Unsuspected Gifts

Vesuvius imagined, artist unknown

The meaning of Total Being expands as our experience of true nature reveals more and more of itself. Total Being can shift from being the totality of the individual to the total being of the whole universe to the mysterious total being beyond time and space. True nature allows us to perceive everything in a new light. We recognize that where we are in the moment is not other than anything else. Everything else is within us, and not only everything else but everything else at all other times and places. When we are not experiencing ourselves this way, then we are experiencing ourselves only as the individual and not the unilocal nature of the individual. It’s true that as an individual, we are in time and space. But we are also the true nature of the individual that interpenetrates all time and all space, bringing everything in time and space to one singular point.

A. H. Almaas, The Alchemy of Freedom

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— Eckhart Tolle

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It is fashionable today to bypass or surpass Freud for all sorts of reasons: sociological, feminist, scientistic. But one gift from Freud that we ought never neglect: his return to the sources of culture in Mediterranean myths…