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Coming to Life: Traveling the Spiritual Path in Everyday Life
Discusses the importance of spiritual growth and awakening in everyday life, explaining how a spiritual revitalization helps individuals realize a universal oneness from which harmony, peace, and love flow
- GenresSpirituality
189 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1990
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 21, 2011
This is a very good book. I bet it is out of print, but Amazon has a few copies. I also highly recommend her book "Whole Child Whole Parent", which I turned to again and again when my children were young.
Here are some quotes from "Coming to Life" which I copied so I would not forget them:
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
Wendell Berry
Preface
...Whether it pleases us or not, each moment is a gift...If we let it pass without opening it, we have missed something priceless.
..the one thing we can count on is that everything we are counting on is going to fall through under us. ...we are falling through into God...it is the whole from which we came and to which, deep down, we long to belong.
...we are afraid to admit to our real suffering. If we are not bleeding or starving, we think we are weak to feel as unhappy and alone as we sometimes do. But...our sufferings are our doors to spiritual awakening.
...There are laws of being that can be unearthed and counted on. When things go well, we are properly oriented. ...You can learn how, spiritually, to reorient and come into better alignment with life.
Chapter 4. Yearning to Make Connections
...Most of our uneasiness can be traced to feeling separate, finite, and therefore unviable. The feeling that we could not survive apart gives rise to tremendous urgency to connect up to something. If we can get...attention from other people, we can ward off the feeling of separateness and the dread of not being at all.
...This discussion of our obsession with interpersonal connections is not meant to suggest that community, filial, friendly, marital, and parental relationships are not important or to be denied. The problem is our misuse of them for support other than they were meant to provide. The challenge is to find such a secure footing in life that we can be truly loving together; so that we can, in fact, truly love, rather than use and abuse each other.
Chapter 5. Seeing Through Life's Betrayals
...we can all think of times when those we counted on for support betrayed our trust. Failing to provide the stable connection we seek, they have exacerbated our sense of separation. Even psychotherapy. Even God.
...There is no more troublesome idea than this: that we need to connect to each other for some sort of life support.
...As life goes on, all selves, our own included, tend to prove unequal to the life support task we have assigned them.
...The idea of becoming self-sufficient or grown-up is itself unrealistic and unreliable. Sooner or later we all encounter our limits. Then we want someone to take care of us, approve of us, agree with us, and keep us warm, supplied, and patted on the head. ...so we keep meeting the betrayer-- as provider/withholder, approver/disapprover, sustainer/let-downer, as parent, spouse, friend, sibling, employer, child, stock market, love connection, business connection, social connection, drug connection.
...But in every case, it is an idea, a false expectation, that betrays us. It is never, at bottom, each other.
...consider the possibility that connection-making may be a wrong idea that could never come out right. What is the idea again? There are two parts: first is that to be disconnected means to die; second is that therefore we need to get connected to somebody or something. ...The underlying assumption is that we are disconnected, separate, to begin with.
Craving is like a creeper,
it strangles the fool.
He bounds like a monkey, from one birth to another,
looking for fruit.
When craving, like a poison,
takes hold of a man,
his sorrows increase
like wild grass.
When this terrible craving,
fierce to subdue, is subdued,
Sorrow slips off like
drops on a lotus leaf.
Buddha
Chapter 9. Universal Firsthand Realizations of Oneness
...at least some of the bad things that happen...can be transcended through realization of oneness with invisible laws.
...we come to where we want to shift from the struggle to maintain separate whole selves to seek instead realization of our individual oneness with the whole through oneconsciousness. This is...the turning point of our lives. ...We... are invited beyond the parent/child, life/death struggle and catch-22 of always trying to go it alone in order to regain the right to be taken care of again.
...As self-consciousness is characterized by connection-making, oneconsciousness is characterized by connection-seeing. This is cultivated by ...living study and prayer...Reluctantly we tear ourselves away from our dreams, awaken, sit up, put our feet on the floor. What do you know! We are and have always been truly safe, embedded in God. Beautiful light is streaming in. A new day. Time to be up and about and in love.
