Mike Farley
I have written much here about acceptance – including particularly Tara Brach’s concept of radical acceptance – and it seems to me one of the keystones of any contemplative practice. To accept the circumstances of our life, the time and place of our birth, our age and our state of health, the...
Mike Farley
Now is the only moment we will ever know. Our memories of the past are experiences in the present. So are our thoughts about the future. So when we talk about not being present, we mean our attention is not on the present moment. It is focused on thoughts about the past or future. We can be...
Mike Farley
In the west today, we are very interested in what consciousness (our field of awareness) can reveal when focused on the external world. For instance, if we focus our awareness on plants we can build a system of botany, and if we focus it on rocks we can build a system of geology. But mystics of...
Mike Farley
“It is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live,” Henry Miller wrote in comparing the art of living to dance, driven by rhythm into which the dancer must relax. “It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender.” Surrender, it turns out, is an essential part of...
Mike Farley
There are situations when one owes solitude to other people, if only not to bother them. But more than this, the multitude needs solitaries as it needs postmen, doctors and fishermen. They go out and they send, or bring, something back—even if they send no word and vanish finally from sight. The...
Mike Farley
The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists,...
Mike Farley
I feel like I’ve written about the idea that God does not coerce but instead lures us toward greater justice, beauty, and etc a few times already. So rather than focus on this, or indeed the relational nature of the text [Matthew 10:40-42], I want to point out that process thought insists that...
Mike Farley
Human beings are probably the most inappropriately named species on our planet. Most of us spend very little time being. It would be more accurate to call us human doings, human thinkings, or perhaps human wantings – with being somewhere near the bottom of the list. Most of us find it very...
Mike Farley
Perhaps the most notable overall change [in the awakening mind], though, is a general sense of well-being. In the same way that the taking for granted syndrome inevitably leads to frustration and dissatisfaction, ongoing gratitude leads to contentment and fulfillment. You will no longer crave...