Knowledge and Awareness

Do you have qualities which can be criticized and improved?

Try to admit that this is so, and to find these qualities out by yourself.

Count Leo Tolstoy

Nothing can make a person’s soul softer than the understanding of his own blame, and nothing can make one harder than the desire always to be right.

Attributed to The Talmud

Both Cited in A Calendar of Wisdom

Maybe because it is the Easter Season, and maybe because the focus of my life comes from a very early and foundational teaching from Arica that declares that “you are responsible for your own evolution” that these quotes above have a value, or an impact that I feel is greater than the words alone can convey…

Self-knowledge is an essential trait or an indispensable quality of awareness that declares itself to our soul on a daily basis. Just as it is a part of any classical spiritual direction training and practice to do a “daily examin” of our motives and thoughts, feelings and experiences etc., so, too, does the responsibility for our progress and our atonement fall to our own understanding, and the comprehension of what direction, what path, what actions we can take…

One of the great misunderstandings, as I see it, of the Easter story is that Jesus’s sacrifice was for our sake… That because he willingly suffered at the hands of a more dense and terrible consciousness that was determined to keep the dysfunctional status quo and its lines of money, power, and influence etc., that somehow, incredulously for me, because of his singular suffering we are released from our responsibilities and personal crucifixions.

Traditional theology declares that we believe in him as a God, rather than as an inspired, wise human being who courageously showed us his path which is our own path to overcoming through an unselfish, redemptive love…

If we resist our need to be vulnerable, to be honest, humble, yet still be forthright in our willingness to correct and not justify our behavior, then we have a “fighting chance” to actually be a genuine Christian, or follower of Jesus.

Without an openness to change, to correct or to reframe and to rework our understanding, the path of wisdom that Jesus laid out during his life will not be open to us to emulate and follow…