Moving Beyond Self-Centeredness (Jared Michaels, Zen priest)
From Jared's recent feature on Huffington Post, "Welcome to the Global Spiritual Revolution." Here are some selected highlights from this excellent article.
We may not recognize it, and there may be quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, but I am convinced that we are in the early stages of a global spiritual revolution. And I want everyone to join it or enter into it even more profoundly than you already have.
We are doing more good than ever... Why? Because we are moving beyond a phase of human history that has been characterized by self-centeredness, we are realizing that we are interconnected, and we are increasingly acting from a place of love.
There are many examples of this revolution...
Countless awakened teachers, some of whom belong to a particular religion and some of whom are completely secular, have expressed the same message.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” (Albert Einstein)
There is a river of goodness on Earth these days, and we can enter into it more and more deeply.
Spirituality is at the very heart of this revolution.
