nature, which opens us up to the experience of others and to our own empathy and compassion, are we likely to act in ways that are harmless, both for ourselves and others.

Some people shut down their feelings in some domains of their life while allowing themselves to feel in other areas.  This allows them to be destructive in one domain while constructive in another.  This leads to a divided man and is not to be recommended.

I believe we were born with a feeling nature for a reason and that is to encourage us to act in ways that are beneficial to creation as a whole rather than just suiting our own limited mental concepts.

When we ignore our feeling nature destruction is the result. This can be seen in all the violent acts that occur on the earth against other people, animals and the planet itself.

Many of these actions are viewed as "necessary" but this is only because those that carry them out or condone them are deluded by distorted thinking and have shut down their feeling nature which would tell them these things are wrong.

This denial of feeling makes these people a danger to all life.  We must regain our connection to our feeling nature and act according to its dictates (in conjunction with our rational nature) if we are to become noble co-creators on this wonderful planet.

Sharka Todd

See also: Rationales used by “machine men” to justify destructive action
, We can't know something by thinking about it and The head and heart must be in balance.

The scientific v mystical view

Image by Sharka Todd

To expand one's perception an open-heart is needed!

Scientists think you can understand life by using the intellect alone, but spiritualists have known for ages that the key to the mystery is the open heart.  Hence, you have to become open-hearted like a little child to see heaven, which in reality is all around (and within) you!  Without the open heart the glory of creation will not be seen and hence depressive, live-negating philosophies will be created, as we see in the world today, which other, spiritually blind people, believe in!

Sharka Todd

The key to understanding something

The key to understanding something, for me, is get into the sense and feel of it rather than thinking about it.  For thinking just creates a barrier between yourself and the thing you are thinking about!

Sharka Todd

Is math the secret to understanding?

Does math really give us an understanding of anything, truly?  A tree, a plant, a person, a planet?  Do we truly KNOW these things by attempting to define them by numbers?  And yet our society revers the physicists and the mathematicians who attempt to understand the universe and life purely by mathematical methods.  It makes no sense!

To know something we must become one with it.  This is only achieved by placing our consciousness upon the thing, stopping the thinking process, opening the heart and entering the thing we are observing with our feelings.  To this end many people take powerful psychedelics or meditate to help the process.  This is how we understand life, not by thinking about it or assigning numbers to it.  Any mental activity creates a barrier between us and the thing being contemplated.  Only a silent but aware mind can truly take in its surroundings in a meaningful way.

Sharka Todd

The importance of a simple faith

There's no need to put a label on the goodness that underlies life, but it's important to recognize it!

It's important to believe that we live in a loving, supportive universe.  This give us the surety that helps us to live expansively and reach our maximum potential.  Religions attempt to turn this natural belief in the goodness of All into something more specific- a belief in a story about a creator and "his" preferences and other stories they consider important to their world view.

I actually don't think there is any need to turn one's belief in the basic positivity of life into anything more specific, like stories about God, the son of man, prophets, virgin births etc.  After all, the birds and other creatures don't seem to need these stories to live a joy-filled, positive existence and I would suggest, neither do we!

The non-believers amongst us would argue that there is no evidence that the universe is loving and supportive.  If you have not had this experience of a supportive universe then I truly feel sorry for you!  It takes the whole being to feel this loving, gracious, supportiveness, not the intellect working alone.  Those who depend only on the intellect for their understanding of life will feel as if they are cast adrift from the heart of the loving mother, the soul of Creation.  The only way to heal this divide is to move one's attention away from one's thoughts to the natural world around us.  This will provide a taste of the glory we have been born into!  If that doesn't work, then read your doom and gloom philosophies, in spite of the evidence of your senses!  After all, we are given the freedom to live and believe as we wish, even if these beliefs are in direct opposition to the underlying reality of things!

Sharka Todd

Should humans think like machines?

To a machine everything is just 0's and 1's.
There is no quality, only quantity.
And to a machine something that can't be measured in 0's and 1's just doesn't exist!

So you and your feelings, thoughts, doubts, hopes and fears are invisible to a machine. The only things that can be registered are those things which can be quantified and converted into binary code.  Everything else is effectively nonexistent!

Interestingly, there are many people who wish to think like a machine so they don't have to deal with the subjective nature of life!  They seek a false sense of certainly to deal with the insecurity of being alive and they think that imitating a machine will give them that.  But it's just a delusion, of course!  Everything is in the mind of the perceiver. That doesn't mean we can't agree on anything.  It just means everyone has a personal and intimate experience of the world which cannot truly be shared by another.  Much of human culture is a search for agreement but also a search for the new.  For we are always seeking to expand our knowledge and experience base as this is what makes life flow through us and makes us feel alive and growing!

