fairyfaye:oh arthur thank u so much for posting this !
my stephen levine books are among my very favorite books and words could never express what his teachings have done for me
i will do what i can to help
thanks again
ps: how are the honeymooners ??
xo
You're welcome, Fairyfaye.
![Smile [:)]](/Public/cs/emoticons/emotion-1.gif)
My friend
Nomali let me know earlier today, so I posted it around a few forums where I thought people might be interested.
Thanks for asking about Liz and myself; we are doing quite well. She posted
some pictures from our wedding in October. This weekend we are going on a road trip for a few days; first to see
Gangaji in Ashland, and then on to Portland to visit some friends.
At the end of this message I'll post some more quotes from Stephen Levine.
namaste,
Arthurfrom http://www.lifeawarenesscenter.com/levinestephen.html
We pretend we are immortal. Only others die:
At
home in our favorite easy chair, we read in the newspaper of five dying
in a hotel fire in Cleveland, of ten killed in a bus accident on the
freeway. Of three thousand crushed in an earthquake in Italy. Of the
death of Nobel laureates in their laboratories. And of murders in the
electric chair. We partake of the “survivors news,” reinforcing the
idea that “everyone dies but me. Sitting there, reading over the death
of others, reassures us of our survivorship, of our immortality.
~
On the loss of control that we feel when we fear death:
If
we examine our fear of death we see in it a fear of the moment to
follow, over which we have no control. In it is a fear of impermanence
in itself, of the next unknown changing moment of life.
~
On why death is not the enemy:
What
preparations have you made to open an inner life so full that what ever
happens can be used as a means of enriching your focus? It's an
ongoing process of opening a life. The more you open to life, the less
death becomes the enemy. When use using death as a means of focusing
on life, then everything becomes just as it is, just this moment, an
extraordinary opportunity to be really alive.
~
On our erroneous essential self:
Unable
to differentiate between the object of awareness and awareness itself,
we think of all the content of mind as our own, as “me.”
~
On the persona we create and the damage that does to us:
We have become so identified with our doing, with our model of who we
are, that we become incredibly insecure at the time of death. We no
longer know who we are, because we have always traded off our true
being for some stance in the world, for some position of authority. We
are traded grace for the mask of someone doing something in a world of
arbitrary values.
This
self-cruelty of our holding two models can be seen in the eyes of those
on their deathbed unable to continue manifesting the roles they have
spent their whole life polishing and developing, guilty and confused as
a condition they find themselves in, wondering what is real and who
they really are.
~~~~~
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