Myth tells us that these two elements of the self – doing and being – unite is us to form a unity. Neither by itself can constitute an evolving whole. – p.17
In order to be present you have to appreciate that the present is an unknown – it has never been here before, and neither have you. – p.27
What does not enter the experience of the body remains bound in the realm of idea. – p.35
Only a quiet mind can receive the present – and a quiet mind is nothing other than a quiet body. – p.35
The brain in our cranium and the brain in our gut are equal, opposite and complementary partners, and it is in the exchanges between them that the creative energy of our consciousness is born. – p.71
Being passive to ‘what is’ is the only means we have of coming into relationship with it. – p.93
The universe of being to which passivity opens us lies so far beyond the realm of idea, and so deep within the realm of the unnamed, that it cannot be described with any pretense of accuracy. It can only be experienced. – p.94
Our living grows into relevance as it attunes to the whole and expresses it.
– p107
Wild nature is the most intimate mystery available to us, and we treat it not as our teacher, but as a storehouse to be plundered, a danger to be avoided or a form of entertainment to be managed for our enjoyment. – p.118
In that resting place of Being, your life is still: your life is on fire. – p.142
Habitual tension is tension you inhabit. – p.144
The narcissism of our culture is drawing us towards the fate of Narcissus, who was so self-absorbed that he forgot the world and perished. – p.172
Once you confess that you do not know the present, you can open your eyes to discover it; once you confess that you cannot know the world, you can begin to feel it. Such a reconciliation with your own ignorance imparts not doubt, but certainty: the certainty of being in the truth of the present, here and now.
– p.173
The One Presence is the truth of your (‘his’ in the text) own life, as much as it is the truth of the world; in the end, the One Presence is the ultimate perspective to be incarnated and lived. – p.197
The present will always be insufficient if we are insufficiently present. – p.200
Each of us is at every moment standing in the river of the world’s energy. Either we choose to brace against it or we submit to it. – p.215
It is a self-achieved abandonment in which you offer yourself completely and with gladness to the world around you, sensationally merging with it. – p.223
Only by submitting to what is can you feel what is. – p.236
Reality is a union of opposites that dance the world into being. – p.238
Authority is an abstraction we create in order to govern what has lost touch with the guidance of Being. – p.252
It is when you actively attend to the present that you reverberate to its call and discover the self as a verb rather than an object. – p.267
In a state of receptivity, the nourishment of Being is bottomless. -p.280
For any species in the natural world, its survival is a product of how well it can harmonize with that world. – p.300
Without such a sensitive balance, the species will perish through overpopulation, dwindling food supply or an inability to adapt within an increasingly imbalanced environment. What natural selection actually favors is the ability to harmonize with the world. -p.301
Our potential for harmonizing with the natural world is obscured by our instinct to dominate it. – p.301
In gentleness, the ordinary heart meets the ordinary world and they are found to beat as one. -p.312
True gentleness……rescues you from the driven highway of doing and allows you to sail the river of being. – p.313
Whatever man discovers in himself merely reflects what belongs first to nature – just as man himself does. – p.367
A body deprived of its own sensitivity cannot notice the world’s. – p.369
All willful effort displaces Being. – p.376
Once you recognize that the energy you experience in your body is your intelligence, it is easy to see that when you clear the body’s energy, you are clearing the mind. -p.388
Rhythm is embodiment. When someone speaks it is the rhythm of her voice – its vibrational song – that reveals her life and mind, far more than the specific words she utters: within that rhythm are felt the implicit perplexities of the moment in a way that words, tied as they are to meaning, could not describe. – p.398
There are no obstacles; there is only guidance. – p.412
Every new challenge you meet with wholeness deepens it. – p.412
When consciousness floods the deep within our core, we find there a stillness that is not self-achieved or peculiar to us or possessed by us; that eternal stillness abides there because it belongs to the nature of the world to which we belong.
– p.417
What the soul wants, what it hungers for, what it is spending time on this earth to achieve, is a fully conscious, bodily experience of the Present. – p.418
All of reality waits to sing to you if you can but allow what is eternal in you to rest in and be ravished by the passing moment. -p.420
To allow the Present to live in your core is at one and the same time a surrender, a softening, an abandonment of consolidations, a homecoming, an activation of the soul, an opening of the heart, a dilation of sensitivity, a marriage of male and female, a journey into the vibrant, felt unknown, a coming to rest in the moment, and a yielding to the One Harmony. – p.426
The more spaciously the transient Present lives within your core, the more your soul’s love will be liberated. – p.427
It (love) restores consciousness to the world and enables it to talk to you. – p.428
“Reality is essentially fluid, and fluidity is no other than emptiness; there is nothing permanent in reality to grasp, nothing to hold on to — but in its ceaseless, all-aware currents, there is everything to feel.”
