Sunday Night

We spent the weekend listening to Douglas Brooks teach on The Bhagavad Gita. Being around Douglas really is like trying to drink from a fire hose but there is always a lot to think about an ponder on.

A few choice teachings:

• Myths are self-conscious lies told in the service of a deeper truth.
• As you come closer to the truth, you do not arrive at a definitive answer, you gain access to a greater expanse of options and answers.
• 1 good laugh is worth 10,000 serious thoughts
• There is nothing less humorous than Indian philosophy
• Sanskrit is like bicycle racing- it never gets easier, it just gets faster.
• Every word in Sanskrit derives its meaning from a verbal root. Everything derives its meaning from what it does.
• Certainty is a far greater problem than ignorance. We can learn more from doubt than we can from certainty. Tantrikas pose the problem as one of certainty and Vedanta poses the problem as ignorance.
• ritual shows you make sense of what is actually happening. The incongruity of that is where ritual gets its power and serves its function.
• we are not trying to solve the problem of being human but rather we are trying to engage the process more skillfully.
• the world you see is your world through your experience but it is not only that.
• You do not change the world, you change your measure of the world.
• Your life has no purpose, no goal and no meaning...and that is the good news.
• The things you want most will unravel you. All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
• There is no getting what you want without making a mess.
• Life years to live.
• If you want to lay claim to your whirling mind you have to lay claim to your body.
• On the evolution of yoga: no modern physicist would be where they are without Newton, yet no one believes it anymore.
• The tantric approach is one of clear boundaries with no limits.
• Once you get into a purity paradigm the problem becomes, "How pure is pure?"
• In tantra, freedom is not the goal, its the starting point. You are free...to what will you bind yourself? To what will you yoke yourself?
• If you can't say yes to your nature, you can't be generous to others about theirs.
• Step deeply into your preferences, it will release you to be you.
• Don't ask the world to deliver what it is not. "Receive the world as it is, how it is really presented, and then we will talk."
• The world will bend to your desires so long as you are not asking it for what is is not. It is not about not asking for what you want. It is more that you should not ask for what is not being offered.
• GRACE- you didn't earn it, you don't deserve it, you can't pay it back. And while you cannot compel it, you can invite it and you can align with it.
• You are not fallen from Grace you are fallen as Grace.
• You will gain as much fulfillment as you apply yourself.
• Grace steps in when effort lets go.
• You don't have to try too hard, you just have to try hard enough.
• You are not not to exceed your boundary but to expand your boundaries.
• There is nothing in a teaching that can hurt you but you can hurt yourself.
• The Universe is giving us all that we need to flourish but it makes no promise that it will.
• However it is we choose to love is what we become.-Appa

Kelly is working on the slideshow form our very fun party last night. I will post that when he gets done with it. It was super fun.

All right, that is it for now, time to settle down and get ready for bed. We go back at it tomorrow.