this one is from snow lion’s dharma quote of the week, which although wondering nuggets of reminders, doesn’t always grab me. but this one in particular is quite interesting because sometimes i think i am not accounting for the physological damage that may have occurred in my childhood. i joke about the war fucking me up but the truth in the joke is something did mess me up and i can’t seem to account for it. it’s not something so over the top to cause obvious psychological? malfunctions but enough to ‘hold’ me back in some shape or form. anyway, here’s the quote from a book entitled, the wisdom of imperfection.<\/p>\n
“If we do not uncover [our] problems–and I saw this in myself–we risk placing a veneer of spirituality over deeply buried emotional wounds from childhood that do not simply go away.<\/p>\n
…When this happens there is greater potential for our spirituality to become simply another expression of our personal pathology. We can falsify the qualities valued in the path without realizing it. Renunciation can become another level of denial and avoidance; compassion can become a sickly sentimentality that has no substance to it. Our desire to help others can come from “compulsive caring,” or a compulsion to sacrifice ourselves because we feel worthless. The Buddhist idea of emptiness can likewise be falsified by the desire to disappear psychologically and merge or lose ego boundaries. Lack of identity, formless vagueness, and absence of boundaries do not exemplify the Buddhist idea of emptiness. My own version of this misconception was to try to live an ideal of the pure and pious only to find it was a form of repression I could not ultimately sustain.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[[[ wow this is a powerful quote; this first part “If we do not uncover [our] problems–and I saw this in myself–we risk placing a veneer of spirituality over deeply buried emotional wounds from childhood that do not simply go away.” somehow makes me think of cynthia and discussions of her spirituallity and spiritual path; the rest powerfully puts into words the sentiment of confusion or unclarity around spirituality and the meaning of life and self dilusion and denial that i think i have touched on in conversations with you before. anyway, this is very thought provoking ]]]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pb4m0Z-bf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jack.orangephotography.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jack.orangephotography.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jack.orangephotography.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jack.orangephotography.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jack.orangephotography.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jack.orangephotography.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jack.orangephotography.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jack.orangephotography.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jack.orangephotography.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}