“The way we experience the self has a profound impact on the way we describe the world around us. The brilliant medieval mystic Meister Eckhart noted that “all the images we have for God come from our understanding of ourselves.” We might similarly note that how we imagine nature largely arises from how we experience ourselves. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Ilya Prigogine put it another way: “Nature is part of us as we are part of it. We can recognize ourselves in the description we give to it.” When we look at atom and individual we find that though their roots come from different languages – Greek and Latin – they mean exactly the same thing, “indivisible.” There is more to this than mere coincidence: we describe the world according to how we experience ourselves. The self and the atom are both classically understood to be ‘stand-alone’ units that interact with other ‘stand-alone’ units. That understanding provides the foundation for the story by which we live – and that makes it all the more difficult for us to recognize that it is entirely a cultural fabrication sustained by mutual agreement. In other societies the idea that each person enjoys a sort of independent existence is quite alien. Anthropologist Wade Davis, for example, reports that in the language of the Penan tribe of Borneo – one of the last nomadic rain-forest societies on earth – there are no words to distinguish between he, she or it, but there are six words for we, the pronoun that discloses relationship. He also noted that “they measure wealth not by the extent of their possessions but by the strength of their relationships.”
“Every sensation in the body is a form of thinking.”
“Our wholeness has no outer boundary”
“One cannot experience and control at the same time”
“Ideas are frozen energy.”
“Breath is the gateway to Feeling.”
“In a state of receptivity, the nourishment of Being is bottomless.”
”Habitual tension is tension you inhabit.”
“any parts of you that are chronically not at peace – cannot be made to conform to peace, or go quiet: they live in the body and have to be processed by its fluid intelligence.”
“Be still, and know that life is subtle.”
If you don’t love being here now, you will resist it – and such resistance is always successful.
- True self-knowledge is not an entity to be possessed, but a revelation of the world itself – to be felt and explored and lived. In fact, we could accurately say that your ‘true self’ is that measure of you that is continuous with the present. To center yourself in the present is to awaken to what is most true in you. All the rest is fantasy. It’s really that simple. In our culture, alas, each of us takes on so much responsibility for creating and upholding our ‘known self’ that only the lucky ones ever discover the relief of disclaiming that responsibility and giving over to the aliveness of the present; within its fluid ease, self-knowing is a moment-by-moment revelation of the harmonizing energies of the world to which you belong.
Holophilia – a love of the whole
I think the most dangerous individuals are those who feel their convictions more intensely than they feel the newness of ‘what is’ – whether their convictions concern corporate entitlement, religious ideology, social engineering or the solutions afforded by technology. Such rigid convictions exhort us to actions that are heedless of the whispering currents of the living present. ~ Philip Shepherd, ‘New Self New World’
We live by words every day, but until the word is made flesh, Idea will rule; the more we are ruled by Idea, the more we stifle the Energy of Being. If we are literally to incorporate our thinking – which constitutes the integration of idea or perspective – we have to surrender it to the flesh … when that happens, the Present becomes a sensitivity rather than an idea, and its sensitivity is recognized to be the thinking self. At that point you are truly “feeling the thing as a whole”. ~ Philip Shepherd, ‘New Self New World’
Love … experiences the unknowable in opposites that work together without ceasing to be opposites. It becomes evident, then, that love is not just a feeling or emotion on an equal footing with other emotions such as anger or fear or happiness: in its essence, love is a form of intelligence that liquefies the world even as it blurs the edges of the self: the divisions on which the enclosed thinking of the ‘known self’ depends fall utterly away, and whatever your love’s genius embraces, there is a sense, as you look upon it, of “life confronting life.” In that sense, love is at the same time both knowing and being known. In fact, we might call love the supreme intelligence—it reveals the world to us as no other faculty can: it reveals the world in wholeness, it reveals the world in kinship, it reveals the world in ravishing specificity, and it reveals in the world a mindfulness that lives invisibly through all that is. In revealing the true and full relationship of all things to all things, and of us to the unbroken whole, love shows us, as physicist David Bohm put it, that “everything material is also mental and everything mental is also material. The separation of the two—matter and spirit—is an abstraction.” ~ Philip Shepherd, ‘New Self New World’
“To be gentle with the present moment is to be open to its wild eternity.” pg 315