Here are some quotes from "Coming to Life" which I copied so I would not forget them:
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
Wendell Berry
Preface
...Whether it pleases us or not, each moment is a gift...If we let it pass without opening it, we have missed something priceless.
..the one thing we can count on is that everything we are counting on is going to fall through under us. ...we are falling through into God...it is the whole from which we came and to which, deep down, we long to belong.
...we are afraid to admit to our real suffering. If we are not bleeding or starving, we think we are weak to feel as unhappy and alone as we sometimes do. But...our sufferings are our doors to spiritual awakening.
...There are laws of being that can be unearthed and counted on. When things go well, we are properly oriented. ...You can learn how, spiritually, to reorient and come into better alignment with life.
Chapter 4. Yearning to Make Connections
...Most of our uneasiness can be traced to feeling separate, finite, and therefore unviable. The feeling that we could not survive apart gives rise to tremendous urgency to connect up to something. If we can get...attention from other people, we can ward off the feeling of separateness and the dread of not being at all.
...This discussion of our obsession with interpersonal connections is not meant to suggest that community, filial, friendly, marital, and parental relationships are not important or to be denied. The problem is our misuse of them for support other than they were meant to provide. The challenge is to find such a secure footing in life that we can be truly loving together; so that we can, in fact, truly love, rather than use and abuse each other.
Chapter 5. Seeing Through Life's Betrayals
...we can all think of times when those we counted on for support betrayed our trust. Failing to provide the stable connection we seek, they have exacerbated our sense of separation. Even psychotherapy. Even God.
...There is no more troublesome idea than this: that we need to connect to each other for some sort of life support.
...As life goes on, all selves, our own included, tend to prove unequal to the life support task we have assigned them.
...The idea of becoming self-sufficient or grown-up is itself unrealistic and unreliable. Sooner or later we all encounter our limits. Then we want someone to take care of us, approve of us, agree with us, and keep us warm, supplied, and patted on the head. ...so we keep meeting the betrayer-- as provider/withholder, approver/disapprover, sustainer/let-downer, as parent, spouse, friend, sibling, employer, child, stock market, love connection, business connection, social connection, drug connection.
...But in every case, it is an idea, a false expectation, that betrays us. It is never, at bottom, each other.
...consider the possibility that connection-making may be a wrong idea that could never come out right. What is the idea again? There are two parts: first is that to be disconnected means to die; second is that therefore we need to get connected to somebody or something. ...The underlying assumption is that we are disconnected, separate, to begin with.
Craving is like a creeper,
it strangles the fool.
He bounds like a monkey, from one birth to another,
looking for fruit.
When craving, like a poison,
takes hold of a man,
his sorrows increase
like wild grass.
When this terrible craving,
fierce to subdue, is subdued,
Sorrow slips off like
drops on a lotus leaf.
Buddha
Chapter 9. Universal Firsthand Realizations of Oneness
...at least some of the bad things that happen...can be transcended through realization of oneness with invisible laws.
...we come to where we want to shift from the struggle to maintain separate whole selves to seek instead realization of our individual oneness with the whole through oneconsciousness. This is...the turning point of our lives. ...We... are invited beyond the parent/child, life/death struggle and catch-22 of always trying to go it alone in order to regain the right to be taken care of again.
...As self-consciousness is characterized by connection-making, oneconsciousness is characterized by connection-seeing. This is cultivated by ...living study and prayer...Reluctantly we tear ourselves away from our dreams, awaken, sit up, put our feet on the floor. What do you know! We are and have always been truly safe, embedded in God. Beautiful light is streaming in. A new day. Time to be up and about and in love.
May 1, 2020
Wanted to like this book. Some good thoughts but lost in the verbosity.
Read
March 26, 2017This is a book to be read slowly and thoughtfully. It will cause you to consider and reconsider many of your assumptions and beliefs. If you are looking for a spiritual and contemplative book, I highly recommend it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews