Many practitioners who are very advanced in religious traditions, fine connoisseurs of repeated texts, many very skilled believers, very quick in the presentation of the conceptual elements essential to their respective traditions, completely obscure the first step of any spiritual approach, and, from there, drift very largely from the authentic channel.
These people do not manage to enter the path through the door of simplicity, of presence in gesture, in speech, in thought.
To the body, right there, here, right away, which, in time, here, by the candle, the hand on the matchbox…
This body that takes the match and strikes it, feeling the flame arriving, feeling the smoke.
When the flame radiates in the darkness, this body passing through time.
Leaving the books, the armada of concepts, the official wisdom, on the edge of the river
while he crosses each time.
©FJ Sept 2024
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Notes & Silence 
You do realise that every post, in which you mention religious traditions, serves only to establish the venom they conceal? To my mind, anyhow…
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You do realize that in any of post in which traditions are mentioned in such a sense, I consider them as poisonous…but as concealing a rich and deep Truth that needs to be rediscovered.
I can never be responsible for the layer from which traditions is perceived.
I have written bitterly about religious.
Again, that bitterness was mine. I see it now.
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The bitterness may have been yours. But those traditions provoked it.
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Been thinking about all this.
My guess is we’re both right
at different levels
I feel homesick from a freedom I glimpsed
I now ‘traditions’ are intrinsically unable to loyally reflect it.
Yet, there are several rooms in the castle of tradition… and some of them are all about freedom.
It’s not because we can not abide in the deeper ones that they do not exist.
They may even be the stem cells of the whole tradition(s) organism.
Remembering is my main practice.
And there are moments in my life – trust me– when I need to practice A LOT…
The trick is the more we forget, the least encline to practice we are, and the more we need to.
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Maybe we speak at cross purposes, to an extent.
My experience is that tradition speaks of freedom – then defines it, making it a trap to deprive us of precisely what it promises, whilst pretending deprivation is abundance.
The deeper rooms in the castle are the dungeons.
Remembering is a huge part of what what we all do, I suspect. But memory can be a signpost in many directions – and one’s practice the journey along the chosen route.
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They may pretend deprivation is abundance.. And bake do no know whether it is accurate or not.
But one thing they pretend that I have experienced from within therefore can claim is correct
Is that humility is power and freedom
And enslavement to pharaoh-ego perdition and weakness.
…which does not mean they should be followed, for even a broken clock is right twice a day.
_
This comment may be unrelated to the core meaning of the previous one..
I agree with you…the wilderness of free spaces is the fuel for liberation.
Not everyone has it.
Some souls are better (best) domesticated.
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Poor souls.
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I’m a married man, you know …
J’aimeJ’aime
Some men suffer a lot because of the way their wife treats them.
Yet marriage is the solution for them for, were they traveling through life single, the harm they would inflict on themselves would be so much worse.
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I, also, am married. Whether I would have been better off single is an open question. One that my wife puzzles over, as well.
Some spouses (rarely, I suspect) are ideal partners, throughout time. Some are caretakers, for this life. Some are neither. Either way, I am less concerned about self-inflicted damage than damage done to each other.
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That is a question impossible to ponder for most parameters elude us…and those we think we understand are certainly perceived in a distorted way…
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