Sharka Todd

The strange world of “skeptics”

When you already know all the answers what's left to talk about?

If you point out to a self-proclaimed "skeptic" that science is unable to answer all the questions that intrigue man and that the only way to answer some questions is to step outside the scientific domain you may be met with great hostility.  Their attachment to the scientific method is fanatical in its passion and zeal and hard for an outsider to fathom.

Because science has proven so successful in helping us understand certain universal mechanisms many people mistakenly conclude that it is able to answer all of our questions.  The questions it is unable to answer are then seen as nonsense or irrelevant.  But to adhere to this perspective (scientism) means that many of the most interesting and essential elements of human life are placed off limits for contemplation and debate.  I believe this limits us as human beings.

Related to this is the notion that there are no valid types of evidence for any given phenomenon outside those gained by the scientific method.  All other ways of gathering information are not just seen as fallible but are seen as completely worthless.  As a result you have one of the high priests of scientism, Richard Dawkins, saying his own personal experiences are completely irrelevant in terms of his understanding of truth.  For him, only things that other high priests of science have agreed upon have any reality, apparently.  I find this strange, to say the least!

Another strange element of the “skeptic” mindset is that if you question the all-seeing, all-knowing ability of science and claim that there are other types of evidence that can be used to understand the world they start to think you are advocating for a belief in every hypothesis and belief mankind has ever held under the sun.  They think you are advocating for flat Earth theory, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and so on.  It is as if, somehow, if we realize science is limited in its ability to describe and explain human experience then we must also lose our rational sense as well.  Of course, this idea makes no sense and it shows just how much skeptics are dominated by emotion rather than by logic. 

Like other fundamentalist religions, scientism is an emotion driven belief system which just happens to place establishment science as its arbiter of truth, where other religions may place a holy book, or more accurately, the interpretation of that holy book given by its priests.  For “skeptics” their priests are the public figures of establishment science, who can do and say no wrong.  And if they do suddenly disagree with a key pillar of scientific dogma then they are excommunicated, seen as heretics, and called pseudo-scientists, a title held for those who fundamentally disagree with prevailing scientific dogma.

Sharka Todd

Beyond the 5 sense prison

Art by James in the Shell

The world is full of people who are blinded by the 5 senses and the messages they supply to the brain. They believe that is All There Is. And anybody who says Something Else might exist and that they may have even experienced Something Else, well, they are proponents of "woo" and therefore not worthy of paying any attention to, whatsoever! They may even be deluded or mentally ill!

The cult of "5-sense reality is All There Is" is the one that has most of the world in its grip. They believe we are purely physical bodies trapped in a 3 dimensional box and there is nothing we can do about it! This is a true prison, indeed!  But many of our most advanced citizens, our deepest realizers, tell us otherwise. They say that the world we can see, hear, smell and touch is but a fraction of the true dimensions of reality that are available to us.

How do we access these other realms, these other viewpoints? Simply by withdrawing our attention from the 5 senses. When we do this we naturally experience other, "inner" worlds. Yes, materialists will say these worlds are simply the largely meaningless firing of the neurons of the brain when it is shut off from 5 sense data. But many who have had these experiences say otherwise. They say these are real worlds, organized and meaningful, and that we can inhabit and interact within them and learn from them.

Even in our waking life we can use input that comes from sources other than the 5 physical senses to enrich our lives and make improved choices. These subtle feelings or sensations that some call intuition, gut feeling or just "feelings" (in the Star Wars films, for example), can provide input that we can use in our decision making process to achieve a better outcome for ourselves and others.  Why is this?  Because they come from a deeper, wiser, broader part of ourselves which isn't so stuck in time and space as we seem to be!

See also: Intuition: our inner guidance system

Sharka Todd

David Icke addresses this theme here:

 

Intuition and the Jedi

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

The understanding and use of the intuitive "sense" is not encouraged by modern institutions- but in Jedi circles it is given pride of place!  The Jedi view the subtle senses as conveying messages that can't be gained any other way, and which prove useful for one's continued well-being and the well-being of others.  Indeed, intuition is seen as playing a role that the thinking mind is incapable of fulfilling, for the thinking self exists in a kind of vacuum that may be totally removed from what is actually going on in the world around us.  It is only the senses (both subtle and gross) that allow us to be in touch with the world around us and allows us to respond to life in the most appropriate and constructive way.

Sharka Todd

Is intellectual knowledge "true knowing"?

We don't truly "know" anything until we experience it firsthand. Anything else is just a mental image we hold and that isn't true knowing. If it was true knowing then actual experience would be unnecessary, we would just need to hear second accounts of things and think about them.

So the greatest enemy to true knowing is thinking the mental image we have of something is the thing itself.

Rather we need to experience something first hand to truly "know" about that thing!


Sharka Todd with acknowledgement to Kim Michaels.