This still sums it up better for me than anything else I've read

“God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought. And it’s as simple as that. So it all depends on how much you want to think about it–whether it’s doing you any good, whether it’s putting you in touch with the mystery that’s the ground of your own being. If it isn’t, well, it’s a lie...So half of the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts. Those are what we call theists. The other half of people who know that the metaphors are not facts, and so they’re lies. Those are the atheists.”
~Joseph Campbell

I've always thought "do you believe in God?" was pretty much an entirely semantic question.

What the Living Do

What the Living Do

The Art of Listening

“No man would listen to you talk if he didn't know it was his turn next.” ~Edgar Watson Howe

“Years ago, I tried to top everybody, but I don't anymore, I realized it was killing conversation. When you're always trying for a topper you aren't really listening. It ruins communication.” ~Groucho Marx

“The first duty of love is to listen.” ~Paul Tillich

“You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time." ~M. Scott Peck

“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer." ~Henry David Thoreau

It has long been a pet peeve of mine when people can't listen. The extreme example is those people who dominate the conversation and hardly let you speak at all. More common are those people who politely let you take a turn but are clearly not really listening but only waiting for their next turn to talk. I have been guilty of this myself. Most people have.
Mindfulness has recently increased my awareness of this phenomena, and I have been dealing with it by trying to be an even better listener. Listening to people the way I would like to be listened to, and trying (and here the part where I often fail) to not be attached to the results. Which is to say, sometimes the result is that it opens up the conversation to a deeper place. When the person talking feels listened to it allows them to be willing to listen to me also (which I think is my partly selfish goal) and then real communication can take place. More often however I just end up doing a whole lot of listening. Which when I can let go of any desire to talk, can end up being very interesting. I am a bit of an armchair psychologist, so I am always listening for the motivations beneath the talk. Good practice for my future career, I think. Listening is also the only way to learn anything, and people usually love to share (show off) what they know.

If all we have is the present moment and compassion is the highest good, than it is true what Brenda Ueland said, "Unless you listen, you can’t know anybody. Listening is love, that’s what it really is." I recommend the entire lovely essay, Tell Me More: On the Art of Listening

Namaste.
:-)

Cypripedium acaule

This was my second annual voyage to pay homage to these sacred beauties. And to do some wonderful hiking. Now back to work...

Great Blue Herons

It is no random choice that I have an image of a heron in flight as my profile picture. For whatever reason Great Blue Herons have always resonated deeply with me. I would like to go so far as to say I consider them my 'totem spirit', but some part of me feels like it is new-agey cultural appropriation to use that term...

Today as I looked up from my work, a heron flew directly overhead and landed on the top of one of the tall trees nearby that is next to a koi pond. This is a common occurrence. Today, as soon as she(?) landed, she was aggressively dive bombed by a very pissed off crow. This crow swooped back and forth like a pendulum for a good ten minutes aiming at the heron's head. The heron took little notice, only ducking when necessary. The crow eventually got tired and gave up.

Which got me to wondering: Why was the crow so upset? I had presumed the heron was after koi, and the crow was just being territorial about the treetop. But do herons eat bird eggs and nestlings? Or adult birds? They eat snakes, frogs and of course fish, so birds didn't seem too out of the question, but I had never heard of it. So I turned to the internet for help. It turns out the answer is yes, but not often. This video I stumbled on may give the answer why: they aren't very good at it!
:-)

Grey Heron versus Starling from BirdGuides.com on Vimeo.

My favorite bird attacking my least favorite. And yet somehow, I am rooting for the starling...

Karen Armstrong, part II

...And there was a wonderful moment when I actually went and asked for some help from a Jewish scholar at a college...And he explained to me...the revolutionary idea that religion was not about believing things (emphasis mine). He was telling me the story of Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus who'd been approached by a bunch of pagans who said they would convert to Judaism if Hillel could recite the entire Torah while he stood on one leg. And Hillel stood on one leg and said, "Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you. That is the Torah, the rest is commentary. Go and learn it."
And I said, "Well, that's all very nice, but, I mean, what were these Gentiles supposed to believe?" And Chaim said, "Well, it's easy to see you were brought up Christian." He said, "We Jews, we — it really doesn't matter what you believe, religion is about doing things. It's about, say, living, as Hillel says, in a compassionate way that changes you.

~Karen Armstrong, interviewed by Krista Tippet

My last post prompted me to take a second look at those 2 interviews with Karen Armstrong. If you have the time, both interviews are on the websites (links in previous post), and are well worth reading or listening to.
Karen Armstrong was the 2008 recipient of the TED prize: $100,000 to grant a wish, which she used to launch her
Charter for Compassion. Her acceptance speech below is just wonderful, if you have a spare 20 minutes to get an idea of just how wise and insightful she is about religion in the world.

Karen Armstrong

In the rare moments I have had recently for anything other than work, schoolwork, other necessary business, and sleep, I have been attempting to make a little time for personal reading. I recently finished When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (I am a huge fan) and am now reading Buddha by Karen Armstrong. I have been wanting to read one of her books ever since hearing her interviewed on both Bill Moyers Journal and
Speaking of Faith. She is a wonderful refreshing blend of articulate, wise, insightful, and thoughtful, and directs her talents towards the study of the history of religion, a topic which has become one of endless fascination to me. I chose to start w/ Buddha for obvious reasons, and the book does not disappoint.

I have been underlining like mad, as much of what she writes resonates strongly with me. It has also deepened my understanding of a subject I thought I was well acquainted with by placing it in a historical context more fully fleshed out than any I have read before.

I also am enjoying, for some reason, her use of Pali terms rather than the more familiar Sanskrit. Thus, 'nirvana' becomes 'nibbana', dharma becomes 'dhamma', etc.

“The Buddha believed that a selfless life would introduce men and women to Nibbana. Monotheists would say that it would bring them into the presence of God. But the Buddha found the notion of a personalized deity too limiting, because it suggested that the supreme Truth was only another being. Nibbana was neither a personality nor a place like Heaven. The Buddha always denied the existence of any absolute prin­ciple or Supreme Being, since this could be another thing to cling to, another fetter and impediment to enlightenment.

“Like the doctrine of the Self, the notion of God can also be used to prop up and inflate the ego. The most sensitive monotheists in Judaism, Christianity and Islam would all be aware of this danger and would speak of God in ways that are reminiscent of the Buddha’s reticence about Nibbana. They would also in­sist that God was not another being, that our notion of “exis­tence” was so limited that it was more accurate to say that God did not exist and that “he” was Nothing.

“But on a more popu­lar level, it is certainly true that “God” is often reduced to an idol created in the image and likeness of “his” worshipers. If we imagine God to be a being like ourselves writ large, with likes and dislikes similar to our own, it is all too easy to make “him” endorse some of our most uncharitable, selfish and even lethal hopes, fears and prejudices. This limited God has thus contributed to some of the worst religious atrocities in history.

“The Buddha would have described belief in a deity who gives a seal of sacred approval to our own selves as “un­skillful”: it could only embed the believer in the damaging and dangerous egotism that he or she was supposed to transcend. Enlightenment demands that we reject any such false prop. It seems that a “direct” yogic understanding of anatta ('no self') was one of the chief ways in which the early Buddhists experienced Nibbana. And, indeed, the Axial Age faiths all insist in one way or another that we will only fulfill ourselves if we practice total self-abandonment. To go into religion to “get” some­thing, such as a comfortable retirement in the afterlife, is to miss the point.