Join 📚 Claudia's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Claudia's read, .
The great limitation of ego consciousness is that it tends to concretize reality in order to make itself feel secure about its own place in the scheme of things. Thus, it perceives life in terms of doing, and doing implies being able to control or manipulate. From this perspective, life is safe and secure and static and dead. If, on the other hand, we can root our identity in being, in trusting the Great Mother, who cherishes all life - our own included - then the door is open for spontaneity, for something new to burst in with the security of those roots. Spirit blows where it wills. It is agile and quick, playing within the spaces of matter, constantly changing color, changing form, changing language, moment by moment open to new beginnings. The third eye, or Ajna center, at the core of the sixth chakra, has been called the perception of the imagination. Imagination is without limits, constantly bringing forth myriads of possibilities. Soul and spirit delight here in the garden of creation.
Laughter, joy, and ecstasy are associated with this chakra and sorrow as well. These are not the personalized emotions of the ego, with its depression and anxiety, or pleasure and excitement. The emotions of the soul are real - intensely real, but they are not personalized. The soul can weep over injustice or the stupidity and greed of humanity. It can rejoice over the budding of a flower, or a little act of kindness. These are the keenly felt emotions of love devoid of self-interest, love that perceives the possibilities and grieves the inability to respond. When we meet someone who loves in this way we know immediately that we are in the presence of a great soul.
Dancing in the Flames
Marion Woodman
She thought you could find inspiration everywhere:
I heard once about a Yiddish poet who lived in utter poverty and misery, a teenager, who never had seen anything beautiful in his life, and he made splendid poems about vegetables jumping into the soup pot. My idea being that for the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you don’t have to look far away. You have to know how to see.
The Work and Wisdom of Hedda Sterne
austinkleon.com
In science, as in art, the essential drive today is toward seeing whole.
Creative Vision in Artist and Audience
Richard Guggenheimer
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