Donkey stories

[stardustpilgrim]

My teacher sent me off with a donkey, to find my true self. Eventually, I discovered, what I was looking for was the donkey he sent me off on.

You don't want to rob another of discovery.

[stardustpilgrim]

“But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:3-4 ESV).

Jesus was a very smart dude, intelligent and knowledgeable. You can take it or leave it, but I think Jesus knew about the right and left hemispheres of the brain. And this is exactly what he had in mind when he said this. Our left brain deals with particulars, in time, in space, is the small mind. The right brain is wholistic, Big Mind. The left hemisphere is generally the home of the self-as-conditioning, the false self (among other things). The right brain is nonlocal, is access to the Whole. (See My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte-Taylor). In another place he said we can't put new wine into old wineskins, as they will break, spilling the wine. So new wine has to be put into new wineskins. The old wine is the left brain. The new wine is the right brain. Right-brain-stuff cannot be put into the left brain, the left brain hasn't the capacity, it will "burst". In life, sometimes we use our left brain, sometimes we use our right brain, right tool for the right job means everything. Left brain, "nothing". Right brain, "SOME". Both are needed like a bird needs two wings.

This is pretty interesting.

reminds me of what zen buddhists call the Big Mind. Most of us, most of the time, live in our Small Mind. If you’re worried, stressed, anxious, uptight, angry, being needlessly aggressive or competitive, that’s your Small Mind doing what it thinks it needs to do to keep you alive. I say ‘what it thinks’ because when you look back at the sum total of time your Small Mind spends worrying about things, you can be fairly sure that 90% wasn’t worth worrying about, and the other 10% wasn’t improved by worrying about it anyway. Your small mind is about you. What you need. What you want. Your survival in this big bad world.

The Big Mind is all about We and all about Us. It understands that the world is made up of 7 billion interdependent human beings and that in anything but the short term acting selfishly for your own interests alone doesn’t get us very far. And because the Big Mind understands the interconnectedness of all things,

[stardustpilgrim]

“Or consider a story in the Jewish Talmud left out of the Book of Genesis. (It is in doubtful accord with the account of the fruit, the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall, and the expulsion from Eden.) In The Garden, God tells Eve and Adam that He has intentionally left the Universe unfinished. It is the responsibility of humans, over countless generations, to participate with God in a "glorious" experiment - the "completing of the Creation."
The burden of such a responsibility is heavy, especially on so weak and imperfect a species as ours, one with so unhappy a history. Nothing remotely like "completion" can be attempted without vastly more knowledge than we have today. But, perhaps, if our very existence is at stake, we will find ourselves able to rise to this supreme challenge.”
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

[stardustpilgrim]

This guy was the real deal. Haven't watched this yet, watching KC vs BB. Posting so I won't loose it.