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Archive Number 1564 | ||
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Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 14:45:41 -0600
At 3:42 PM -0500 5/31/02, Carol Wright wrote: >Many keep wanting to plant plastic >flowers in my hell hole and walk away. So, from where I am, it's refreshing >to have the tree dead dead dead. That is the truth of what it is like. Yes, >it sometimes feels hopeless. Why can't people let it be hopeless? Yes! One of the great dangers of "enlightened" thinking is the hope that with one's cleverly wise mind one can skip death, despair and hopelessness. Treya Killam Wilber (Ken Wilber's deceased spouse) went through a profound education into the way the mind's fear drives it to refuse the reality of old age, disease and death (Shakyamuni's three awakening shocks). She recalls how she used to make up theories to explain why her mother contracted colon cancer. Then she got cancer herself and learned that "it was really fear -- unacknowledged, hidden fear -- that motivated me to believe the universe made sense and that its forces were more or less within my control. In such a reasonable universe, staying healthy would be a simple matter of avoiding stress of changing my personality or becoming a vegetarian." (from Grit and Grace). Kat Duff calls this tendency "Toxic Health." I can't lay my hands on her book so I can't even give you the title, but it's a brilliant examination of how to be with dark times. Christopher -- Moving Stories - Stories Created, Discovered & Told Christopher@Moving-Stories.com - web:www.moving-stories.com (303) 477-7833 / P.O. Box 40032, Denver, CO 80204-0032 | ||